Although countries like Lithuania don't want to admit it, Russia does hold a veto over Ukraine’s future, Henrik Larsen, a researcher at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, told LRT.lt in an interview.
Russia has a veto over Ukraine's membership because some countries are afraid of ending up in war with Russia," said Larsen who worked in Kyiv as a political adviser to the EU delegation to Ukraine from from 2014 to 2019.
The priority for Ukraine now is NATO accession, which would pave the way for membership in the European Union, said Larsen. “We should start with security first, so NATO integration must be the highest priority for Ukraine,” he said.
But this is where issues arise. According to Larsen, NATO has always been an alliance aimed at consolidating, rather than creating, a “geopolitical order”.
“West Germany was added 1955 at the same time as the Warsaw Pact was created – it was consolidation,” he said.
The same applied to the accession of the Baltic states and other European countries after the Cold War. “It was easy enough to enlarge the alliance and take them in because they were already part of the West, it was a low-hanging fruit,” Larsen said.
“When it comes to Ukraine, it's a fundamentally different question [...] because NATO would take actual steps to integrate a country that is at war and whose geopolitical status is unclassified because there is a country that contests it and that, of course, is Russia,” said Larsen.
“I know it's very popular in the East European countries, including Lithuania, to say Russia shouldn't have a veto over membership, but Moscow does have a veto to the extent that members are afraid of ending up at war with Russia,” he added.
Path to Brussels
On February 28 last year, Ukraine formally submitted its application for EU membership. At that time, President Volodymyr Zelensky asked Ukraine to be admitted to the EU immediately. On June 17 the same year, the European Commission recommended to the European Council to grant Ukraine candidate status.
Meanwhile, Brussels identified seven necessary reforms that Ukraine had to implement before proceeding, including reforming the Constitutional Court, ramping up the fight against corruption and money laundering, and implementing the so-called anti-oligarchy laws.
Some observers say that Ukraine has sped up reforms following Russia's full-scale invasion. However, Larsen claims that the progress has always been "one step forward, one step back".
"They put in place the institutions when the IMF told Ukraine to, but then in practice, they undermined those institutions,” said Larsen.
“You had high-level investigations ongoing, but they were undermined by lawmakers or they were undermined by the security service. Then the international community insisted that Ukraine implement a high anti-corruption court, which they did, but then they tried to make sure that there was control over the selection of judges and that was all the reason to suspect that they wanted to control the judges.”
“I’m not talking about the people – the elites, the political elites and the economic, financial elites are non-cooperative on the most important issues,” said Larsen. Even amid war, it “seems that the EU wants to reform Ukraine more than it does”.
“It was the same in 2014 –we have a conflict ongoing in the Donbas, so we cannot do reforms now, we cannot reform the SBU now because we have a war. And in 2016 there was a change of government, then there was one year where it was impossible to do reforms, and then elections were approaching,” he said.
“Let's say the war ended in a month, then the pressure would go off a little bit for Ukraine. How do you keep the pressure? And from the Western perspective and that you do through conditionality, keep off the conditionality and show the elites that there are sanctions, that are costs connected to non-compliance to the criteria that they have committed to.”
“The problem is that it's hard to keep the pressure because you want to help a country that is at war. You don't want to let that country go bankrupt,” said Larsen.
But, at the same time, “you have to raise the costs of engaging in high-level corruption”, he added.
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