For the last few years former Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban was the most vocal opponent of Ukraine’s EU accession bid. However, behind the scenes several other EU members have also opposed allowing the agricultural superpower to join the European Union quickly.

Until now their leaders have kept their heads below the parapets, allowing Orban to take the flak, but now that he's been ousted more EU member states are standing up and making their voices heard.

The fact that many EU states are uncomfortable with allowing a country the size of Ukraine into the Union is not news. As IntelliNews reported, formal negotiations on the raft of accession clusters was supposed to be opened last June but that deadline came and went with nothing happening. Ukraine's EU ambassador at the time said publicly that several other EU states were not prepared to begin the discussions although she refused to name names.

The underlying issue is Ukraine's size, and particularly the size of its agricultural sector. Fully one third of the EU's budget goes on agricultural subsidies and under current rules Ukraine would be entitled to a massive €186bn of subsidies – as much money as Europe has granted it to support the war over the last four years – and that would be on an annual basis.

As IntelliNews has reported, Ukraine cannot join the EU until the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is reformed as the EU simply cannot afford to take Ukraine in under existing rules. The amount of money it's entitled to would also turn the EU budget on its head, making countries that are currently net beneficiaries from the budget, such as Poland and Hungary, into contributors. The main donors would also have to massively increase their contributions.

While countries like Poland have been vocally supportive of Ukraine in its war with Russia, at the same time Warsaw has unilaterally (and illegally) banned the import of Ukraine’s agricultural products after cheap Ukrainian grain crashed the Polish domestic grain market in 2023. More recently, despite Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Magyar's landslide victory in the recent general election that was supposed to bring Hungary back into the EU fold, amongst his first acts was to also ban the import of Ukraine’s agricultural imports for much the same reasons. The only supranational power Brussels has over the member states is to set trade policy. The member states are not allowed to ban Ukrainian imports under existing EU rules. That is a decision that is supposed to be taken in Brussels.

More generally, after war broke out in February 2022 the EU suspended its Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area (DCFTA) system of quotas and tariff exemptions to allow Ukraine to freely export goods to the EU as a form of indirect subsidy. However, that agreement was allowed to expire last June, reimposing the high tariffs and tiny duty free quotas on Ukrainian goods, taxing away vital export revenue earnings that had been used to subsidise the budget. Despite the best efforts of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to reintroduce exemptions, Ukraine’s trade deficit with the EU has mushroomed from €20bn a year two years ago to €60bn now that has to be financed somehow.

In anticipation of this need for more money von der Leyen has been trying to float an expansion to the EU budget contributions taking the total to €1.8 trillion, but that idea has already been met with fierce resistance particularly by the nine large countries that are net contributors to the budget led by Germany.

On the money front, the Brussels elite have on several occasions tried to pressure EU members to come up with money for Ukraine and been rebuffed at every turn. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas last year tried to jam through a €40bn allocation for funding Ukraine from the EU budget that was universally rejected. She then followed up with a cut-down €5bn allocation, but that was rejected out of hand too. Most recently, Nato General Secretary Mark Rutte tried to get member states to permanently commit to earmarking a mere 0.25% of their budgets to funding Ukraine. That got the kybosh too.

The agricultural policy problem has been mentioned but skirted around. There have been suggestions of a two speed entry which have been roundly rejected by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who is first and foremost interested in the EU article 42/7 security guarantee that is written into the founding treaty that would act in lieu of Nato’s Article 5. But to access that Ukraine would need to be a full member.

The contradiction between the economic objections, and the implicit security guarantee that comes with membership, is the Gordian knot that has not been cut, nor even debated in public.

The situation has been made even more complicated by the US brokered attempts to bring about a ceasefire agreement between Russia and Ukraine. At the Moscow meeting on December 3 between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US envoys, a 27-point peace plan (27PPP) was agreed that included an accelerated accession for Ukraine to join the EU by 2027 as US President Donald Trump looked for an off-ramp and a way to provide Ukraine with its badly needed security guarantees.

While the 27-point plan dealt with security issues, the Trump team ignored the economic implications of rushing Ukraine into the EU. It was resolutely, but politely, rejected by the European Commission elite which is insisting on a “normal” accession process, endless rounds of negotiations and will take at least a decade to complete – if then.

Turkey formally applied to join the European Economic Community, the precursor to the EU, in 1987 and was recognized as an official candidate country in 1999. It has been waiting in what Zelenskiy calls the “perennial EU waiting room” for 38 years. Likewise North Macedonia has been waiting 21 years, Montenegro for 16 years, Serbia for 14 years, and Albania for a dozen years. So if Ukraine really was granted accession to the EU next year it would have only waited a total of five years since it first applied.

