Germany and France have called for Ukraine to be granted “symbolic” benefits in a pre-accession phase that excludes EU farming subsidies and voting rights, falling short of Kyiv’s hopes of fast-track membership following a potential peace deal with Russia. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy seeks EU membership as one of the key benefits from any peace deal, arguing for his country to join the bloc as early as 2027. But the EU’s biggest members have balked at the European Commission’s proposals to rip up the slow and bureaucratic accession process in order to give Kyiv rapid benefits. German and French proposals laid out in separate documents seen by the FT pour cold water on any hopes in Kyiv that the war-torn country could be granted privileged status in its bid to join the bloc. Germany is pushing for “associate membership” status — where Kyiv would sit in ministerial and leaders’ meetings but have no voting rights and “no automatic application” of the shared EU budget.
France dubs such a halfway membership “integrated state status”, under which access to the “Common Agricultural Policy and European funding such as cohesion policy . . . should be postponed to a post-accession phase”.
