Ukraine is expected to join the European Union by 2027 under a proposal aimed at ending Russia’s war, the Financial Times reported Friday.
Should the plan come to fruition, an accession to the bloc of a war-ravaged country would amount to a transformation in the European approach to admitting new members.
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The plan, it is understood, represents a much revised version of proposals issued earlier by the U.S. administration of President Donald Trump; the original plan was criticized by Kyiv and its European allies as tilted towards Russia.
The process of admission into the EU is normally highly complicated, usually taking years and requiring a unanimous vote from all 27 members of the bloc. Yet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Thursday that Washington has the leverage needed to convince leaders opposed to Ukraine’s membership to change their stance.
“The United States can take steps to unblock our path to the European Union,” he said, adding that “the U.S. president has various levers of influence and that this will have an effect on those who are currently blocking Ukraine.”
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Zelensky added that Washington wants only Ukraine, not Russia, to withdraw its troops from swathes of the eastern Donetsk region, where a demilitarized “free economic zone” would be installed as a buffer between the two armies.