EU plan to grant Ukraine accelerated membership despite Hungarian objections revealed

The European Union is preparing an exclusive plan that could grant Ukraine a form of partial membership as early as next year, POLITICO reported on Tuesday, citing several EU diplomats and officials.

If adopted, the proposal would represent a significant change to how the bloc grants accession status to new countries, with Ukraine receiving membership status prior to completing the reforms required for full membership privileges, in what several diplomats termed a process of “reverse enlargement”.

In practice, the initiative would involve fast-tracking Ukraine’s technical preparation for accession, granting it a form of partial EU membership without the full privileges provided to member states, and navigating the likely veto of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has said his country would be willing to block Ukrainian accession “for another 100 years”. 

“It would be a sort of recalibration of the process — you join and then you get phased in rights and obligations,” an EU official familiar with the ongoing discussions in Brussels told POLITICO. “So there would be a rethinking of how we do accession based on the very different situation we have now compared to when the commission established accession criteria.” 

To bypass Hungary’s opposition, the EU is first planning to see whether Viktor Orbán loses the April parliamentary elections, after which it ask US President Donald Trump to pressure his ideological ally, or, if necessary, strip Hungary of its voting rights to prevent it from blocking enlargement, POLITICO reported.

The proposal is seen as attractive in Brussels because it would give Kyiv time to complete reforms to its democratic institutions, judiciary and political system, while reducing the risk of Ukraine abandoning its EU ambitions and pivoting away from the West.

The plan would also facilitate Ukraine’s stated ambitions of joining the EU by 2027 as part of a potential peace deal with the Kremlin. On 30 January, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Ukraine would “be ready” to join by then, and asked Brussels to provide an alternative path to membership for the country to safeguard its future.

Responding to Zelensky’s comments, European Commissioner for Enlargement Marta Cos said that many EU member states would like to see Ukraine join the bloc as early as 2027, though other member states such as Germany have expressed hesitancy at Kyiv potentially being granted an  accelerated membership, with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz last month describing Ukraine joining the bloc on 1 January 2027 as “out of the question”.

Ukraine became a candidate to join the EU in June 2022, four months after Russia launched its full-scale invasion. At the end of 2023, Brussels and Kyiv began accession negotiations, which typically take years to be completed.