Policy brief by Leonid Litra, Senior Fellow at the New Europe Center available in English here.
‘We are convinced that not granting Ukraine candidate status would be a serious blow to Ukraine, a potentially devastating signal to Putin, and a grave European mistake at a time of enormous military, economic and political pressure on Ukraine. We are also convinced that granting candidate status would not be enough’. This is a key idea of the brief prepared by Leo Litra, a Senior Research Fellow, New Europe Center.
He proposed ‘a formula, a win-win approach, which is addressing EU concerns without lowering the ambition of Ukraine’. The analyst underlined: ‘The most realist scenario
is that EU offers candidate status in June (EU Summit) and to open accession talks shortly after this, while also defining a concrete interim goal that is to be reached through these talks before full accession’.
The essence of the formula is the following: ‘We suggest to create a new version of European Economic Community that offer access to the EU Single Market and to the Four Freedoms for all European democracies that meet the necessary conditions. That would allow opening accession talks on ALL chapters in three- step accession process: first candidate status for Ukraine, second, entry in the EU Single Market and benefiting of the four freedoms, which is the core of the EU – through the creation of European Economic Community. The third step would then be full membership. This is how Austria, Finland and Sweden navigated the EU accession through European Economic Area (EEA) between 1990 and 1995 and succeeded.’
The concept of this brief was developed in cooperation with the European Stability Initiative (ESI).
