But that timeline is now at risk after Hungary on Tuesday opposed sending a letter to the European Council and Commission, on behalf of the bloc\u2019s 27 members, that spells out the joint position of EU capitals. Hungary was the only country to oppose the move, which requires unanimous approval from all 27 and will be discussed again next week, the diplomats said.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for the Hungarian Permanent Representation in Brussels did not reply to a request for comment.<\/p>\n
The move is in keeping with Prime Minister P\u00e9ter Magyar\u2019s cool stance toward Ukraine\u2019s membership.<\/p>\n
While Magyar did not oppose opening a first cluster for Ukraine, his government insisted on deleting the words \u201cas soon as possible\u201d regarding Kyiv\u2019s EU membership from the written conclusions of a gathering of EU leaders in Brussels last week, according to one of the diplomats.<\/p>\n
Both diplomats were granted anonymity because they are not allowed to speak on the record about closed-door procedures.<\/p>\n
During a news conference at the end of the European Council meeting last week, Magyar doubled down, telling reporters: \u201cThere are six clusters in total, and we don\u2019t think opening them all at once is a good idea \u2014 partly because the ink on the first one isn\u2019t even dry yet, and partly because it would send the wrong message to the countries of the Western Balkans \u2014 Serbia, Albania, Montenegro, and North Macedonia \u2014 [which] have spent years working toward EU membership.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"But that timeline is now at risk after Hungary on Tuesday opposed sending a letter to the European…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8832,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[2513,4392,738,52,55,2982,4393,4394,67,2558,3119,26,740,72],"class_list":["post-8831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-albania","tag-balkans","tag-enlargement","tag-hungary","tag-moldova","tag-montenegro","tag-neighborhood","tag-north-macedonia","tag-peter-magyar","tag-serbia","tag-taras-kachka","tag-ukraine","tag-viktor-orban","tag-war-in-ukraine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8831"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8831\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}