Negotiations on Ukraine's EU accession will not yield results
(Baonghean.vn) - Political scientist Vasily Kashin said that the EU's negotiations with Ukraine will drag on indefinitely and will most likely not lead to any results.
“Even if we imagine that someone really wants to see Ukraine as an EU member and does not manipulate Ukraine’s expectations, this is still a super difficult task, it requires many years of work, enormous efforts, huge costs, and in the end - an extremely dubious result,” said expert Kashin, Director of the Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies at the Higher School of Economics of the National Research University, in an interview with the Zvezda TV channel.
As Mr. Kashin noted, if before the Russian military campaign, Ukraine needed $10-15 billion a year in external assistance, now it needs $160-170 billion a year. “Ukraine is far behind the richest countries in sub-Saharan Africa” and will therefore “eat up” all EU aid flows. In Kashin’s opinion, if you take into account the problem of corruption, due to the inability to monitor the effectiveness of spending these funds, Ukraine’s prospects for EU membership seem even more uncertain.
Sharing the same view, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban believes that Ukraine is still far from becoming an EU member and that Budapest will not change its stance in accession talks in exchange for Brussels releasing a hypothetical source of funding.
Last week, Reuters reported that Brussels was considering a proposal to release a 13 billion euro ($13.6 billion) fund for Hungary in exchange for the Central European country supporting aid to Ukraine and talks on Kiev's membership in the EU. "I categorically reject any connection. We will not initiate [such a deal] nor accept it from Brussels," Orban said of the hypothetical deal. Orban criticized the current EU leadership, saying that "the bloc fulfills the tasks of globalist elites" rather than the people of member states. The conflict in Ukraine is just one example of how Brussels' policies go against the interests of the bloc's countries, he added.
