Ukraine’s EU talks have started. Why this enlargement will be judged harder than any before it. Iana Okhrimenko

“What’s up with the economy?” is a weekly podcast in Ukrainian by the Centre for Economic Strategy in collaboration with Hromadske Radio and supported by PrivatBank.

Hosts Anhelina Zavadetska and Maksym Samoiliuk speak with experts, entrepreneurs, analysts, and government officials about the current state of Ukraine’s economy.

On 15 June, Ukraine opened its first negotiating cluster with the European Union. In the new episode, we discuss what this cluster covers, why Brussels is likely to apply tougher standards to Ukraine than to any previous candidate, the role corruption really plays in this story, and where Ukraine is already ahead of expectations.

The guest of the episode is Iana Okhrimenko, Senior Economist at CES.

We have summarised the main points of the conversation:

What the “Fundamentals” cluster covers, and why it opens first

Okhrimenko explains that, narrowly defined, the cluster includes two economic criteria: a functioning market economy and the ability to withstand competitive pressure in the EU single market. However, it stretches far wider — into the judiciary, public procurement, and anti-corruption policy.

“These are the fundamental principles of accession. If we’re talking strictly about the economic criteria, there are two of them. But there are many other areas too — corruption, the rule of law, the courts, public procurement.”

Under the EU’s revised enlargement methodology, this cluster opens first and closes last by design. According to Okhrimenko, the logic is symbolic as much as procedural: nothing else is considered settled until the foundations are. The remaining five clusters are expected to open in July; whether they can also be closed on an ambitious timeline, she says, is the real open question.

Why Brussels will hold Ukraine to a tougher standard than Poland or Bulgaria

Okhrimenko sees little chance Ukraine repeats the 4–7-year path that took Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania from opening talks to full membership. Three structural shifts work against a faster timeline — and none of them are really about Ukraine’s own readiness.

The first is institutional memory. Bulgaria and Romania were admitted despite known weaknesses in their judiciaries, propped up by a post-accession verification mechanism that, as Okhrimenko puts it, never fully delivered.

“They were let in on credit,” she notes — and with Hungary, Bulgaria, and Slovakia having since backslided on rule-of-law standards as full members, Brussels has little appetite to repeat that mistake. That, in her reading, is why the Fundamentals cluster now closes last rather than first: to rule out a country becoming a formal member while its core institutions still fall short.

The second reason is the sheer expansion of the EU acquis since the last big wave of enlargement. Most of today’s green-transition rules and digital legislation did not exist when Poland or Bulgaria negotiated. Economic regulation is another example of this shift. Before the EU sovereign debt crisis, debt and deficit rules existed, but their enforcement architecture was much weaker, and much of today’s financial-services regulation had not yet been developed. Ukraine, by contrast, will negotiate under a much denser framework, including strengthened fiscal surveillance, the macroeconomic imbalance procedure, and a far more developed body of financial regulation from day one.

Is Ukrainian corruption really the obstacle Europe says it is?

Pressed on corruption — consistently cited in Europe as a reason for caution — Okhrimenko offers a structural explanation rather than a cultural one.

“In my view, the phenomenon of Ukrainian corruption is simply an evolutionary mechanism society uses to adapt to the absence of quality legislation.”

Where formal institutions are transparent and predictable, she argues, people follow them; where they aren’t, corruption fills the gap as a survival mechanism — one that recedes as legislation converges with EU norms, not a fixed trait of national character.

“I don’t like it when corruption gets treated as some kind of national trait — Germans are hardworking, Italians are cheerful, Ukrainians are corrupt. That’s just not how it works.”

She also points to a double standard in how corruption is measured: EU enlargement reports lean on the perception-based Corruption Perceptions Index, while member states themselves are tracked against harder, measurable indicators that, in her view, could just as easily apply to Ukraine. Once a narrative repeats for long enough, she notes, it becomes disproportionately hard to dislodge — even as Ukraine’s own anti-corruption track record improves. On her account, the past year brought unprecedented progress on transparency safeguards for EU-linked public investment, including new entry conditions for projects and the consolidation of the DREAM digital monitoring system.

Where Ukraine is already ahead — and where it’s seriously behind

According to Okhrimenko, digitalisation and energy are the chapters where Ukraine outperforms expectations, largely because wartime necessity forced fast convergence with EU standards — though she flags weak data-protection safeguards as a gap even there.

The clearest stalled win, in her view, is joining the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA), which would cut cross-border transfer fees to near-domestic EU rates.

“It’s not some political issue at all — it’s purely technical work,” she says, pointing to Moldova as proof it can be done quickly once the requirements are met.

The blocker is domestic anti-money-laundering legislation that still hasn’t passed. On the other end, Okhrimenko names labour mobility and social policy as the areas furthest behind, citing an outdated Labour Code never updated to match a decade of EU reforms — alongside agriculture, which she expects to be the hardest chapter overall given how politically charged the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy is, and how willing Polish farmers have historically been to protest any change.

“If there’s a reason to protest, Polish farmers will probably take it,” she notes.

Beyond full membership: why we bet on “internal market first”

Okhrimenko walks through several alternatives short of full membership now circulating in Brussels — a Franco-German proposal for tiered “associate” status, and a French version floated without even a clear path to full membership later. Neither, she says, is a credible route to full membership. 

She is more drawn to two other models: staged accession, developed for the Western Balkans, which trades incremental rewards for completed reforms instead of an all-or-nothing outcome; and the Austrian-Swedish-Finnish route of joining the internal market — minus agriculture and the customs union — once Ukraine fully transposes the legislation of Cluster 2.

“If we fully implement the second cluster’s legislation, we should get the green light to join the internal market,” Okhrimenko says, adding that this path offers business far more predictability than waiting for full accession.

The underlying bet, in her view, is that commerce can pull politics along: deeper integration before formal membership gives EU businesses a direct stake in Ukraine’s accession, much as it did in former EEA members.

“What’s Up With the Economy?” is a podcast by the Centre for Economic Strategy in cooperation with Hromadske Radio, supported by PrivatBank.