No expansion funds in EU budget: expert on Ukraine’s possible 2030 membership

She stated this in an interview with Yuriy Fizer, the host of the Espreso TV channel.

"Of course, Ukraine has a high-quality dialogue with the EU, but it seems to me that at this stage the European Union is making concessions to us. It seems that they feel guilty for the fact that we are at war, for the fact that we are being bombed. And perhaps they are not so demanding of us at this stage. And also our government officials understand that, in principle, it is possible to quickly jump into the European Union by 2030. We will do something, something we will not. That is, there is a dialogue, but how it will develop further is unknown," Akulenko noted.

According to the Executive Director of the Ukrainian Center for European Policy, it is not yet a fact that Ukraine will be accepted into the EU in 2030, as European experts point out that a separate budget is needed for expansion. There are no funds for expansion in the current EU budget, so this is unlikely to happen by 2030. When a new budget is approved, this could potentially happen by 2035 or at another time, depending on the circumstances.

"That is, now the dialogue is quite constructive. But what will happen when it comes directly to agricultural policy, competition policy - where interests will clash? I don't know what this conversation will be like. And in general, it is difficult to predict, because the stage we are going through now is quite easy. We are required to develop documents, roadmaps in sensitive areas such as human rights, anti-corruption, judicial reform, public administration, and democracy.

We cannot fully ensure democratic rights during the war. But in any case, this is not such a difficult task compared to what will happen next. In the next phase, we will have to ensure the implementation of everything that we wrote in these roadmaps.

For example, if we take only one task - judicial reform: it is necessary to select 2,500 new judges. And not all the institutions involved in this process are ready. Plus, there is a problem - this profession has become unpopular, and people are not going there.

The Executive Director of the Ukrainian Center for European Policy added that each point of the roadmap for joining the EU is a super-task that not only requires the political will of the top leadership, but also requires solving deep social problems that we have not solved since the 1990s.

"Therefore, I do not want to predict events. But I think that in the future it will be quite difficult for us to fulfill these tasks, since we are talking about sensitive political reforms. This requires not only will, but also the support of the people," Akulenko summarized.

• The Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration, Minister of Justice Olha Stefanishyna, assured that Ukraine will be a member of the European Union in 2030, adding that this decision has already been made.
• Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said that allocating funds for Ukraine is a "big mistake" by the EU. According to him, they should be directed to the European economy.