Four years after Ukraine applied for membership in the European Union, one conclusion is inescapable: The EU’s normal model for enlargement is not fit for purpose. The bloc’s accession process—rigid, technocratic, and slow—was designed for peacetime, not for a country fighting a war of survival and rebuilding a shattered economy. Even in peacetime, achieving agreement among the EU’s 27 members to admit a country as large and low-income as Ukraine would be an uphill climb.
Since the EU made Ukraine’s candidacy for membership official in June 2022, the country has made remarkable progress on reforms under extraordinary conditions. Yet the scale of adopting the EU’s so-called acquis—the vast set of administrative and legal standards to which members are obligated—while repelling Russia’s invasion would take many more years, even under ideal circumstances. Meanwhile, with both Russia and the United States exerting hostile pressure on Europe, Kyiv and Brussels lack the luxury of time.
Four years after Ukraine applied for membership in the European Union, one conclusion is inescapable: The EU’s normal model for enlargement is not fit for purpose. The bloc’s accession process—rigid, technocratic, and slow—was designed for peacetime, not for a country fighting a war of survival and rebuilding a shattered economy. Even in peacetime, achieving agreement among the EU’s 27 members to admit a country as large and low-income as Ukraine would be an uphill climb.
Since the EU made Ukraine’s candidacy for membership official in June 2022, the country has made remarkable progress on reforms under extraordinary conditions. Yet the scale of adopting the EU’s so-called acquis—the vast set of administrative and legal standards to which members are obligated—while repelling Russia’s invasion would take many more years, even under ideal circumstances. Meanwhile, with both Russia and the United States exerting hostile pressure on Europe, Kyiv and Brussels lack the luxury of time.
The EU has a deep interest in firmly anchoring Ukraine to the bloc even before this yearslong process ends. Ukraine has the strongest army in Europe, has become a leading developer of military technology, and has been successfully fending off a Russian invasion for years. With the Kremlin vowing to destroy the European security order and U.S. support for Europe’s defense no longer assured, you want Ukraine on your team.
The question, therefore, is not whether to accelerate Ukraine’s integration but how.
A growing debate in Kyiv and EU capitals centers on an idea called “membership lite”—a model that would bring Ukraine into the EU quickly but not completely, with phased rights and obligations tied to reform benchmarks. The fact that U.S.-brokered peace proposals include 2027 as a date for EU membership—an utterly unrealistic target given the current accession system—has also catalyzed creative thinking on Ukraine’s membership.
Many EU member states remain skeptical of creative solutions for Ukraine. They fear that bringing Ukraine into the bloc too soon—even with limited membership rights—would complicate the reforms needed to integrate the country, which risks becoming a spoiler state like Hungary. Budapest, in turn, is adamantly opposed to any steps that would bring Ukraine closer to membership. Another group fears that creating a limited membership status would open the door to a multispeed Europe—a two-tier EU that relegates Ukraine and possibly others to permanent second-class status.
However, membership lite is the only realistic way to reconcile political urgency with continued reforms. Properly designed, membership lite need not dilute enlargement; it could serve as a model for future enlargement rounds and lead to a more dynamic EU. In fact, the bloc already struggles with a growing divergence among its members on existential issues. A hushed debate over tiers of membership already exists and would go public sooner or later, even without the Ukrainian case making it more urgent.
The core principle should be simple: Any interim model for Ukraine must be a stepping stone to full membership, not a substitute for it. Otherwise, membership lite would easily turn into eternal limbo. And it must give Ukraine a voice on the EU’s common foreign and security policy issues, not make it a mere recipient of other members’ decisions.
Clarity about Ukraine’s final destination does not solve the problems of scale. Ukraine is a large, war-damaged economy whose eventual integration into the EU’s subsidy policies, including an estimated 10.3 billion euros annually in agricultural payments and around 4.8 billion euros in cohesion funding, could reshape financial redistribution across Europe. Enlargement at this magnitude cannot be treated as a routine technical exercise. Any serious proposal must recognize political and fiscal realities from the outset.
Ukraine’s path to full membership will invariably be bumpy and face stiff resistance from various interests—from French and Polish farmers to Russia-friendly governments in Hungary and Slovakia. But it is exactly these obstacles that make membership lite an attractive interim option.
There are three broad pathways for structuring a membership-lite arrangement.
The first is to upgrade Ukraine’s 2017 EU association agreement, a legally binding framework for close, privileged cooperation with the EU. This would deepen Ukraine’s access to the single market and selected EU policies while keeping it formally outside EU institutions. Regulatory alignment, consultation mechanisms, and expanded integration could mirror those of the European Economic Area, which tightly aligns nonmembers Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway with the EU.
