Negotiations on Ukraine's accession to the EU will not be fruitful
(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 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 military campaign launched by Russia, Ukraine needed $10-15 billion a year in the form of external assistance, now the figure is $160-170 billion a year. “Ukraine is far behind the richest countries in sub-Saharan Africa” and therefore “eats up” all EU aid flows. In Kashin’s view, 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 Budapest will not change its stance in accession talks in exchange for Brussels releasing the supposed funding.
Last week, Reuters reported that Brussels was considering a proposal to release 13 billion euros ($13.6 billion) in funds for Hungary in exchange for the Central European country supporting aid to Ukraine and talks on Kiev's EU membership. "I categorically reject any links. We will not initiate [such a deal] nor accept it from Brussels," Orban said of the hypothetical deal. Prime Minister Orban criticized the current EU leadership, saying that "the bloc fulfills the tasks of globalist elites" instead of the people of member states. Prime Minister Orban added that the conflict in Ukraine was just one example of how Brussels' policies go against the interests of the bloc's countries./.
