BRUSSELS — When the European Union offered Ukraine a path to membership last year, it was in many ways an emotional response to the Russian invasion. Leaders were under pressure to show solidarity with the victims of aggression, even though many opposed the idea.
Since then, preoccupied with passing sanctions, scrounging up aid and scouring military inventories to send Ukraine weapons, few in Europe have focused seriously on what that commitment might actually mean.
But this is a courtship with consequences for the future, not only for Ukraine’s aspirations and survival, but also for Europe’s own security and finances. Ukrainian membership would reshape the bloc and its relationship with a post-conflict Russia. It would also provide the best path toward internal Ukrainian reform as the country worked to meet E.U. standards of transparency and rule of law.
But tensions are already growing between Europe’s desire to maintain its tough requirements and Ukraine’s demand for quick entry into a promised land that has given hope to the embattled country. European Union officials like Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, have been slow-walking expectations for Ukraine, a country that nearly all agree is fundamentally unprepared to join.
“Now there’s more sympathy and the feeling that Ukraine is a part of Europe, but that’s sentimental and not hard-core,” said Anna Wieslander of Sweden, director for Northern Europe for the Atlantic Council organization.
“What’s the plan ahead? That’s what I’m missing,” she added. “There’s no discussion of what the membership criteria in a new situation should be or what kind of union we get then. We’re putting our heads in the sand.”
European officials say quietly that there is no real way around the current, demanding process of accession, which normally takes many years. And that assumes an independent post-conflict Ukraine, with strong security guarantees or assurances, which many think can only come with NATO membership, too.
One thing is clear: Restoring a shattered Ukraine and bringing it fully into the European fold will be expensive, turning some countries from net receivers from the E.U. budget to net providers. It also promises to shift Europe’s center of gravity eastward in ways that could fundamentally change the balance of power in the bloc.
“The consequences of Ukraine in the E.U. will be complicated, even explosive,” said Thomas Gomart, director of IFRI, the French Institute of International Relations. “But it will be politically impossible to reject it.”
After all, Ukraine is fighting on Europe’s behalf, not just its own. It is Ukraine that is now defending NATO’s borders, let alone Western values, analysts pointed out.
“Ukraine is waging Europe’s war,” said Steven E. Sokol, president of the American Council on Germany. “Europe owes Ukraine a lot more urgency.”
The time for “piecemeal decisions” is long past, argues Sven Biscop of Egmont, a Brussels think tank. “Accepting a neighbor under invasion as a candidate for membership must mean accepting more responsibility for that neighbor’s survival,” he said.
If Ukraine survives, Mr. Biscop said, it will be an integral part of the Western security architecture: the new frontier with Russia, not merely the buffer state it has been. After a year of war, he said, the European Union should “finally come up with an overall plan to provide military support over the long term,” gradually taking over from the United States.
But for Europe, that will require a wrenching shift in mentality that has barely begun.
Since the founding of what became the European Union after World War II, European integration has been seen as a “peace project,” said Ylva Johansson, the E.U. commissioner for home affairs.
“The E.U. was intended to be a project to make war impossible on the European continent,” she said. In many ways, it succeeded, as it and NATO took in members of the former Soviet bloc, providing development, security and more prosperity to 100 million people.
But the biggest conflict since World War II is now raging in Europe. “Ukraine also shows that Brussels and the peace project have failed,” said Heather A. Conley, president of the German Marshall Fund.
Brussels — and Washington — did not understand what their outreach to Ukraine for eventual membership in NATO and the European Union would spark in President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
In 2019, Ms. von der Leyen announced that she would lead a “geopolitical commission,” to learn to use “the language of power.” But comprehending the need for the bloc to think and act as a global player is quite different from doing so.
“There is an understanding of the need but an inability to meet the moment, which is a geopolitical moment,” Ms. Conley said. “Europe shifted east with an enlargement process that needed to be geopolitical from the start but became technical. They lost their way.”
The European Union has nonetheless coalesced impressively since the invasion. It has sharply cut dependency on Russian energy, especially natural gas. It approved 10 packages of sanctions against Russia. It reduced two-way trade with Russia by 135 billion euros (about $143 billion), while providing Ukraine with more than €38 billion in financial and humanitarian aid and €12 billion in military support, noted Valdis Dombrovskis, the commissioner for trade.
According to the Kiel Institute, which tracks aid to Ukraine, the Europeans have earmarked some €54.9 billion (about $58 billion) for Ukraine, while the United States has committed €73.1 billion, €44.3 billion of it military. Despite all the criticism of Brussels as slow to act, E.U. institutions have provided the second-largest amount of total aid, at €35 billion, while Germany is the third-largest donor country after the United States and Britain.
Ms. Johansson emphasized that the Commission, which is traditionally stuffed with lawyers who draft regulations, was learning to be “operational,” for example transforming an existing mechanism to reimburse member states for their military contributions to Ukraine.
Brussels has committed to supporting the government in Kyiv with €1.5 billion a month for a year, Mr. Dombrovskis said, matching Washington’s contribution, with more to be added by multinational financial institutions.
But those figures will be trifling compared with the costs of reconstruction, estimated already at $1 trillion, let alone of eventual Ukrainian membership in the union. And there are already minority voices in the bloc that are anxious over the cost and its possible political impact.
As Sanna Marin, the prime minister of Finland, said at the Munich Security Conference last month, “I’m worried about the resilience of E.U. citizens. There are divisions. In many countries in Europe, people are frustrated with high inflation, high energy prices and say the war must end, it’s causing too much trouble.”
Politicians must be clear about their commitment to “support Ukraine as long as necessary,” she said. “But the next year will be difficult.”
And not just the next year, but many years to come. Having offered Ukraine a path to membership, the Europeans will be expected to take more responsibility for its reconstruction and institutional transformation from a relatively corrupt post-Soviet state into a European democracy clean enough to join the bloc.
“The Americans will say, ‘We took care of the war, now you take care of the reconstruction,’” said Camille Grand, a former senior NATO official now with the European Council on Foreign Relations. However exaggerated, that is the expectation in the American Congress, he noted.
The Group of 7 industrialized countries has set up an agency for reconstruction, but the Europeans will have to play a central role, both in financing it and in guiding Ukraine to revamp its institutions and reduce corruption.
As happened with the post-Soviet countries of Central and Eastern Europe, it is likely that Ukraine, with its history of corruption and oligarchic rule, will be able to join NATO before it qualifies to join the European Union.
Given that, said Stefan Kornelius, the foreign editor of the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, “the big issue will be how to give Ukraine political guarantees below membership level,” since the promise of E.U. membership “is the main hope that keeps them alive.”
The process of E.U. accession is the best guarantee that Ukraine will reform and will use reconstruction aid efficiently, said Radoslaw Sikorksi, a member of the European Parliament and former foreign and defense minister of Poland.
Ukraine is already receiving E.U. pre-accession funds, which will grow. “That will be hundreds of billions over a decade, and that will be Ukraine’s real Marshall Plan,” Mr. Sikorski said. And if security is assured, private investment will flow in, he said.
He is optimistic about Ukraine’s eventual future in Europe. As an exporter of carbon-free nuclear energy, a huge and fertile agricultural power and a source of adaptable computer technology, he said, “I think when the war finally ends, Ukraine can be rich.”