For Brussels, this is the least disruptive and least painful option. It avoids institutional change, is negotiable in terms of scope, and can be delivered quickly. Financial support would continue primarily through the EU’s Ukraine Facility and macrofinancial assistance, rather than the much larger structural and cohesion funds reserved for members. For many governments, this is precisely its attraction: integration without immediate entry into the EU’s redistribution architecture.
For Ukraine, however, this is also the least ambitious and attractive scenario. Integration would deepen without guaranteeing a seat at the decision-making table or defining a clear trigger for full membership. The transformative political power of an expected accession—its ability to lock in reforms and signal irreversibility—would risk fading over time.
The second pathway is more politically consequential: negotiating and signing an accession treaty but deferring its entry into force until the EU agrees on a redistribution system to accommodate Ukraine, Kyiv completes its reforms, and all member states ratify membership.
Under this model of accession-in-waiting, Ukraine’s trajectory toward membership would be politically anchored and effectively irreversible. Full legal membership would take effect only after ratification, but accession negotiations would proceed within a structured framework. As negotiation chapters are provisionally closed, Ukraine’s participation in EU policymaking could deepen through structured consultation and observer status without voting rights.
For those member states that are more skeptical of Ukrainian membership, this sequencing offers reassurance. In several member states, notably France and Poland, farmers are wary of how Ukraine’s massive agricultural sector would shift markets and redirect subsidies. Net contributors to the EU budget, such as Germany and Sweden, question the scale of so-called cohesion transfers that fund infrastructure and other projects. Others fear veto politics and institutional imbalance in a bloc already struggling to function with 27 members.
To speak about Ukrainian membership without acknowledging these concerns would be dishonest. This is precisely why sequencing matters. Institutional change and full budgetary participation would occur only after ratification. Until then, the existing legal basis—the 2017 EU-Ukraine association agreement—would continue to govern cooperation. Financial support would remain centered on the Ukraine Facility, with access to the bloc’s structural funds following only on full entry and subject to transitional arrangements.
This model separates political commitment from formal implementation. It binds Ukraine to the EU while preserving member states’ constitutional prerogatives. Crucially, it sends a powerful signal that accession is not hypothetical but underway.
The third pathway—treaty change to create a second tier of EU membership—is the most ambitious but also the least realistic. It would involve revising the EU treaties to create a new form of differentiated membership, allowing earlier participation and potentially limited voting rights in areas of advanced alignment such as foreign policy, trade, and parts of the single market. In theory, this would institutionalize phased membership and give Ukraine a political voice earlier in the process. In practice, treaty revision would likely require referendums in several member states and reopen constitutional debates that many governments are unwilling to face.
EU hesitation is structural as much as political. The bloc is not merely a market or a geopolitical alliance; it is also a vast redistribution system that operates at continental scale. Accelerating Ukrainian membership would inevitably raise questions about agricultural subsidies, cohesion formulas, and long-settled budget ceilings. These are not technical adjustments but contentious decisions that shape and often embitter domestic politics across the EU.
Against that backdrop, the upgraded association model is the easiest for Brussels. Treaty change is the boldest option but politically improbable. The acceding state model sits in between—legally orthodox, politically meaningful, and strategically credible.
But whichever path is chosen, Ukraine should have a political voice. Once a new status is settled on, Ukrainian representatives should participate meaningfully in European Parliament committees and European Council working groups, even if they do not initially have voting rights. These are the arenas where rules are written on agriculture, energy, digital markets, and security—policies that will shape Ukraine’s future.
Without such participation, Ukraine risks becoming subject to rules drafted without its input, undermining both legitimacy and incentives for further reforms. It would also lead to a gradual decrease of support for EU accession among the Ukrainian public.
There is also urgency. If a new framework is to take effect by 2027—as currently discussed in Brussels and key capitals—drafting and consensus-building must begin this year in earnest. Enlargement is as much political choreography as legal engineering.
The real choice facing Kyiv and Brussels is not between fast and slow accession. It is between meaningful integration with political clarity on the one hand and symbolic shortcuts that breed disillusionment on the other.
The EU has already demonstrated that it can act geopolitically. Granting candidate status in 2022 was a strategic decision that reflected a new security reality. Russia’s invasion shattered old assumptions about the European order. Enlargement can no longer be treated as a purely technocratic exercise.
A well-designed membership-lite framework would acknowledge that Ukraine is already part of Europe’s security architecture. It would give Kyiv a phased but real political voice, reinforce reform incentives, and reassure cautious member states that integration remains conditional and reversible.
The challenge now is not whether Ukraine belongs in Europe. That question has been settled on the battlefield and among European leaders. The challenge is whether the EU can design a path that matches the historical and geopolitical imperative.