Balkan block on accelerated Ukrainian accession

Now more EU member states are openly pushing back against efforts to fast-track Ukraine’s accession to the bloc, warning that enlargement momentum for Kyiv must not come at the expense of by-passing the far more patient and harder working long-standing candidates states that have been patiently waiting for years in the Western Balkans.

The debate, which has intensified ahead of key EU meetings in June, highlights growing divisions inside the union over how to balance geopolitical urgency with concerns about fairness, institutional capacity and the financial implications of expansion.

Austria and Greece have stood up in support of their near neighbours and argued that Ukraine should not be allowed to bypass Balkan candidates that have spent years navigating the accession process.

“The same rules and conditions must apply to all candidates. Here we always have this special focus on the countries of the West Balkans,” Austria’s Europe Minister Claudia Bauer told journalists during a ministerial meeting in Brussels on May 26.

“For some, there is an overtaking track, with which some can already have a foot in the European Union, while others have to work for decades on membership,” Bauer added as cited by The Kyiv Independent.

For all the hype about Ukraine’s “move towards Europe” and the good progress it has made in several of the accession clusters, there are several others where it has made little progress – particularly on the so-called “fundament cluster” that deals with things like corruption, rule of law and judicial reform. Earlier this year in its last EU accession progress report, Brussels downgraded Ukraine’s progress status to a B for failing to make enough changes to an already poor record.

The dispute comes as the EU attempts to maintain political support for Ukraine amid Russia’s continuing invasion while also confronting enlargement fatigue among several member states. Ukraine was granted candidate status in 2022 in what many European leaders framed as a geopolitical necessity following Moscow’s full-scale assault.

Kyiv was expected to begin opening formal EU accession bid negotiation clusters as early as June, potentially allowing it to overtake several Balkan states that have remained stalled despite years of negotiations. Kyiv has made a lot of progress, but in several clusters it has made no progress at all.

An EU diplomatic source told the Kyiv Independent that while Greece “supports the accession process of Ukraine and Moldova … it is essential that progress in their accession paths does not come at the expense of the Western Balkans, whose European perspective has been clearly recognised since the Thessaloniki Agenda of 2003.”

That 2003 summit formally committed the EU to eventual membership for the Western Balkans. Yet progress since then has been limited. Slovenia joined the bloc in 2004 and Croatia in 2013, but other regional candidates remain mired in disputes, democratic setbacks and institutional delays.

North Macedonia became a candidate country in 2005 but saw its path blocked for years by disputes first with Greece and later Bulgaria over language and identity issues. Serbia, also a candidate since 2005, has faced mounting criticism from Brussels over democratic backsliding and ties with Moscow. Bosnia & Herzegovina and Kosovo have yet to secure full candidate status.

Montenegro is currently regarded by EU officials as the most advanced accession candidate, while Albania cleared another negotiating milestone on May 26.

The widening debate over enlargement has also exposed the failure of Germany’s latest proposal for a form of “associate membership” designed to deepen integration for candidates before full accession.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz proposed the idea in a letter to EU institutional leaders on May 18, arguing for additional rights for candidate countries and a phased approach to membership. But the proposal boils down to “membership” without any of the benefits of membership – little more than the right to attend the meetings, but with no powers to vote or contribute to the running of the EU in any meaningful way. Zelenskiy rejected the idea out of hand.

“Merz’s proposal rightly recognizes the geopolitical necessity of enlargement, and Berlin’s pitch is a pragmatic attempt to reconcile this imperative with the reticence felt in many national capitals about special treatment for Ukraine,” Martin Leng of the Brussels Institute for Geopolitics told the Kyiv Independent.

Zelenskiy's counter argument is that Ukrainians are fighting and dying to protect European security, and that earns them a right to sit at the same table as other European countries – a right that Brussels remains extremely reluctant to grant. Either Ukraine is in the EU or it’s not.

As IntelliNews has reported, the disunity in the EU with the increasingly dysfunctional European economy is making Ukraine’s accession increasingly unattractive due to the massive costs to the EU budget of its accession. Now that Orban is gone, the fig leaf that was concealing these reservations has fallen away.

Faced with increasingly harsh economic realities from the boomerang effect of sanctions on Russia, the number of voices calling for reengagement with Russia are growing louder. French President Emmanuel Macron was the first to suggest that the EU needs to reengage with Moscow and since then half a dozen other top leaders have taken up the call – a movement that must be unsettling the Ukrainian leadership in Bankova.