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The European Council has voted in favor of kicking off EU accession negotiations with Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova. There was some good news also for Georgia, which was awarded EU candidate status despite the numerous questions regarding some of the policies implemented by the Georgian Dream ruling party. In turn, Bosnia Herzegovina could start accession talks next year, provided it fully implements the set of measures the European Commission recommended in 2019.
The launch of EU accession talks doesn’t necessarily mean the integration process will be finalized, and at no rate has a deadline for admission been announced for states enrolled in the negotiation process. It all boils down to the way and speed the two countries will implement the criteria stipulated in the negotiation chapters.
The decision to launch accession negotiations is an important signal of support from Brussels, also marking a remarkable victory for the governments of two countries. Ukraine needed this favorable vote as it is undergoing a difficult moment, following the failure of last summer’s counter-offensive and amidst waning support for Kyiv. Neither Brussels nor the United States has so far approved their support packages for Ukraine, which together total 100 billion EUR. At the same time, right-wing politicians are gaining more popularity as they become increasingly vocal in their demands to cut funding to Kyiv.
Such opposition towards Ukraine has been visible also at the level of the European Council, where Hungary threatened to veto the launch of accession talks just hours before the vote, blocking the support package for Ukraine.
Hungary – Ukraine’s number one political opponent
“Enlargement is not a theoretical issue. Enlargement is a merit-based, legally detailed process, which has preconditions. We have set up seven preconditions and even by the evaluation of the commission, three out of the seven are not fulfilled. So, there is no reason to negotiate the membership of Ukraine”, Viktor Orban said upon his arrival in Brussels.
Orbán’s Hungary blames Ukraine for being corrupt, applying unfair treatment to the Hungarian minority and being over reliant on agriculture.
Starting December 2022, when the European Commission decided it would no longer turn a blind eye to the numerous anti-democratic drifts in Budapest, Hungary’s illiberal Prime Minister has turned his guns towards Ukraine. At the time, the European Commission decided to freeze nearly 22 billion EUR worth of European funds allotted to Hungary, invoking violations of democratic values in this country. It’s useless to recall that Hungary’s assistance to Ukraine in the war started by Orbán’s close ally, Vladimir Putin, amounted to all but nothing.uHunH
Orbán equally opposed the assistance mechanism devised by the European Commission for Ukraine, which consisted of a support program worth 33 billion EUR awarded as low-interest loans and another 17 billion EUR in non-reimbursable grants, claiming these funds would be an easy prey for corrupt politicians and would thus be hard to trace.
What prompted Orbán’s adamant attitude? Democratic principles? Morality? Neither. In recent years, Orbán’s policies, many of which have fallen in line with the Kremlin’s interests, turned out to be a complete waste of time and resources. I have analyzed all the above in this article for Veridica.
Therefore, the
Budapest hardliner saw the EU accession candidacies of Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to strongarm the EU, as payback for Hungary getting shut out the previous year. In other words, Orbán’s logic was the following: pay me or I exercise my veto. Ahead of the summit, the European Commission announced Budapest had made sufficient progress to reform its judiciary, becoming eligible for receiving 10.2 billion EUR from its originally earmarked funds.
Orbán’s theatricalities did not stop here. Once the European Council president Charles Michel announced that heads of state and government decided to open negotiation talks with Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova, Viktor Orbán said this was a bad call. After keeping the entire European community on its toes in the weeks before the summit, threatening he would block the decision, Orbán contended himself in abstaining. He simply walked out of the room. Later, he explained on his Facebook page that he abstained because he didn’t want to be a part of what he described as poor decision-making.
This is not the first time a leader abstains. The same happened in 2019, when Angela Merkel disagreed with the appointment of Ursula von der Leyen at the helm of the European Commission.
Kyiv celebrated a geopolitical victory in the middle of a fully-fledged war against Putin’s Russia. Ukraine fears Hungary will continue to add more hurdles to its EU accession bid
“This is a victory for Ukraine. A victory for the whole of Europe. A victory that motivates, inspires and gives strength”, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskky wrote on X. the Ukrainian president thanked European Council president Charles Michel and other European leaders, including Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz, who allegedly helped persuade Viktor Orbán not to veto the start of negotiations.
