The European Commission has initiated the process of assessing Ukrainian legislative reforms to align them with EU laws, which marks the start of Ukraine’s formal membership negotiations, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on January 25.

Ukraine’s government has a huge amount of work ahead of it to bring its legislation and institutions into line with those of the EU. By one estimate it needs to pass 17,000 new laws, of which several thousand are “urgently needed.” 

At the same time, it needs to beef up its institutions, particularly those dealing with the fight against corruption. As bne IntelliNews reported, Ukraine still has a corruption problem, although Zelenskiy has already made real in-roads into tackling the issue. The judicial system also needs a complete overhaul.

No one is pretending that Ukraine will join the EU soon. The President of the European Council, Charles Michel, predicted that Ukraine's accession to the EU will be “difficult”, and most observers believe it could take a decade to complete. The European Council signed off on starting formal accession negotiations with Ukraine and Moldova on December 14.

The EU will also have to reform itself before it can accept Ukraine on account of the latter's large population and powerful agricultural sector. Ukraine can’t join the EU until the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is reformed. Ukraine would be entitled to a massive €186bn in subsidies if it joined under current rules. Just the agricultural subsidies for Ukraine under the CAP would cost €16bn a year, according to bne IntelliNews estimates, half as much again as the €11bn a year that Poland currently receives from the EU as grants for everything, including both agriculture and infrastructure subsidies.

While the work of new post-Maidan bodies like National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) and the Anti-Corruption Court (ACC) have caught most of the headlines, the nuts and bolts work of modernising the legislative basis is just as important, if not more so.

EU membership means the free movement of goods, capital and labour, so all the laws covering the functioning of the economy have to align with the entire body of EU laws, known as the acquis communautaire, and Ukraine’s legislative base remains largely Soviet.

The acquis is divided into 35 segments, all of which must be thoroughly adopted and ratified by the Commission. Croatia, the most recent member to join the EU, completed this process in a decade.

Zelenskiy tweeted that the comprehensive effort needed to ensure Ukrainian laws conform to EU standards, along with the formation of Ukraine's delegation and the crafting of their negotiation stance, is a major challenge. The Ukrainian government's team will assemble in the spring at an inaugural intergovernmental conference to start this work. A Ukrainian delegation, led by Deputy Prime Minister Olha Stefanishyna, responsible for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration, met with EU officials in Brussels to initiate the screening phase on January 25.

An agreement was reached regarding the structure and timetable for the screening discussions, beginning with deliberations on fundamental rights and reforms. Following the meeting, Stefanishyna said that the initial segment of negotiations might span one to two months, Ukrinform reports. The outcomes of the European Council's meeting in March are expected to catalyse the subsequent stages of the negotiation process.

Stefanishyna expressed optimism that Ukraine's execution of the European Commission's four key recommendations would hasten the formulation of the negotiation framework for the initial round of talks.

Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, on January 19, disclosed that Ukraine had met three of the four additional recommendations put forth by the European Commission in November 2023. These accomplishments include expanding the workforce of NABU, reactivating the asset declaration registry and amending laws pertaining to national minorities.

The fourth recommendation, legislation concerning lobbying, has been preliminarily sanctioned by the parliament.