Ukraine had hoped to see all six negotiating clusters opened this month, but EU governments agreed only to advance the sixth, covering foreign and security policy.
Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Taras Kachka, who oversees EU and NATO integration, welcomed the step as "really good news", while acknowledging that expectations had run high amid a broader sense of momentum. He said all member states remain engaged and that no serious obstacles have emerged, and voiced hope that talks on the four remaining clusters — covering the internal market, competitiveness, climate and agriculture — could begin as soon as this week.
EU Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos said the Commission considers the groundwork complete for opening the remaining clusters swiftly, though the pace now rests with the Irish EU presidency and member states.
"Even if we have to wait a bit, the technical work continues", she said, adding that she expects Ukraine's accession process to gain further momentum once a new government takes shape in Kyiv.
That reshuffle, Kachka insisted, will not slow the accession drive, which he described as an "absolute priority" for Ukraine's government. He predicted the incoming team would prove more effective at tackling both urgent needs, including preparing cities' resilience for winter, and the structural reforms accession demands.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced Sunday that Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko would step aside to take on "an important area of cooperation with a key partner"; she formally resigned Monday after a year in office, with Ukrainian media pointing to Naftogaz chief Serhiy Koretskyi as her likely successor.
Moldova, too, saw its sixth cluster open Tuesday, covering external relations, defense cooperation and resilience against hybrid threats.
Warsaw stakes out its red lines
The accession framework groups negotiating chapters into six thematic clusters, a structure adopted in a 2020 overhaul of the process; opening any cluster requires unanimous member-state approval. Ukraine and Moldova both applied for membership within days of Russia's February 2022 invasion and were granted candidate status that June.
Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Ignacy Niemczycki characterized Tuesday's cluster as relatively low-friction, but said the broader exercise of opening clusters exists precisely so states can lay out concrete demands — pointing to Poland's insistence that Ukrainian farmers meet EU standards as one example.
Such demands, he said, matter not just to the candidate country but to everyone else at the negotiating table. He noted Poland itself operated under transitional restrictions on labor mobility after joining the bloc, and made clear Warsaw intends to safeguard the sectors it views as most sensitive going forward.
Niemczycki also pointed to a joint statement issued by Poland, Germany and France at a recent Weimar Triangle meeting, which stressed that enlargement must remain a merit-based process grounded equally in European values such as the rule of law. He linked that language to recent friction over Ukraine's commemoration of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), blamed for the Volhynia massacre, saying he was glad the concern had been voiced plainly and not solely by Poland.
While calling it firmly in Poland's strategic interest to eventually see Ukraine join the EU "at the right time and after the right negotiations", Niemczycki cautioned that any such outcome would ultimately require the backing of Polish society.
"We must reach an understanding on these difficult issues so that both sides want to keep working together", he said. "I don't think we should keep escalating this process [...] The past cannot be allowed to stand in the way of building a shared future".
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Source: PAP