Ukraine’s EU Accession: No Room for Bluff

Moreover, the EU must recognize that at the heart of its current ills lies a political-economic asymmetry. It is painfully evident in the EU’s commitment to accept Ukraine as a full member. Ukraine’s future accession should bring large long-term benefits, but the adaptation costs for EU countries related to the agricultural sector, labor markets, and state budgets will arise immediately, and they will be unevenly distributed and affect policy.

As these costs have come into focus, Europe’s strategic commitment has run into internal constraints. As a result, the EU is clearly in no hurry to move forward, although its leaders insist that Ukraine’s accession remains an imperative. The main problem is the lack of coordination: the accession process requires interrelated political decisions (ratification, reforms to open the market, budget adaptation) that cannot be described as neutral.

EU governments face electoral and budgetary constraints, as well as voter resistance, which is heightened in anticipation of upcoming adaptation costs. No government wants to take the first step without reliable assurances that the costs will be comparable for the others. Although a strategic consensus has been reached, there are delays, new demands, and procedural stalling. The reason is that acting alone is risky.

Risks today, benefits in the future

This dynamic is similar to a familiar problem in economic policy. Markets are often unwilling to finance projects that look risky, capital intensive and slow to pay off. In these cases, the state must intervene, not because these projects have no value, but because private players cannot tolerate uncertainty.

EU governments are also finding it difficult to take the next step toward Ukraine’s accession, not because it has no strategic value, but because the domestic political risks are immediate and the benefits are in the future. In other words, Europe is trying to make a strategic investment with high risks but no insurance.

The irony is that the EU has already proven its ability to deal with such coordination problems. For example, it has launched major industrial initiatives to promote the production of batteries, semiconductors and hydrogen. These projects are recognized as strategically necessary, but they are not funded by the private sector.

In these cases, the EU has used a strategy of risk sharing through coordinated public investment, early loss taking, and synchronization of cross-border actions. Participation was asymmetric, time-limited, and presented as a form of coordination that increased efficiency.

This experience can serve as a lesson for EU enlargement. If Europe wants its commitment to Ukraine to be credible, it must reduce the political costs of accepting its accession. It should start with an honest assessment of the consequences. Ukraine’s accession will create a real challenge for adaptation. Agricultural producers in a number of EU countries will face increased competition; labor-intensive industries will feel the effects on wages and employment; budgets will have to be redistributed.

Since governments in democracies have good reason to fear such changes, recognizing them is a precondition for making credible policy decisions. If ignored, resistance to Ukraine’s accession will manifest itself later, taking the form of vetoes, demands for additional guarantees, and other delays. The question is not whether EU enlargement will increase costs. The question is whether these costs will be spread in an uncontrollable and politically destabilizing way, or whether they can be spread and smoothed over time.

Collective investment

One way to mitigate the shock is to think of Ukraine’s accession as a collective investment that would be underpinned by temporary, targeted risk-sharing structures. EU-level adaptation mechanisms, modeled on existing industrial policy instruments, would help governments cope with sectoral shocks and budgetary pressures during the transition period.

The main contribution would, of course, continue to be made by EU countries, whose degree of participation would be commensurate with their level of risk and financial capacity. EU institutions will take care of coordination, while the state development banks will help stretch the costs over time with loans and guarantees. This approach avoids relying solely on state budgets.

Ukraine’s accession will create winners and losers in every EU country. Many export-oriented companies, logistics service providers, construction companies, and financial institutions will be well positioned to benefit from Ukraine’s recovery and deeper integration. By mobilizing these beneficiaries through co-financing projects and investment structures, political coalitions can be broadened and the idea of enlargement can be more easily defended within EU countries.

Importantly, all this support will be temporary, limited to an upper threshold and tied to clear steps in the accession process. The aim is not to pay permanent compensation, but to guarantee the political feasibility of accession.

The same logic leads to the choice of more integrated approaches to Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction. If one considers Ukraine’s reconstruction and EU enlargement as separate processes, both will be weaker. Coordinating investments in defense industrial capabilities, agrarian modernization, energy systems, and infrastructure would have long-term benefits for both Ukraine and the current EU countries, turning enlargement from a problem of redistribution of funds into a project of joint system-building.

Phased or “light version” enlargement helps to cope with the challenge of adaptation, but it comes with risks. If intermediate phases turn out to be substitutes for steps on the road to membership, the EU’s credibility will suffer. What matters most to Ukraine is a clear commitment that meeting certain criteria will lead to full membership.

Promises and policies

However, the credibility of promises is not only a matter of intentions, but also of capabilities. If promises do not gain political support, they will eventually be broken, and the consequence will be strategic damage. Without mechanisms to manage the costs of adaptation, the EU risks a double bind: high-level commitments accompanied by an unclear timetable for implementation.

These mixed signals will reduce Ukraine’s incentives to reform and complicate its recovery. And they will weaken Europe’s containment policy. Europe does not have to choose whether to bear the costs of Ukraine’s accession. It must decide whether to bear them in a thoughtful way, based on institutions that will make its commitments sustainable. Otherwise, Europe’s credibility will be undermined from within.

Ukraine’s accession to the EU is not just a question about Ukraine. The question is whether the EU can adapt its enlargement model to a world in which geopolitics and economics are closely intertwined. The EU has already learned to influence domestic markets and cannot rely on market forces alone to integrate a country as large and strategically important as Ukraine.

In this situation, it is not declarations that will create credibility, but institutions and decisions that give credibility to commitments. Europe cannot bluff on Ukraine’s accession because its own future increasingly depends on it.