Ukraine deserves its place in the EU. It’s right for the country – and right for Europe
What a difference a war makes. Four months ago, the leaders of France, Germany and Italy would not have dreamed of supporting Ukraine’s candidacy for EU membership. But this Thursday, there they were in a sunny Kyiv, all emphatically endorsing it. If next week’s EU summit agrees, following the positive opinion just given by the European Commission, this really could be, as President Volodymyr Zelenskiy put it after meeting his visitors from luckier parts of Europe, “one of the key European decisions of the first third of the 21st century”. It could mark the beginning of a further round of eastern enlargement of the EU, as significant as the first big post-cold war round in the 2000s, which in two waves took in countries from Estonia to Bulgaria. The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus scores again: “war is the father of all things”.
There are two good reasons for accepting Ukraine as a candidate for membership of the EU: because Ukraine has earned it, and because this is in the long-term strategic interest of all Europeans. The second is even more important than the first.
Ukraine’s aspiration to join the EU did not start yesterday. I will never forget standing on a freezing Maidan in Kyiv during the Orange Revolution in 2004, amid a sea of European flags such as I have never seen in any EU capital. Ten years later, the 2014 protests in Kyiv were sparked by President Viktor Yanukovych’s rejection of an association agreement with the EU – and they were christened the Euromaidan.
The war has confirmed this settled will of the Ukrainian nation. From the outset, Zelenskiy made candidacy for EU membership one of his three main asks to the west, alongside his urgent request for more weapons and sanctions. A recent opinion poll
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