Ukraine would join EU next year under draft peace plan

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Ukraine would join the EU next year under a proposal backed by Brussels in negotiations to end Russia’s war, a move that would transform the bloc’s approach to admitting new members.

EU accession by January 1 2027 is specified in the latest draft of a peace proposal that Ukrainian and European officials have presented to Washington, people briefed on the document’s contents told the Financial Times.

The plan is a revised version of proposals the Trump administration has made to end the war, a plan that Kyiv and its European allies had seen as tilted towards Russia.

The latest version comes as Donald Trump steps up pressure on Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to agree a peace deal by Christmas.

Officials supportive of Ukraine’s EU ambitions said the European Commission now understands it should not derail the peace process by opposing the rapid timeline for Kyiv’s membership.

But Ukraine has yet to formally complete even one of the EU’s gruelling 36 negotiating chapters and the schedule would upend the bloc’s “merit-based” approach to admitting new members.

The people briefed on the peace plan said it would force Brussels to rethink its entire enlargement process, including issues such as the timing of access to EU funds and voting rights.

US backing for the plan would also mean that Trump could push Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who has so far held up Ukraine’s accession process, to drop his veto.

“The issue of Ukraine’s future EU membership depends largely on the Europeans — and on the Americans too, in fact,” Zelenskyy told reporters in Kyiv on Thursday.

“If we agree a deal specifying when Ukraine becomes a member of the EU, the Americans, as a party to this agreement, will do everything so that our European path cannot be blocked by others in Europe over whom they have influence,” he added.

Ukraine applied for EU membership shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, and was granted the status of formal candidate four months later.

The EU’s enlargement commissioner Marta Kos told the FT last month that new member states could be put on “probation” for a few years and excluded from the bloc in case of democratic backsliding, under a proposal aimed at allaying concerns about the impact of new entrants.

Trump said on Thursday that US officials would attend a weekend meeting with European and Ukrainian officials to seek agreement on sticking points on the peace proposals.

He added that the deal had become “a little bit complicated, because you’re cutting up land in a certain way, it’s not the easiest thing, it’s like a complex real estate deal times a thousand”.

Russia has not indicated it will accept any plan that deviates from its maximalist demands for ending the war.

Yuri Ushakov, foreign policy adviser to President Vladimir Putin, said on Friday that Moscow had not yet seen the latest drafts of the US peace plan with input from Ukraine and its European allies.

“When we do see it, I sense that we’re not going to like a lot of it,” Ushakov told reporters.

Ushakov also rejected suggestions that the frontline Donbas region could become a “free economic zone”, an idea being pushed by the Trump administration, if Ukraine withdrew its troops from the territory it controls there.

Russia, which occupies about two-thirds of the Donbas and annexed the entire region in 2022, will not relinquish its territorial claims, he said, in comments quoted by Kommersant.

“This territory will come under full Russian control, by military means if not through negotiations,” he added. “Everything else depends on this alone. A ceasefire can only begin after Ukrainian troops withdraw.”