Ukraine's Destiny's European And EU's Destiny's To Embrace Ukraine

One of the main issues that led to President Viktor Yanukovych's ousting was a proposed free-trade agreement with the EU that he sought to reject despite the Ukrainian Parliament having already accepted it. In a 2015 documentary film,“The Great European Disaster Movie” for which I served as executive producer – which featured plenty of skeptical and critical voices against the EU in Britain, France and elsewhere – by far the most powerful and emotional voices in favor of the EU were from Ukrainians.

Admittedly, now that Victor Orban is no longer Hungary's prime minister it is hard to find European leaders who are explicitly opposed to Ukraine's membership. Everyone claims to be in favor of it. But dig a little deeper and you will find many countries keen at least to slow the process down and some that might choose to block it altogether.

Italy is at the forefront of those wanting to slow it down. Giorgia Meloni says that she supports Ukraine's accession but that countries in the Balkans, by which she means Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Serbia and North Macedonia, should take precedence.

Meloni's desire to show favor to Italy's close neighbor and her desired asylum-processing partner Albani a can be understood as a natural diplomatic gambit. But this could also become a way to ensure that Ukraine's entry is delayed for years, given the clear problems concerning democracy, the rule of law and Russian interference in Serbia, in particular.

The most crucial opponents, however, lie in two of Ukraine's biggest neighbours, Poland and Hungary.

The man who defeated Orban, Peter Magyar, is not going to demonize Ukrainians as enemies in the way that Orban tried to. But although he has lifted Hungary's veto over Ukraine's commencement of formal accession negotiations and Orban's block on the EU's €90 billion loan to finance Ukraine's war effort over the next two years, the issue of the status and rights of the approximately 100,000 Ukrainians who are of Hungarian ethnic origin remains sensitive politically in Budapest.

Poland's objections are even more visceral, notwithstanding the fact that unlike Hungary the country has housed vast numbers of Ukrainian refugees during the four-year war. President Volodymr Zelenskyy recently caused outrage among Poland's political leaders when he gave posthumous honors to one of the former leaders of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. This was a pro-independence group that during the Second World War was involved in a massacre of Poles in what is now western Ukraine but which in 1918 had been seized by Poland.

A more down-to-earth objection to EU membership for Ukraine is rooted in the traditional EU sport of agricultural protectionism.

The EU already accounts for 65% of Ukraine's goods exports. The free-trade agreement that was negotiated in 2014 and has been in provisional force ever since then was deepened even further in 2022 when the EU abolished remaining tariffs on goods from Ukraine in order to support Ukraine's economy after the Russian invasion. However tariffs on food imports were reintroduced in June 2025 under pressure from farmers and their political allies in Poland and Hungary.

Full Ukrainian entry to EU would inevitably involve those food tariffs being abolished again, which gives Polish farmers ample reason to oppose it, or at least to slow it down drastically by demanding a long transition period for agricultural trade. One of the reasons why Russian imperialists have coveted Ukraine for centuries is the fact that its wheat fields are so large and fertile.

EU enlargement decisions require all 27 existing member countries to agree and to ratify the decision through their own parliaments or by referendums. Inevitably, this hands a lot of power to objectors, even when the moral and political case for Ukrainian entry is so obviously strong.