Continued support but not without conditions: this was more or less the message sent on June 11 by the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, during her visit to kyiv, the second since the start of the invasion. of Ukraine by the Russian army.
Alongside the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, she assured that Ukraine could this week take a further step on the road to candidacy for the European Union. “We want to support Ukraine on its European journey,” summarized Ursula von der Leyen.
European hesitations
For the time being, there is no question of joining which, the French Minister Delegate for European Affairs, Clément Beaune, had warned at the end of May, could take “probably fifteen or twenty years” : the Commission could simply ” recommend “ that Ukraine be granted candidate status, a recommendation that will still need to be approved by all 27 member states. “Today’s discussions will allow us to finalize the assessment by the end of next week,” explained Ursula von der Leyen, before tempering: “There are still reforms to put in place, in the fight against corruption for example. »
Because if Volodymyr Zelensky had, by submitting Ukraine’s application for candidacy four days after the start of the Russian invasion, demanded rapid membership, kyiv quickly came up against the reluctance of part of the European bloc. According to information from the Bloomberg agency, the Netherlands and Denmark in particular initially opposed Ukraine’s obtaining candidate status, citing in particular the country’s contrasting record in the fight against Corruption.
“Ukraine has since 2014 created an ecosystem to fight corruption from scratch”, reacted in the columns of the Ukrainian media Oukrainska Pravda Andreï Borovik, director of Transparency International Ukraine.
Long term support
122e the organization’s corruption perception ranking, “Ukraine still has efforts to make to fight corruption, starting today”, he acknowledges. “I believe that obtaining candidate status will impose more ambitious commitments on Ukraine,” hopes at the same time the activist – and the whole of Ukrainian civil society.
The visit of Ursula von der Leyen, as much as the possible obtaining of the status of candidate, is also symbolic for a Ukrainian power which now faces the prospect of a long-term war with Russia. For Volodymyr Zelensky, “a positive response from the European Union to the Ukrainian candidacy request would be a positive response to the question of the future of the European project”. Ukraine had already moved closer to the EU by signing, after the 2014 revolution, an association agreement with the European bloc, synonymous in particular with a free visa regime and the lifting of customs barriers. But the status of candidate is also today for Kyiv a way of securing the long-term support of Western countries against Moscow.