EU Urges Ukraine to Accelerate Rule-of-Law Reforms in Accession Roadmap

The European Commission is calling on Ukraine to urgently accelerate rule-of-law reforms, making progress in early 2027 to provisionally complete parts of its EU membership negotiations.

The new roadmap, obtained by POLITICO, urges Kyiv to “urgently and significantly step up the pace of the rule of law reforms.”

Key requirements must be met in the first half of 2027 before negotiations in individual policy areas can be provisionally closed.

The roadmap, part of the Commission’s enlargement package due to be presented Wednesday, sets out seven negotiating chapters Ukraine could provisionally complete next year.

It offers no date for membership.

The timetable reflects the demands of aligning Ukrainian laws and institutions with EU standards while the government and parliament are managing a war.

Reform Conditions

EU accession negotiations cover 35 chapters, spanning subjects from food safety and agriculture to judicial independence and foreign policy.

Completing individual chapters would still leave Ukraine needing an accession treaty and the required approvals and ratification.

The Commission identifies education and culture as a chapter that could be provisionally closed in the first half of 2027.

Six others could follow in the second half: intellectual property, employment and social policy, industrial policy, research, external relations, and foreign and security policy.

Brussels has created a dedicated task force to assist Ukrainian authorities with reforms that require substantial consultation, resources and implementation time.

The roadmap remains open to revision. Faster reforms could allow negotiations in additional areas to be completed sooner.

Moldova Could Advance Faster

The proposed timetable points to an increasingly uneven pace between Ukraine and Moldova, whose accession bids have previously moved together.

Moldova could complete negotiations in more than 20 policy areas in 2027, compared with Ukraine’s seven.

Both countries received candidate status in June 2022 and began membership negotiations in June 2024. The differing targets raise the prospect of their bids proceeding separately.

For Ukraine, the Commission also wants negotiations opened before the end of 2026 in two outstanding groups of chapters: the green agenda and sustainable connectivity, and resources, agriculture and cohesion.

It considers Kyiv to have fulfilled the conditions for opening both groups and is urging the accession conference to act by year-end.

Further progress would depend on reforms and decisions by member countries.

War adds unresolved questions over security, territory and mutual assistance obligations.

Although EU rules do not explicitly bar a country at war from joining, a peace settlement would not remove Ukraine’s reform requirements.