President Zelensky has asked for Ukraine’s accession to the European Union to be approved with an emergency procedure, but it’s not that simple. Here because. The article of the Post
The treaty on the European Union establishes in article 42.7, a clause of mutual defense in the event of an armed attack on a member country, even if the terms with which it is expressed are less peremptory than those used for example by the article 5 of the NATO treaty.
Josep Borrell, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs, said that Ukraine’s entry into the European Union is not on the agenda. Borrell said that “Ukraine has a clear European perspective”, but that membership is something that will take many years in any case and that now the Union “must provide an answer for the next few hours, not for the next years”.
It generally takes several years of negotiations before a country is admitted to the Union. After the request by the country, the European Commission must decide whether to grant it the status of candidate country and only at that point do the negotiations conducted by the European Council begin. The last country to join was Croatia in 2013, which had submitted its application ten years earlier. There are also currently five other countries that have been granted candidate status to join the Union, but whose accession negotiations are still ongoing: Turkey, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia and Albania.
To join, a country must meet certain fundamental criteria, including compliance with Article 6, paragraph 1 of the Treaty on Union, according to which a country can enter the European Union only if it guarantees internally respect for freedom, democracy, human rights, fundamental freedoms and the rule of law. There are also some economic criteria to be respected, including the presence of a free and competitive market economy.
Among the European countries there are those who believe that this process should be speeded up exceptionally for Ukraine, so as to allow it to immediately enjoy all the guarantees provided for by entry into the Union. On Monday evening, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia signed a joint communiqué in which they called on the European Union to provide Ukraine with “maximum political support” and to immediately initiate the necessary procedure. to grant it the status of candidate country for accession to the Union.
Italy has not expressed a clear-cut position on the matter, but has limited itself to saying through its Italian Foreign Minister, Luigi Di Maio, that it believes “that the request for entry into the European Union is legitimate”. German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, on the other hand, said rather opposed an immediate entry of Ukraine into the Union. and something that can be done in a few months ».
(Extract from an article published by Il Post; here the full version)
