How EU wants to overcome Orbán's veto to start membership talks with Ukraine

There is less than two months to go before European institutions close down for Christmas, and this is the short window of time Denmark has in its current presidency of the EU Council to push through substantive decisions on Ukraine and its accession to the European Union.

After that, Cyprus, not the most pro-Ukrainian of EU members, will take over the presidency for six months. The Cypriot government has announced that during its term, it will shift focus away from Ukraine to other issues.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen does still have time to break through the wall of Hungary’s veto and launch substantive EU accession negotiations with Ukraine.

Although the details are not yet finalised, the plan already has a name – "Frontloading".

Read more in the article by Sergiy Sydorenko, European Pravda's editor: Frontloading: EU’s alternative path to break Hungary’s veto on Ukraine's accession talks.

There is a prevailing belief within the EU that Orbán’s current veto is only temporary. The reasoning goes that elections are set to be held in Hungary in April, at which point Hungary's blocking tactics will pause. 

Yet even if one assumes that the Hungarian elections will automatically remove the veto, simply sitting and waiting for a change of power in Budapest hardly seems wise.

In practice, the lifting of the veto and the start of talks with Ukraine could only happen around June, just as Cyprus’s EU presidency is coming to an end.

That is eight months away. Losing that much time just waiting for the start of negotiations would be an unacceptable luxury for Ukraine.

The following year will be favourable for bold decisions. Ireland, a country more active in promoting Ukraine's accession, will take over the chairing of the EU Council from Cyprus on 1 July 2026. And then after Ireland, Lithuania – one of Ukraine’s key advocates.

Kyiv expects that during this period, Ukraine will be ready for the next steps and capable of completing some of the negotiation chapters.

But the groundwork for this must be laid now.

It is at this point that the outlooks of Kyiv and the European capitals diverge.

"You can carry out reforms even without starting formal negotiations. Just take EU legislation and adopt it", they say in Brussels, and in a formal sense, they are absolutely right.

Ukraine’s political reality is somewhat different. It’s no secret that the "monomajority" in Ukrainian parliament exists only on paper. Many MPs have lost interest in parliamentary work. Holding new elections to renew the legislature is impossible until martial law is lifted.

For that reason, for reforms to succeed, it is highly desirable to have European backing for key legislative projects, as well as a formal list of EU requirements, up front, rather than only following the start of accession negotiations, as normally happens. 

As a result, Brussels devised another scheme that formally doesn’t cross red lines for member states, yet allows Ukraine not to remain stuck in a deadlock.

This initiative is named "Frontloading" – the idea being to resolve most of the issues at the initial stage.

Numerous European Pravda sources in Brussels say that "frontloading" is now viewed as the only realistic option to break the deadlock created by Orbán’s ongoing veto.

The irony, however, is that despite such broad support, the details of the initiative have not yet been agreed upon.

Essentially, the idea is for the EU presidency, the European Commission and key member states to agree on moving toward informal accession talks without the official opening of a negotiation cluster.

The idea is to carry out as many steps and reforms as possible during this period. Then, once Hungary lifts its veto – perhaps after an electoral defeat of Orbán – and the clusters are officially opened, Ukraine will already be at an advanced stage of negotiations.

A number of details of this plan, however, remain undefined.

Chișinău is aware of the initiative and is broadly supportive of it.

"Frontloading is a new and creative idea", says Iulian Groza, Executive Director of the Chișinău-based think tank IPRE, which focuses on European integration. It may well work. But it should be understood that this is not a way to bypass Hungary’s veto. In the end, there still has to be a unanimous vote to open the clusters."