Stay informed with free updates
Simply sign up to the War in Ukraine myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.
The EU is preparing to start technical work on Ukraine and Moldova joining the bloc despite Hungary’s continued blockade of advancing accession talks, according to officials briefed on the process.
Kyiv applied for membership in 2022, weeks after Russia’s full-scale invasion — and was soon followed by neighbouring Moldova. Both countries formally started EU accession talks last year, but Hungary has since objected to the next steps: unanimous decisions by the bloc’s 27 members to formally open so-called negotiation “chapters” to align the two nations’ legislation with EU rules in areas ranging from energy to competition and rule of law.
The European Commission has proposed adjusting its own rules to circumvent Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s veto by starting the technical work in several “clusters” even in the absence of a formal decision to open talks in those areas, the officials said.
EU leaders will discuss the issue at their meeting in Copenhagen on Wednesday, before being joined on Thursday by other leaders from neighbouring countries including Ukraine and Moldova.
Taras Kachka, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister for European integration, said Kyiv was hoping to persuade Budapest to allow negotiations to proceed given that the ultimate decision to let a country join the bloc still requires unanimity and is a “deep political question”.
“But meanwhile we have and we really appreciate that we have, an offer from EU institutions and other member states to go with technical work on clusters,” Kachka told the Financial Times.
This would allow Kyiv and Chișinău to move forward on reforms, regulatory alignment and institutional preparation. Once Hungary was willing to lift its veto, the formalities could be sped up. “In theory you could then open and close a cluster on the same day,” one of the officials said.
The plan is not without risk. It could make it harder to motivate Ukraine and Moldova to undertake sometimes painful political reforms without having a public acknowledgment of their efforts. But the alternative, that the reforms halt altogether, risks being worse, the officials said.
“Officials in Kyiv tell us that even soldiers on the front line are aware of the lack of technical progress in Brussels,” said one EU diplomat involved in the discussions. “We have to find a way to make progress somehow . . . the level of frustration is rising not just at the Hungarians, but at all of us.”
Kachka said moving ahead on a technical track was not ideal and posed “a problem for everybody”. But he said it was important to proceed “without any interruptions because interruptions in accession negotiations will lead to, let’s say, disassembling the reforms”.
Kachka said he was hoping to persuade Budapest to “calibrate” its position out of “respect”, but he admitted he was “really more optimistic than a lot of people”.
A senior Moldovan official told the FT they were also in discussions with the commission and were broadly supportive of advancing technical work without a formal decision to open and close chapters.
António Costa, president of the European Council representing EU leaders, is pursuing a different work around, which would involve changing the rules on the negotiation process so that clusters can be opened by a majority of EU countries. But the change requires unanimous support, including from Hungary, and is deemed unlikely to succeed, officials said, noting that closing chapters would still require unanimity.
“[Costa] talked to many leaders and it is not a secret that he his trying to do this. But there is no guarantee,” said one of the officials of Costa’s discussions. “It is obvious that we would need unanimity to at least change the negotiating frameworks . . . he is well aware that this is a difficult task.”
Read the full article here