EU to make recommendation on Ukraine’s candidate status for joining bloc next week, says von der Leyen

The EU executive will next week make a recommendation on whether Ukraine should be given candidate status to join the bloc, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, has said.

Such a recommendation would be a preliminary step on a long road to full membership, and Ukraine would need the backing of all 27 EU governments before candidate status was given. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has been pushing for rapid admission into the EU to provide the country with more security since the Russian invasion.

“We want to support Ukraine in its European journey,” Ms von der Leyen said in a joint press conference with Mr Zelenskiy on a surprise visit to Kyiv on Saturday. Heavy fighting is continuing in the eastern Donbas region, where Russia has been making incremental gains.

“The discussions today will enable us to finalise the assessment by the end of next week,” von der Leyen added, saying that the Ukrainian authorities had “done a lot” towards a candidacy, but that there was “still need for reforms to be implemented, to fight corruption for example”.

Speaking alongside Ms von der Leyen, Mr Zelenskiy said that the EU’s decision on Ukraine would “determine” the future of Europe.

“It is now being determined what the future of a united Europe will be, and whether there will be a future at all. A positive response from the European Union to the Ukrainian application will signify a positive answer to the question of whether the European project has a future at all,” he said.

“All of Europe is a target for Russia, and Ukraine is just the first stage in this aggression,” he added.

Since Russia’s invasion on the February 24th, senior EU officials, including Ms von der Leyen, who was making her second trip to Kyiv since the start of the war, have spoken in favour of putting Ukraine on a speedy path to the EU accession by granting it candidate status.

And while a number of EU states including Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland have backed these calls, there are still doubts in Berlin and Paris and other western European capitals over whether it is possible to begin the formal process already.

‘Parallel European community’

On Thursday, Bloomberg, citing a diplomatic note, reported that Denmark believed Kyiv did not sufficiently fulfil the criteria to apply to join the EU, saying that the country “would need to fundamentally improve its legislative and institutional framework”.

Last month, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, said it would be “decades” for Ukraine to be accepted into the EU, suggesting Kyiv could join a “parallel European community” while it awaited a decision.

EU leaders are expected to further discuss Ukraine’s application during a summit on the issue later month, alongside the applications of Moldova and Georgia.

Kyiv sees the chance to join the EU as both a symbolic and strategic way of addressing its geopolitical vulnerability after Zelenskiy earlier acknowledged that Ukraine will not become a Nato member.

Recent surveys suggest that support for EU membership among Ukrainians has soared to 91% since the start of the invasion.

Russia, which has used Ukraine’s earlier push to join Nato to justify its invasion has recently declared that it saw Ukrainian membership of the European Union to be equivalent to Ukraine joining Nato.

Food

Earlier, Mr Zelenskiy insisted on Saturday that Ukraine would prevail in its almost four-month-long war with Russia that has become focused on a grinding artillery slugging match over an eastern Ukrainian city.

Russian forces have been trying to seize Severodonetsk in an advance in the east, turning it into one of the bloodiest battles so far. Neither side has secured a knock-out blow in fighting that has pounded swathes of the city into rubble.

Ukraine has appealed for swifter deliveries of heavy weapons from the West to turn the tide of the war with Russian forces — which it says have at least 10 times more artillery pieces than Ukrainian forces. Yet, even when outgunned, Ukraine’s army has proved more resilient than expected in early phases of fighting.

“We are definitely going to prevail in this war that Russia has started,” Mr Zelenskiy told a conference in Singapore by video-link. “It is on the battlefields in Ukraine that the future rules of this world are being decided.”

The conflict between the neighbours — two of the world’s biggest grain exporters — has reverberated well beyond Ukraine’s borders.

Since Russia invaded global food prices have shot up. The United Nations said on Friday that as many as 19 million more people around the world could face chronic hunger in the next year because of the reduced exports of wheat and other food commodities.

Global energy prices have also surged as the West has ratcheted up sanctions on Russia, a top oil and gas exporter.

“If due to Russian blockades, we are unable to export our foodstuffs, which is so sorely missing in global markets, the world will face an acute and severe food crisis and famine — famine in many countries of Asia and Africa,” Mr Zelenskiy said.

Turkey has tried to secure a deal so Ukraine can resume shipments from its Black Sea ports, which accounted for 98 per cent of its cereal and oilseed exports before the war. But Moscow says Kyiv must clear the ports of mines and Ukraine says it needs security guarantees so it is not left exposed.

“As Ukrainian forces use the last of their stocks of Soviet-era weapon systems and munitions, they will require consistent western support to transition to new supply chains of ammunition and key artillery systems,” the Institute for the Study of War said in a report on Friday, adding that effective artillery would be vital in the “largely static fighting” in the east.

Britain’s defence ministry said on Saturday that Russian forces around Severodonetsk had not made advances into the south of the urban centre as of Friday and said the city was the scene of “intense street to street fighting”.

Severodonestsk lies in Ukraine’s eastern province of Luhansk, over which Russia wants complete control. It has demanded Ukraine cede it to separatists along with neighbouring Donetsk. The two provinces make up the Donbas region, where Moscow has backed a revolt by separatist proxies since 2014.

Ukraine’s Luhansk governor Serhiy Gaidai said Russian forces controlled most of the city, after a grinding to-and-fro of advances and retreats, but Ukraine still controlled the city’s Azot chemical plant where hundreds of civilians are sheltering.

He denied a separatist claim that 300 to 400 Ukrainian fighters were trapped there.

“Our forces are holding an industrial zone of Severodonetsk and are destroying the Russian army in the town,” Mr Gaidai said on the Telegram app.

The battle over Severodonetsk and its destruction recall weeks of bombardment of the southern port city of Mariupol. It was reduced to ruins before Russian forces took control of the city last month, with the last Ukrainian defenders surrendering from their redoubt in the sprawling Azovstal steel plant.

The mayor of Mariupol said on Friday that sanitation systems were broken and corpses were rotting in the streets.

The office of Ukraine’s prosecutor general said on Telegram at least 287 children had died in the war so far, after it said it had learned about the deaths of 24 more children in Mariupol.

Moscow has denied targeting civilians, but both sides say they have inflicted mass casualties on each other’s forces.

Agency reporters have not been able to independently verify the battlefield reports in the conflict.

Russia calls its actions a “special military operation” to disarm and “denazify” Ukraine, while Kyiv and its allies call it an unprovoked war of aggression to capture territory. — Reuters/Guardian