By Olha Chepil | 2024-04-22

KYIV -- Ukraine is continuing to make progress toward European Union (EU) accession, and is now set to standardize its laws with those of the EU.

The EU last December agreed to start accession talks with Ukraine.

Ukraine will now need to align with the EU's body of rules and procedures, known as the acquis communautaire or acquis for short.

In March, the commission issued draft negotiating frameworks for Ukraine and Moldova to the European Council.

"The objective of the negotiations is that Ukraine and Moldova adopt the EU acquis in its entirety and ensure its full implementation and enforcement," the EU said in a statement at the time.

The framework for negotiations is broken down into 35 major areas, or chapters, Ihor Petrenko, a political scientist and director and founder of the Kyiv-based think tank United Ukraine, told Kontur.

These categories address free trade, intellectual property law, competition policy, energy, taxation, judiciary, education and culture, financial oversight and many other topics.

During this year, Ukraine will need to develop the action plan for these changes, Petrenko said.

This homework will be graded stringently: all the EU countries need to approve Ukraine's progress in each area. To gain EU membership, Ukraine must consider a total of about 28,000 EU rules and standards.

According to a preliminary assessment, more than 23,000 standards do not need to be implemented, 1,625 legal acts have already been checked and 2,739 acts are subject to future implementation.

"It's important to recognize that the main implementation efforts are happening while a war is going on in the country," Petrenko said.

"Ukraine has already done a lot of work. Ukrainian society and the government are working in unison to succeed in this area."

The pace of the negotiations between Brussels and Kyiv will depend on how quickly Ukraine implements all the required reforms.

The final decision on Ukraine's membership in the EU must be approved through votes by all the member states and through a decision by the parliaments of all 27 EU countries.

Ukraine is a special case

Although the negotiations are a historic event for Ukraine, they do not mean that the country will immediately become a full-fledged member of the EU.

The talks could take years. This is the case with Türkiye, which has been mired in the process for nearly 20 years.

But there is another important factor at play in Ukraine, experts say.

"There's no precedent in the EU of accepting members that are at war, and especially ones that are fighting a much stronger state and with an outlook that no one can predict. So the main issue will be, how and under what circumstances will the war end?" Mykola Kapitonenko, a professor at the Institute of International Relations of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, told Kontur.

He believes that Ukraine won't be able to become a full-fledged member of the EU until after the war. At the moment it is unclear when the war will end, he said.

The EU has set 2030 as an approximate deadline for its enlargement, which is expected to entail the addition of up to nine countries, including Ukraine.

"The decision on EU accession won't happen tomorrow, the day after that or even in a year. The outlook is closer to 2027 or 2030 -- between three and five years," said Petrenko

"That's if we keep up an intense pace. We need to grasp that not everything depends on us."