KIEV —
Ukraine’s bid to become a candidate to join the
EU will get a clear signal next
week, the bloc’s chief Ursula von der Leyen said Saturday on a surprise visit
to Kyiv.
اضافة اعلان
Von der Leyen said
talks she held with
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “will enable us to
finalize our assessment by the end of next week”.
It was the first
time the EU has publicly given timing on when the commission will deliver its
opinion. The bloc’s 27 member countries need to decide whether to allow Ukraine
to start accession negotiations.
Shortly after
Russian’s February invasion, Zelensky started pushing for
Ukraine’s rapid
admission into the European Union and has demanded an answer on its candidacy
before the end of this month.
But officials and
leaders in the bloc caution that, even with candidacy status, actual EU
membership could take years or even decades.
Ukraine sees the
prospect of joining the EU as a way of reducing its geopolitical vulnerability,
which has been exposed by Russia’s war inside its borders.
Von der Leyen,
appearing alongside Zelensky for a brief declaration to media, did not hold out
any promises.
“You have done a
lot in strengthening the rule of law, but there still need to be reforms
implemented, to fight corruption for example or to modernize this
well-functioning administration, to help attract investors,” she noted.
Instead she
focused more on the future reconstruction of Ukraine, once the war has ended.
That, von der
Leyen said, “should be a process that is fully owned by Ukraine”, with the EU
standing by to help and to contribute to a roadmap “to support Ukraine in
pursuing its European path”.
There are
expectations that Ukraine’s EU candidacy status will be green lit at an EU
leaders’ summit taking place on June 23-24 — though with stern conditions
attached.
Several EU
countries, including Sweden, Denmark and the
Netherlands, are reluctant to give
their nod and Germany has not set out its position.
Some have concerns
with Ukraine’s problem with corruption documented before the war, and the fact
that other countries such as North Macedonia and Albania are already further
along the EU candidacy path.
‘European family’
EU officials will pore over Ukraine’s bid next week, with von der Leyen
and her commissioners getting together on Friday to unveil their opinion ahead
of the summit a week later.
Von der Leyen’s
trip to
Kyiv was her second since the Russian invasion in late February.
Her last one, on
April 8, was to hand Zelensky a questionnaire his officials needed to fill to
provide details that would help inform the European Commission’s opinion it has
to give to the
European Council, representing the EU’s member states.
On that April
visit, von der Leyen said “Ukraine belongs to the European family”.
The European Union
is helping channel weapons to Ukraine through a two-billion-euro fund and has
given it more than 700 million euros in aid and in-kind assistance since the
invasion.
It has also
slapped six rounds of sanctions on
Russia, including against its coal and oil
sent to the bloc, and against oligarchs close to President Vladimir Putin and
media outlets deemed to be propagandizing the war.
EU countries are
hosting nearly 5 million Ukrainian refugees who have fled the war.
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