Refusing Enlargement Would Cost EU More Than Ukraine's Accession Kubilius

(MENAFN- UkrinForm) He said this in an interview with Ukrinform when asked whether Ukraine could first integrate in the defense sphere.

"In the European Union, it's always quite difficult to predict how discussions move, why they move, and what will come out of them. Now, definitely, it's very important to look for different possibilities, different options of how enlargement can happen, not only with Ukraine, but also with other countries," Kubilius said.

Commenting on recent reports that EU member states' ambassadors rejected the European Commission's idea of "reverse enlargement," under which Ukraine would first receive EU membership and then gradually acquire full rights, Kubilius said: "Critical opinions about any kind of ideas also are part of the discussion. I would not say that because of some particular discussion suddenly we should stop to discuss the topic of how to make enlargement successful in general."

He stressed the importance of discussing how much it would cost Europe if it fails to accept Ukraine as a new EU member, rather than focusing only on the political, financial and economic cost of such accession.

"I had a very good discussion with Norwegians, who produced a very interesting paper on two military scenarios: how much it will cost for Europe if our support is not increasing and the outcome could be that the Russians could start to prevail more and more, and then what it would it mean for Europe. How many millions of refugees would flow to Europe, how much we would need to spend additionally on our own defense? And the numbers are impressively big. And the second scenario was that we are increasing our support to Ukraine, and Ukraine starts to prevail, and in such a way Ukraine manages to achieve peace, convincing Putin to sit down and to negotiate peace. And in this scenario, the price is eventually two or three times less costly than the first one," Kubilius said.

Read also: Kubilius says Hungary's demand to halt support for Ukraine is unfair

He acknowledged that some countries believe Ukraine is not ready for membership or that the European Union itself is not ready for enlargement.

"We can discuss all those arguments, but at the end we need to ask ourselves the question: if Europe is not enlarging, what are the consequences?" the commissioner said.

European Commission chief spokesperson Paula Pinho recently said that the European Union cannot set an exact date for Ukraine's accession on its own because the "merit-based principle" for candidate countries does not allow it.

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