Shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the beleaguered country formally applied to join the European Union. The application was a fulfillment of a long-held desire, going back years. In 2014, President Viktor Yanukovych was forced out via likely unconstitutional means over a desire to stay more aligned with Russia rather than the European Union. His successor, President Petro Poroshenko, once declared that he hoped to see Ukraine ensconced in the EU by 2020. That obviously did not happen. But the current administration, under President Volodymyr Zelensky, is optimistically hoping to enter around 2030.
The problem is that this is all easier said than done. Entering the European Union is a fraught process requiring each applying state to match a series of benchmarks. But even when they do so, they still need the approval of every member state. And here is where things get tricky for Ukraine.
Ukraine, and much of Eastern Europe, has borders which are, in a civilisational context, relatively “new.” What belongs to one country today belonged to another as recently as the last century. Look at a map of Poland today and a map of Poland from 100 years ago, for example, and you could be excused for thinking you are looking at two different countries.
Many of these Eastern European states entered the European Union at once, in 2004 and 2007. Those years saw the Baltics, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria all join. Because they were all going in at once, past disputes were put aside, as everyone was getting a piece of the pie.
But now that Ukraine is essentially going it alone, those member states which are already in the EU have no reason to look beyond disputes which affect them. And because of the rocky history of the region – and the sometimes haphazardly-drawn borders – there are disputes aplenty.
Poland has already thrown the first major roadblock in Ukraine’s way. In World War II, Ukrainian militias killed upwards of 100,000 Poles in a campaign of what we would today call ethnic cleansing. And Poland is demanding that Ukraine recognize the massacre and take action to exhume the bodies of those killed. The demands angered Zelensky, who reportedly held a fiery meeting with Poland’s defence Minister Radosław Sikorski in which he told the Polish minister that Poland was seeking to stall Ukraine’s entry into the Union. But this was, on its face, a bit ironic, given that it was Sikorski who, last December, said he wanted to see Ukraine in the Union by 2030 with its “internationally recognized borders.”
This is bad news for Ukraine, as Poland has been incredibly supportive of them ever since Russia began the war in 2014, and this – the exhumation of bodies, or at least the attempt to do so – should have been fairly easy. There are much harder issues which will come up between Poland and Ukraine. One, the transport of cheap Ukrainian grain into Poland, already became a diplomatic flashpoint last year; while it was temporarily worked out, Poland will certainly return to it before Ukraine enters the EU.
One of the reasons why the massacre is such an issue is because those who carried it out, and those who thought likewise, are seen as freedom fighters in Ukraine. Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian nationalist who allied himself with the Nazis against the Soviets, has streets named for him across Ukraine (there is an ongoing legal battle over whether a street can bear his name in Kyiv). But Bandera also killed Poles, including in the massacre at the heart of this dispute. But to recognize the massacre as a massacre would mean inherently rejecting Bandera – something many Ukrainians cannot yet do.
The other, less quiet, problem is the aforementioned land disputes. Poland has, at least publicly, acquiesced to the idea of it not getting Lviv (once Polish Lvov) back, much as it has accepted not getting back Lithuania’s Vilnius, which was once dominated by Poles (Lithuanians only became a majority there in the 1960s).
But it is not just Poland with whom Ukraine will have to mend fences. Take Hungary. Like Slovakia and Poland, they too blocked Ukrainian grain from flooding into their borders. But it is those borders which are also proving to be an intractable issue. Hungary has long had problems with Ukraine’s treatment of Hungarian-speakers. In 2017, Ukraine passed a law mandating all students learn in Ukrainian after a certain age; while this was meant to combat Russian-speakers, it also blocked the sizable Hungarian minority (which became a part of Ukraine due to Hungary being forced to give up much of its territory after World War One) from learning in their own language. It also had a negative effect on Bulgarians and Romanians. This, and other perceived offenses, outraged Hungary.
But their differences go deeper than that. Those redrawn borders, the result of the Treaty of Trianon, still anger Hungary today. “Our Homeland,” a small right-wing Hungarian party, has pledged to seek the historical region of Transcarpathia (today’s Ukrainian Zakarpattia oblast). While Viktor Orbán has not made any verbal claims to seek such an outcome, his wearing of a scarf which depicted “Greater Hungary” (modern Hungary plus the lands lost in Trianon) did raise eyebrows in Kyiv and other south-eastern European states like Romania and Slovakia.
Ukraine has issues with Slovakia, too. The country’s prime minister, Robert Fico, demanded that Ukraine remove “fascist” elements from its military; he was likely referring to the Azov Battalion, which does indeed use Nazi imagery. Fico has also recently outright stated he would never allow Ukraine to join NATO. There is little reason to assume he would play nice over their entry into the European Union.
But Slovakia, along with Hungary and Poland, are already in the Union. They will not scuffle too much, and neither can make significant demands of the others. But Ukraine is outside of the EU. To get in, it will have to face historic headwinds – which will probably blow them past their goal of entering by 2030.
Big apes, but not small humans, come under protection of Spanish law