The European Union formally agreed on Friday to restart accession negotiations with Ukraine and Moldova, after ambassadors from all 27 member states approved the resumption of talks in Brussels. The first formal negotiating session is scheduled for Monday in Luxembourg, and will open the “fundamentals” cluster — covering rule of law, judicial independence, and basic constitutional standards. The breakthrough was made possible by Hungary’s new government under Prime Minister Peter Magyar, who took office in May after defeating Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party, and who last week struck a bilateral deal with Kyiv on the rights of Ukraine’s ethnic Hungarian minority — the long-standing pretext for Orbán’s veto. EU Council President Antonio Costa and Commission President Ursula von der Leyen jointly announced the agreement, declaring enlargement “a strategic choice” in an uncertain world.
The received wisdom
The mainstream case for accelerating Ukraine’s EU path is compelling and, on its own terms, largely correct. Ukraine has demonstrated remarkable institutional resilience under wartime pressure, implementing reform packages — on anti-corruption, judicial oversight, and minority rights — that many peacetime candidate countries took years to achieve. The symbolic and security argument is equally powerful: EU membership would provide Ukraine with the binding commitments of the single market, structural funds, and the political anchor of European law, in ways that military guarantees alone cannot replicate. Moldova, meanwhile, has made significant reform progress and represents a more straightforward candidacy. Crucially, the removal of Hungary’s veto eliminates the single largest obstacle that had allowed Russia’s friends in Brussels’s antechambers to delay what is, in strategic terms, an obvious imperative. For the mainstream liberal international order, this is a moment to be celebrated.
A different read
All of that is true. And yet the speed and political pressure now being brought to bear on this process risks producing exactly the kind of rushed, exception-ridden enlargement that created lasting problems in previous rounds — and in a far higher-stakes environment.
The EU’s post-Cold War expansion eastward is widely, and rightly, celebrated as one of the most successful democracy-promotion exercises in modern history. Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and the Baltic states benefited enormously from accession conditionality, and so did the EU itself. But the 2004–07 enlargements also produced some cautionary lessons. Romania and Bulgaria were admitted before their judicial systems were genuinely independent; the EU spent more than a decade trying to use Cooperation and Verification Mechanism monitoring to achieve what pre-accession conditionality had failed to accomplish. Hungary itself — a full EU member since 2004 — has spent the last decade systematically dismantling the rule-of-law standards it pledged on accession. Orbán’s Fidesz was not a random anomaly; it was, in part, a predictable consequence of admitting a country whose institutions had not been given sufficient time to internalise liberal democratic norms before full membership was conferred.
Ukraine is a more complex candidacy than any previous entrant. It is fighting an active war on a significant portion of its territory. Its pre-war governance record was mixed: Zelensky’s government has made genuine progress on anti-corruption, but the broader institutional landscape — oligarchic influence, judicial appointments, media concentration — remains contested. More fundamentally, there is a question that nobody in Brussels is yet prepared to answer honestly: what does it mean to admit a country whose eastern regions are under foreign military occupation? The EU’s own treaties have no provision for this. The precedent — admitting Cyprus in 2004 with the northern third under Turkish occupation — was an acknowledged mistake that has frustrated EU diplomacy for two decades.
None of this is an argument against Ukraine’s eventual membership, which remains both strategically correct and morally appropriate. It is an argument for being honest that Monday’s “fundamentals cluster” is the beginning of a process that will take a minimum of a decade under any realistic scenario — and that pretending otherwise, as political pressure will inevitably encourage leaders to do, creates expectations that will be disappointed and commitments that cannot be honoured on the promised timeline. Peter Magyar’s Hungary is a welcome change from Orbán’s Budapest, but Magyar’s own position on a fast-track procedure is clear: he does not support one, and he has promised a referendum before Hungary approves final accession. The veto may be gone. The complexity has not.
There is also a fiscal dimension that the celebrations on Friday entirely obscured. Ukraine’s agricultural sector alone is large enough to fundamentally destabilise EU farm support structures. The Common Agricultural Policy was designed for an EU without Ukraine’s scale of grain production. Structural funds will require either significant expansion or significant reallocation away from current recipients. Poland — the largest beneficiary of EU structural funding and one of Ukraine’s strongest advocates — has not fully confronted what Ukrainian membership would mean for its own receipt of Brussels money.
What to watch
- The fundamentals cluster negotiations: These will test whether Ukraine can demonstrate genuine judicial independence and anti-corruption progress at speed. The pace of benchmarks matters: too fast and they become box-ticking; too slow and the political pressure to compress will intensify.
- Magyar’s durability: Hungary’s new government has removed a critical obstacle, but Magyar himself faces a domestic referendum commitment on final accession. His political staying power matters enormously.
- Russia’s response: Moscow has historically treated each round of NATO and EU enlargement as a casus belli for escalation. With the Iran deal potentially freeing up US diplomatic bandwidth, there may be an opportunity to manage this. Or there may not.
- The CAP and structural funds renegotiation: Watch for the first serious intra-EU disagreement about money. That is when the strategic enthusiasm will meet budgetary arithmetic.
— J