Most political analysts and publications in Kyiv wrote ahead of the European Council summit that Ukrainian society needs a morale boost that would consolidate resistance in the war against Russia. In the context of very little progress reported in the summer counteroffensive and the war fatigue built-up, opening accession talks is like a breath of fresh air for Ukraine, a symbolic victory against Moscow, which has always been adamant about Ukraine’s European integration. Moscow was the one that forced the former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych not to sign the EU Association Agreement in the autumn of 2013, which sparked the Euromaidan protest, prompting Yanukovych to flee the country and brought the pro-European forces in power. Shortly after the latter took office, in early 2014, Russia launched the war, annexing Crimea and supporting the separatist movements in Donbass. In fact, just as Brussels was discussing the European future of Ukraine, Moscow was launching Kinjal missiles and drone strikes on Ukrainian settlements, reminding the local population that one of the most important prerequisites for accession, aside from reforms, is the end of the war.
For Ukraine, a country at war with Russia, EU accession talks have a much deeper geopolitical significance compared to other states that completed negotiation chapters two or three decades ago. “A miracle has happened in Brussels”, “the Yevropeiska Pravda” (The European Truth) writes. According to the Ukrainian publication, an increasing number of voices in Kyiv had expressed concern with the determination of Hungary’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, of opposing this decision, even if Ukraine has modified the law on the protection of national minorities, a decision Budapest has demanded repeatedly in the last six years.
“It’s an opportunity to celebrate a diplomatic victory. It’s an unexpected victory, but we understand this is merely the start of the road, and the negotiations ahead will be quite difficult”, the “Yevropeiska Pravda” writes.
At the same time, Ukrainian journalists want their country’s EU accession to happen faster than that of other states from the Western Balkans, which in the meantime have lost interest for the promised European way of life. Moreover, the Ukrainian media also mentions Austria’s position, which wants the accession of an ex-Soviet state to coincide with that of a Balkan state, for instance Bosnia Herzegovina, provided of course all accession criteria are met. “The path to European integration therefore does not depend solely on our reforms and the speed with which they are implemented, but also on the progress of other states”, the publication also writes.
Political pundit Taras Chornovil, a former member of the Ukrainian Parliament, points out that EU leaders approached EU accession talks with Ukraine as a geopolitical goal. In other words, the EU understood perfectly the kind of reaction this topic gets in Ukraine in the context of the war.
“In recent days, the EU focused fully on Ukraine, not on Georgia or the Republic of Moldova. They even had to convince or buy off Orbán”, the Kyiv-based analyst says.
In turn, political theorist Sergi Gerasymchuk, an expert with the Strategic and Security Studies Group wrote on Facebook that Viktor Orban will continue to blackmail the EU and Ukraine during the accession talks, arguing that “what if he got an additional 10 billion EUR for every negotiation chapter?” Gerasymchuk alludes to the European Commission’s decision to unfreeze the 10.2 billion EUR worth of cohesion funds addressed to Hungary, in the context of Prime Minister Orbán’s opposition to launch EU accession talks with Ukraine.
Ukraine has started or continued a number of reforms recommended by the EU in order to first obtain the EU candidate status and then launch accession negotiations. The list includes the reform of the Constitutional Court, more efforts to reform the judiciary, combating corruption, implementing measures to combat money laundering, taking legislation action against oligarchs, harmonizing legislation in the audiovisual field, amending the legislation on the protection of the rights of national minorities. At the end of November, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said that most of these prerequisites have been met, the last of which were the amendments brought to the law on national minorities.
The Republic of Moldova: a major step forward at the end of many ups and downs
“Today’s decision to open EU accession talks with the Republic Moldova is a victory for all of us. The European Union said yes to Moldova, yes to our European future. This marks the start of a new page in our country’s history”, the president of the Republic of Moldova, Maia Sandu said, arguing that two years ago no one imagined the European Commission would launch EU accession negotiations with the Republic of Moldova. “Today’s achievement is the merit of the entire society – of everyone who fight for democracy and prosperity, who work hard and patiently, who expressed their votes, marched for freedom and never stopped believing Moldova deserves more. We are Europeans, and this has been recognized by the whole of EU”, president Sandu pointed out.
