Kyiv: For two years the question was not whether Ukraine and Moldova belonged on the road to European Union membership, but whether a single capital’s veto could keep them parked at the start of it. That impasse broke on 15 June, when the two candidates formally opened the first cluster of accession negotiation chapters, the package known in Brussels shorthand as the fundamentals.
The cluster is deliberately the hardest and the most revealing. It bundles together the chapters on the judiciary and fundamental rights, on justice, freedom and security, on public procurement, on statistics and on financial control. These are the areas where candidate countries are most often found wanting, and where backsliding by existing members has done the most damage to the Union’s credibility. Opening them first reflects a lesson drawn from earlier enlargements, when rule-of-law conditions were left until late and proved almost impossible to enforce once a country was inside.
The breakthrough followed the lifting of a veto that had blocked progress for more than two years. Member states reached agreement in the days before the opening to unblock the talks, allowing the Council to clear the way for the two candidates to move in parallel. The choreography mattered: Ukraine and Moldova have advanced as a pair since both were granted candidate status in 2022, and capitals were anxious that neither be seen to be held back by the other.
For Ukraine, the milestone arrives against the grimmest possible backdrop. Negotiating the modernisation of courts, procurement systems and financial controls is an exacting bureaucratic exercise in peacetime; doing it while defending against invasion compresses timelines that would ordinarily run for years. Officials here are candid that opening a chapter is not the same as closing it, and that each will demand legislation, institution-building and independent scrutiny before it can be provisionally completed.
Moldova’s path is less encumbered by war but no less politically fraught. The country’s pro-European leadership has staked its legitimacy on the membership project, and progress in Brussels feeds directly into a domestic contest with forces that favour closer ties to Moscow. A visible step forward gives reformers something concrete to show voters who have been promised that the European choice will translate into cleaner courts and stronger institutions.
The Union’s leadership cast the opening as proof that enlargement, long treated as a dormant file, has become a strategic priority again. The presidency steering the Council’s work hailed the moment as a signal that the futures of both countries are anchored in the bloc. Yet the same officials are careful to stress that the timetable from here is merit-based, not political, and that no accession date is on offer.
That caution is well founded. The fundamentals cluster can take years to close, and every chapter can be reopened if reforms stall. Enlargement fatigue among existing members, the unresolved costs of admitting a large agricultural economy at war, and the Union’s own struggles to enforce the rule of law internally all loom over the process. For now, though, the candidates have what they were denied for two years: a negotiating table that is finally open.
