EL 91 | Ukraine’s European future depends on reforming the Union
ITALIAN | FRENCH | GERMAN | GREEK
July 2026 - More than four years after the start of Russia's invasion, Kyiv's resistance has demonstrated a resilience that few would have predicted at the outset of the war. Yet this resilience is no longer enough to justify Brussels' slow pace. While technical negotiations continue to make progress, Europe's political leadership remains hesitant about Ukraine's full accession, as illustrated by the proposal for an ambiguous "associate membership" rejected by President Zelensky. This is a mistake the European Union cannot afford to make, because the real challenge is not Ukraine's readiness but Europe's own. Enlargement cannot be managed with the Union's current institutional framework: it requires moving beyond unanimity in foreign policy, establishing an autonomous fiscal capacity, and strengthening the roles of both the European Parliament and the European Commission—in other words, taking the long-delayed step toward a genuine political union that Europe has postponed for the past two decades.
Despite expectations, the waning of American support for Ukraine and Trump’s rapprochement with Putin have not brought Kyiv’s resistance to its knees. On the contrary, over the past 12 months it has achieved important results: not only has the Russian advance on the eastern front essentially stalled, but the Ukrainian army has shown it can strike deep into the invader’s territory, threatening its infrastructure, particularly in oil refining and distribution. The message is clear: Putin’s special operation has now turned into a giant quagmire in which Russia cannot win and must instead watch its own back, because its territory is and will remain a target within reach of Ukrainian forces.
While the Kremlin hesitates over what to do next — launching a further escalation of the conflict through general mobilization or accepting a ceasefire along the current front line — the resilience of Ukrainian resistance carries a series of messages for Europe. First, it shows that when the Union acts united, it is powerful: the political, financial and material support of EU institutions and national governments has been decisive in giving small Ukraine the resources, above all financial, to withstand the violence of the Russian bear and prevent the implementation of Putin’s neo-imperial project. Second, the EU faces the fact that Ukraine today represents the outpost of European defence in several respects: it keeps Putin’s advance in check, even as he openly threatens other member states and wages a hybrid war against European countries; moreover, it has one of the strongest armies in the world and is the only European country able to sustain a contemporary conflict.
Furthermore, the need to support Ukraine is one of the main factors pushing for a strengthening of European capacity to act — even if in variable formats of “coalitions of the willing” — and for pursuing a greater degree of harmonisation of the defence industry, not only for joint procurement and interoperability programmes promoted by the Commission, but also because of the practical need for all countries to supply military technologies usable by Ukrainian forces. Finally, Kyiv’s resilience makes it even more urgent to accelerate its process of accession to the Union.
Finally, Orbán’s defeat in Hungary made it possible to launch the real accession negotiations, with the opening of the fundamentals cluster at the Intergovernmental Conference in June and of the external relations cluster in July. At the same time, Europe’s ruling class continues to debate Ukraine’s actual accession to the Union. On 21 May 2026, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz proposed to European partners that Ukraine be welcomed as an “associate member”: a halved participation, without a vote in the European Council, with a commissioner without portfolio and without full access to the internal market. Zelensky rejected the proposal within hours: “We defend Europe wholly, not by half,” he wrote, claiming full and equal membership for Kyiv. The episode, however limited, captures with precision the state of the debate: while technical negotiations move forward, Europe’s ruling class is not fully convinced that Ukraine can join the Union in the near future. This is an error of perspective that we cannot afford.
We cannot pretend otherwise. The Ukraine emerging from more than four years of war is no longer the fragile, fragmented country that applied for membership in 2022. It is a nation that is literally forging itself in the conflict: the pressure of war has helped root, alongside the collective sense of belonging to a national political community, the choice of European values and the will to become an integral part of Europe. This has made it possible to accelerate radical reforms of public administration, justice, the fight against corruption and institutional decentralisation, to the point that the screening of Ukrainian legislation, completed during 2025, has certified an alignment with EU law that would have been hard to imagine just a few years ago. Further postponing accession on the excuse that Ukraine “is not yet ready” means ignoring the fact that, in many concrete areas, it already is; and that the time the Union takes to decide is not neutral, but costs lives, credibility and reforming energy at risk of dissipating.
