Ukraine will have completed the reforms required to get membership of the EU within two years, the deputy prime minister has said, insisting the country does not want a sympathy vote at a looming leaders summit to decide on enlargement of the bloc.
A review published on Wednesday is expected to reveal the European Commission position on whether negotiations should open or not with those countries most advanced with their accession reforms.
“We do not want any discounts because of the war,” Olga Stefanishyna said, adding she was confident of a decision in the country’s favour.
“The two-year timeline we are talking about is just to make sure that we are prepared for membership in terms of legal approximation, of standards and rules and obligations of the directives,” she said.
“Everybody is united, from the president to every local governor, about two purposes: winning the war and making sure the next day after the victory we are not beginning the process of EU membership but we are closing [it],” said Stefanishyna, who has specific responsibility for European and Euro-Atlantic integration of Ukraine.
There is widespread recognition in Brussels that continuous false dawns have made it difficult for politicians to keep the EU dream alive with their own electorates opening up the risk of spreading the influence of Russia in eastern Europe.
“Before Ukraine applied for membership of the EU, enlargement was a taboo topic within the EU. There was no major support from people. There were a lot of complexities in the Balkans. Ukraine has revived the discussion,” said Stefanishyna, describing the impact of the war on EU’s changed attitude to enlargement.
Such is the urgency attached to enlargement that Germany last week suggested that integration of Ukraine and others into the EU could be accelerated with membership benefits granted long before accession with some single market access and observer status at leadership summits.
The proposals were welcomed by North Macedonia, which has been waiting for almost 20 years for membership, and complained that it was hard to keep the dream alive among the electorate if the EU keeps changing the goalposts.
Its foreign minister, Bujar Osmani said it had experienced all the “flaws” of the accession process, identifying the problem as EU’s “focus on the formal membership itself”. Germany’s proposals could remedy this, he added.
Ukraine was added last summer to the queue of official candidates with recommendations to prioritise seven clusters of reforms centring on judicial governance, anti-corruption legislation and anti-oligarchisation among them.
Stefanishyna also addressed concerns about the distorting impact a country with the size of agriculture trade of Ukraine could have on the the EU’s single market.
In a half-year review, it was told by the EU’s Olivér Várhelyi, the European commissioner for neighbourhood and enlargement, that it had completed two of those steps to the satisfaction of the EU, with good progress on another cluster and “some progress” on the four remaining themes.
A full-year review will be published on Wednesday ahead of the next prime ministers’ summit in December.
Stefanishyna said it had made huge progress on reforms since June and was also prepared for arguments against a fast-track accession including distortion of the labour and agriculture market.
In relation to free movement, she pointed out that an estimated 9 million Ukrainians who fled to the EU after the war all had the right to work while a temporary trade liberalisation deal with the EU has given it tariff-free access to the single market on a range of agriculture goods.
