As Ukraine fights, does the EU owe it membership?

It is a question that will hang over a summit meeting of EU leaders starting Monday, and one made more urgent by Ukraine's demand for fast-track accession talks to join the bloc, which may not be decided before another meeting in late June

By Steven Erlanger

Published: May 31, 2022

Downtown Skopje, the capital of North Macedonia, on Feb. 27, 2020. North Macedonia and Albania are the farthest along as full-fledged candidates for European Union membership. (Loulou d'Aki/The New York Times)

BRUSSELS — With Ukraine defending European values and security against a blatant Russian invasion, what obligation does the European Union and NATO have toward Ukraine?

The moral answer may be obvious, as European and American governments vow support for Kyiv and are pouring money and arms into Ukraine. But the practical answers are complicated, as ever, and are dividing Europe.

Defying expectations, the EU has provided significant military aid to Ukraine and inflicted enormous sanctions on Russia, acting with speed and authority. But now it is confronting a more difficult problem: how to bind vulnerable countries such as Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia to Europe in a way that helps them and does not create a further security risk down the road.

It is a question that will hang over a summit meeting of EU leaders starting Monday, and one made more urgent by Ukraine’s demand for fast-track accession talks to join the bloc, which may not be decided before another meeting in late June.

Despite pressure to fast-track Ukraine, full membership for it or the other countries on Europe’s periphery in either NATO or the EU is unlikely for many years. But European leaders have already begun discussing ways to slowly integrate them and protect them.

French President Emmanuel Macron and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi have in recent weeks both talked of a new confederation with the EU, as opposed to the old notion of a core group and a periphery, or a “two-speed Europe,” which newer members reject as creating a second-class status.

In his speech on “Europe Day,” May 9, to the European Parliament, Macron floated a more formed, if still vague, proposal for a new kind of arrangement.

“The war in Ukraine and the legitimate aspiration of its people, just like that of Moldova and Georgia, to join the European Union encourages us to rethink our geography and the organization of our continent,” he said.

Macron offered a sweeping vision of a new European Political Community — an outer circle of European states, including Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova and Britain — that would be linked to the EU but not be part of it.

Such a wider circle of European states would allow Brussels to bring vulnerable countries along Russia’s border into the European fold more rapidly than full EU membership, which “would in reality take several years, and most likely several decades,” Macron said.

Such a “political community” would, he said, “allow democratic European countries that believe in our core values a new space for political cooperation on security, energy, transport, infrastructure investment and free movement of people, especially our young people.”

The idea of concentric rings or “tiers” of European states, of a “multispeed Europe,” has been suggested several times before, including by then-French President François Mitterrand in 1989. Then, though, the idea included Russia; it went nowhere. Macron has brought it up before. But now, with Russia on the march, it is the time to make it real, he said.

In late February, four days after the Russian invasion, Ukraine formally applied to join the bloc, and in March, EU leaders “acknowledged the European aspirations and the European choice of Ukraine.”

On April 8, in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, “Dear Volodymyr, my message today is clear: Ukraine belongs in the European family.” She said, “This is where your path toward the European Union begins.”

But even if European leaders decide to open negotiations with Ukraine, the process will be long, despite support for immediate membership from countries such as Poland and the Baltic states.

On May 22, Clément Beaune, France’s Europe minister, told French radio: “I don’t want to offer Ukrainians any illusions or lies.” He added: “We have to be honest. If you say Ukraine is going to join the EU in six months, or a year or two, you’re lying. It’s probably in 15 or 20 years — it takes a long time.”

Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg said that given the difficulties, Ukraine should be offered “another path” in its relationship with Brussels.

Zelenskyy has sharply rejected any other path than accelerated full membership for Ukraine in the EU. But his demand is unlikely to be met.

A fast-track for Ukraine would probably further alienate the states in the Western Balkans, where the slow and cumbersome enlargement process “has disillusioned many while Russia and China have expanded their influence in the region as a result,” said Julia De Clerck-Sachsse of the German Marshall Fund in Brussels.

Proposals such as Macron’s “can help kick-start a wider discussion” among European leaders about how to better help and protect those who are not yet members, she said. “At the same time, they need to be careful that such ideas are not interpreted as a sort of ‘enlargement light’ that will undermine aspirations to full membership and further alienate” countries already disappointed by the process.

Pierre Vimont, a former French ambassador to Washington and a fellow with Carnegie Europe, thinks it would be best to simply open the EU to all aspirants. But the “real issue,” he said, “is that an EU of 35 members can’t go on in the same way,” requiring serious institutional reform and treaty change to function.

For now, he said, “no one has the answer.” But he cautioned that “we cannot neglect Russia or forget it — we’ve done that for years, and it has not turned out very well.”

“We need to face that question openly,” he said, “and come up with new ideas.”