Then there is the security argument already mentioned, which makes the issue impossible to postpone. Ukraine is in fact also fighting a proxy war in the interest of European security, absorbing on its own territory the military pressure that would otherwise be unloaded directly on the Union’s eastern borders. Asking Kyiv to keep paying this price without offering it, in return, a prospect of full membership amounts to placing on a single country the cost of a public good — the security of the continent — from which all member states benefit. Accelerating accession is therefore not an act of generosity, but a political and moral duty and an investment in Europe’s own security.
If Europe fails to decide, the risk is not simply a continuation of the status quo, but a regression. A Ukraine left in an indefinite limbo, after having sacrificed so much precisely in the name of the European prospect, risks seeing the nationalist and eurosceptic impulses that the war has so far kept at the margins flare up within it. It is the best part of the country — the generation that carried out the reforms, that fought at the front, that staked everything on Europe — that risks being the first to be swept away by this disillusionment. If the reforming energy generated by the war is not immediately channelled into a credible path towards accession, it will simply be wasted, and will not present itself again in the same form.
What about Europe? Here too, reality is more uncomfortable than official statements suggest. More than Ukraine, it is the Union as a whole that seems unprepared. The problem is not so much the need to launch a reform of agricultural policy and cohesion funds capable of absorbing a new member, but rather that of changing the fundamental institutional arrangements that still see crucial decisions — starting with foreign policy and the budget — decided unanimously by governments. For this reason, member states, held back by the fear of losing relative weight in the Council, are tempted, as the Merz proposal itself shows, by hybrid solutions that grant the form of membership without its political substance. The proposal for an “associate” membership, without a vote or full participation in the internal market, must be read exactly for what it is: an attempt to postpone the political decision behind a sophisticated technical architecture.
Zelensky’s refusal was not a negotiating whim, but the assertion of a principle: a country cannot be asked to defend Europe and then be denied a voice in its institutions. What is significant, if anything, is that Kyiv raised no obstacles to a gradual path on individual technical chapters — free movement of workers, opening of the agricultural market, access to funds — provided it obtained full political voice from the outset in return. This is precisely the kind of flexibility that any enlargement requires, offered as proof of the seriousness of Ukraine’s intentions; it is now up to Europe to demonstrate its own.
If this exchange is not seized, the Union risks facing the most irreparable of its failures. An accession process that stalls, after being announced as a priority by every European summit since 2022, would certify in the eyes of Moscow — and of the rest of the world — that the Union’s enlargement promises are a rhetorical tool with no concrete follow-through, and would feed in Ukraine the conviction that Europe, once again, prefers to temporise rather than choose. So that Ukraine’s accession does not remain an act of mere willpower destined to jam in practice, a number of institutional reforms that the Union has been postponing for years are needed in parallel: the extension of qualified majority voting in foreign and security policy, to remove crucial decisions from the blackmail of the national veto; the development of a fiscal capacity autonomous from member states’ contributions; a strengthening of the role of Parliament and the Commission in decision-making processes.
Time is running short, but the window is not yet closed: if managed together with these reforms, Ukraine’s accession can turn from an insoluble problem into a decisive opportunity, becoming the step that finally allows the Union to emerge from the institutional deadlock in which it has been struggling for twenty years and to move towards a genuine political union. It is up to the most far-sighted governments, the Commission and the European Parliament to seize this opportunity with a strong political initiative, before it is decided by internal inertia or external pressure from Moscow. This would also be the most effective response to the nationalist and eurosceptic forces betting on the failure of enlargement to certify the decline of the European project.
The European Letter is published in 7 languages under the auspices of the Luciano Bolis European Foundation in cooperation with the Union of European Federalists.