When the European Union offered Ukraine a path to membership last year, it was in many ways an emotional response to the Russian invasion.
Leaders were under pressure to show solidarity with the victims of aggression, even though many opposed the idea.
Since then, preoccupied with passing sanctions, scrounging up aid and scouring military inventories to send Ukraine weapons, few in Europe have focused seriously on what that commitment might actually mean.
But this is a courtship with consequences for the future, not only for Ukraine’s aspirations and survival, but also for Europe’s own security and finances.
Ukrainian membership would reshape the bloc and its relationship with a post-conflict Russia.
It would also provide the best path toward internal Ukrainian reform as the country worked to meet EU standards of transparency and rule of law.
But tensions are already growing between Europe’s desire to maintain its tough requirements and Ukraine’s demand for quick entry into a promised land that has given hope to the embattled country.
EU officials like Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, have been slow-walking expectations for Ukraine, a country that nearly all agree is fundamentally unprepared to join.
“Now there’s more sympathy and the feeling that Ukraine is a part of Europe, but that’s sentimental and not hard-core,” said Anna Wieslander of Sweden, director for Northern Europe for the Atlantic Council organization.
“What’s the plan ahead? That’s what I’m missing,” she added.
“There’s no discussion of what the membership criteria in a new situation should be or what kind of union we get then. We’re putting our heads in the sand.”
European officials say quietly that there is no real way around the current, demanding process of accession, which normally takes many years. And that assumes an independent post-conflict Ukraine, with strong security guarantees or assurances, which many think can only come with Nato membership, too.
One thing is clear: Restoring a shattered Ukraine and bringing it fully into the European fold will be expensive, turning some countries from net receivers from the EU budget to net providers. It also promises to shift Europe’s center of gravity eastward in ways that could fundamentally change the balance of power in the bloc.
“The consequences of Ukraine in the EU will be complicated, even explosive,” said Thomas Gomart, director of IFRI, the French Institute of International Relations. “But it will be politically impossible to reject it.”
Since the founding of what became the European Union after World War II, European integration has been seen as a “peace project,” said Ylva Johansson, the EU commissioner for home affairs.
“The EU was intended to be a project to make war impossible on the European continent,” she said. In many ways, it succeeded, as it and NATO took in members of the former Soviet bloc, providing development, security and more prosperity to 100 million people.
But the biggest conflict since World War II is now raging in Europe. “Ukraine also shows that Brussels and the peace project have failed,” said Heather A Conley, president of the German Marshall Fund.
Brussels — and Washington — did not understand what their outreach to Ukraine for eventual membership in Nato and the EU would spark in President Vladimir Putin of Russia.
In 2019, von der Leyen announced that she would lead a “geopolitical commission,” to learn to use “the language of power.”
But comprehending the need for the bloc to think and act as a global player is quite different from doing so.
“There is an understanding of the need but an inability to meet the moment, which is a geopolitical moment,” Conley said. “Europe shifted east with an enlargement process that needed to be geopolitical from the start but became technical. They lost their way.”
The EU has nonetheless coalesced impressively since the invasion. It has sharply cut dependency on Russian energy, especially natural gas. It approved 10 packages of sanctions against Russia.
It reduced two-way trade with Russia by €135 billion (about $143 billion), while providing Ukraine with more than €38 billion in financial and humanitarian aid and €12 billion in military support, noted Valdis Dombrovskis, the commissioner for trade.
According to the Kiel Institute, which tracks aid to Ukraine, the Europeans have earmarked some €54.9 billion (about $58 billion) for Ukraine, while the United States has committed €73.1 billion, €44.3 billion of it military. Despite all the criticism of Brussels as slow to act, EU institutions have provided the second-largest amount of total aid, at €35 billion while Germany is the third-largest donor country after the United States and Britain.
Johansson emphasised that the commission, which is traditionally stuffed with lawyers who draft regulations, was learning to be “operational,” for example transforming an existing mechanism to reimburse member states for their military contributions to Ukraine.
Brussels has committed to supporting the government in Kyiv with €1.5 billion a month for a year, Dombrovskis said, matching Washington’s contribution, with more to be added by multinational financial institutions.
But those figures will be trifling compared with the costs of reconstruction, estimated already at $1 trillion, let alone of eventual Ukrainian membership in the union. And there are already minority voices in the bloc that are anxious over the cost and its possible political impact.
The process of EU accession is the best guarantee that Ukraine will reform and will use reconstruction aid efficiently, said Radoslaw Sikorksi, a member of the European Parliament and former foreign and defence minister of Poland.
Ukraine is already receiving EU pre-accession funds, which will grow. “That will be hundreds of billions over a decade, and that will be Ukraine’s real Marshall Plan,” Sikorski said. And if security is assured, private investment will flow in, he said.
He is optimistic about Ukraine’s eventual future in Europe. As an exporter of carbon-free nuclear energy, a huge and fertile agricultural power and a source of adaptable computer technology, he said, “I think when the war finally ends, Ukraine can be rich.”
- The New York Times
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