The Moldovan Foreign Ministry published a video on social media, accompanied by the message: “next stop: the European Union”.
The Republic of Moldova’s European track has not been an easy one, being marked by a constant oscillation between Russia and the West, as well as by election cycles won either by pro-Russian (Agrarians, Communists, Socialists) or pro-European factions. The frozen conflict in Transnistria, overarching corruption and widespread oligarchization, in addition to Russia’s actions by means of the countless sources of leverage that are yet to be eliminated – politicians, monopoly on the local media, the country’s reliance on Russian gas, etc. – have further completed Moldova’s European integration efforts.
In official terms, Chișinău has described European integration as a priority at the start of 2000, when the Baltic States – similar in size to the Republic of Moldova and also sharing a common history in the 20th century – were preparing the become members of the European family. The person who made the announcement was the former communist president Vladimir Voronin, who won the 2001 election by promising to bring Moldova in the Russia-Belarus Customs Union. In the first decade of the first millennium, the country was led by a half-authoritarian regime, often accused by the West for violating democratic principles and the rule of law. During this time Moldova made little progress towards European integration, often seeking rapprochement with Russia.
After 2009, when the government in Chișinău was dominated by several center-right alliances where were overtly pro-European, Moldova developed its relations with the European Union, and the Republic of Moldova was seen as “the success story” of the Eastern Partnership. Moldova became the first country in the Eastern Partnership to secure a liberalized EU visa regime for its citizens. It was also around this time that the Eu Association and Free Trade Agreement was signed. The “success story” was however short-lived, due to the billion-dollar bank fraud that followed in November 2014. Repeated crises started to erupt in the ruling coalition while top-level graft suspicions marred the government’s reputation. The controversial oligarch Vladimir Plahotniuc took over the power reigns. At the end of 2019, the Party of Socialists, at the time led by the pro-Moscow politician Igor Dodon, effectively took power. All these developments left any talk about European integration in the background.
The situation changed rapidly starting 2021, after the pro-European candidate Maia Sandu won the presidential election, and her party, Action and Solidarity (PAS), won the parliamentary election the following year. Pro-European reforms and European integration were brought into the limelight again, the new government also enjoying the declared support of the European Commission and an increasing number of European leaders.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine of February 24, 2022, security risks targeting the Republic of Moldova and the way Moldovan authorities handled the Ukrainian refugee crisis boosted Western support for the Republic of Moldova. In March, the Republic of Moldova joined Ukraine and Georgia in submitting their EU accession requests. On June 23, 2022, Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova were awarded EU candidate status.
EU support for the Republic of Moldova seems to remain high. On June 1, 2023, Moldova hosted the European Political Community Summit, which brought together 40 European leaders and was considered a genuine diplomatic and PR success for Chișinău. Both the European Parliament as well as the Commission recommended the opening of accession talks with Moldova, recognizing Moldova has reported great progress in complying with the 9 prerequisites set in 2022. The Republic of Moldova’s European integration is however tied to Ukraine, a country that faces a number of difficulties, as well as Hungary’s opposition.
Achievements in terms of European integration are of great importance to the current government in Chișinău, at least to partly make up for the delays in implementing important reforms, for instance in the justice system, as well as for the disgruntlements of parts of society, strongly affected by the fallour from the war in Ukraine. Pro-European factions currently hold all the power reins, although the results of last autumn’s local election has revealed a significant drop in societal trust in PAS, which is followed at the top of survey’s lists by pro-Russian parties. In approximately a year, the Republic of Moldova will host presidential election, while in the second half of 2025 parliamentary elections will be held. Past experience has shown that pro-Russian parties must never be underestimated ahead of an election. The launch of accession talks, however, restricts their freedom of action. Even though the process of European integration is not irreversible right now and negotiations might unfold over the space of several years, this week’s decision is an extremely important step forward, perhaps the most important so far.
(Veridica)
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