Why Ukraine's accelerated EU accession is becoming reality and how it could happen
Ukraine is apparently due to join the European Union in 2027 according to the draft "peace plan" agreed upon by Ukraine, the United States and some European leaders.
We say "apparently" because the full text of the plan has not been published and the wording of its provisions remains subject to negotiation.
However, no one has abandoned the idea of a rapid "geopolitical accession" for Ukraine.
Although this is impossible under current EU rules, Brussels has made no objections.
Read more in the article by Sergiy Sydorenko, European Pravda's editor: Bringing Ukraine into the EU by 2027: exploring the idea of "membership-lite" as part of a peace deal.
Ukraine’s leadership has been talking about the need for rapid EU accession for quite some time. But the idea gained real momentum on 18 August, when President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders made a joint visit to the White House.
In the autumn, when the United States returned to peace-making efforts, any lingering doubts about whether the White House understood the importance of this issue vanished.
EU membership for Ukraine acquired the status of a "key security guarantee".
Trump’s team included it in their peace plan – first in the expanded 28-point version, and later in the 20-point plan, in an even more favourable wording for Kyiv. Thus Ukraine’s accession to the EU became one of the key conditions for peace.
At first, few in Europe took the idea of timelines for Ukraine’s EU accession seriously. One of the main reasons was that the plan included a date that was clearly unrealistic – 1 January 2027. This would have meant that less than a year remained until accession.
Kyiv also acknowledges that the accession date may change as a result of the negotiations.
In reality, however, the main challenge is not choosing a date, but getting the EU to agree to announce a date for Ukraine’s accession.
The EU has consistently emphasised that enlargement is a "merit-based process". First reforms, then legal steps. Setting a date undermines this principle.
In addition, the European Union is above all an economic bloc. The EU acquis, i.e. the common European body of law, sets out common regulations for businesses in all the member states and equal conditions for competition within the EU’s single market.
If a member state with different production standards, different control systems and different competition rules were to join the EU, it would distort the single market.
There is a reason for Brussels’ cautious support for this idea. Brussels hopes to find a creative way to reconcile EU rules with the political need to speed up Ukraine's accession.
Two ideas have been made public so far.
The first was voiced by President Zelenskyy, who has proposed that Ukraine join the EU "in advance" while taking on a legal obligation to complete reforms after accession: "Post factum, Ukraine can do everything it is supposed to do – just as it was with our candidate status. It worked! We became a candidate and committed to taking several steps afterwards. And if we don’t fulfil them, there will be no status. This is a normal approach."
The second creative approach is the idea of "EU membership-lite" revealed by the sources cited by the Financial Times, in which Ukraine would initially have limited powers within the EU. This would minimise the impact of an unprepared Ukraine on the single market and could also make it easier to reach a consensus within the EU.
European Pravda sources have confirmed that discussions of this idea are ongoing in Brussels and individual member states, but they are at a very early stage. There is no formal document outlining the new scheme.