European Commission develops unique accelerated entry procedure for Ukraine

The European Commission proposes to implement the procedure for Ukraine's accession to the European Union under the new procedure, which provides for the preparation of technical issues of accession negotiations in parallel with political ones.

Source: article by European Pravda Yellow light for Ukraine: what European Commission decided and whether negotiations on accession to EU will begin

Details: Previously, the EU had a step-by-step procedure for opening negotiations. First, the so-called intergovernmental conference of the EU member states approved a technical document called the "negotiation framework", without which negotiations could not begin in principle.

This artificially hampered the start of negotiations, for example, for Albania and North Macedonia. They received a political decision to start negotiations in March 2020, but due to problems with political requirements, they waited for the approval of the "framework" for more than two years, until June 2022.

"And since then they have not made significant progress; the so-called screening continued for another year, that is, the verification of compatibility with EU law, and only in December 2023 should these two Western Balkan states open the first negotiation chapters," the article says.

In the case of Ukraine, the European Commission took into account the new reality and proposed a parallel approach in negotiations instead of doing it step by step.

This means that the intermediate and technical stages, namely, the preparation of the negotiation framework and the screening of legislation, will begin in December 2023, as soon as a political decision of the EU summit appears, where the proposal of the European Commission to start negotiations with Ukraine should be approved.

But for this, Ukraine needs to get the consent of all leaders at the EU summit in order to open negotiations, including Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

"Although Brussels does not give Kyiv a 100% guarantee, it claims in closed negotiations that, most likely, they will find an agreement with Orbán – this was reported to European Pravda by numerous sources in Ukraine and the EU. And the Hungarian leader has repeatedly proved that he is ready to give up his ‘principles’ for financial injections from the EU budget; most likely, they expect that a similar scenario will unfold now," the material says.

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