According to a poll conducted by the Razumkov Center, 84% of the Ukrainians support Ukraine’s accession to the EU (as of the beginning of the year). Only 7% of the Ukrainians do not support joining the European Union. Such high support is explained, in particular, by the EU’s positive image in Ukraine (87% of citizens have a positive attitude towards the EU) and Russian aggression. However, experts warn that the level of support may decrease in the future as more and more people face practical European integration challenges. The changes that lie ahead will not always be popular. Some of them will require additional costs that will bring great benefits in the medium and long term, but may be painful in the short term. Under such circumstances, the responsible explanatory work of experts and journalists, designed to raise the general public’s awareness of European integration, becomes even more important. Now, according to many experts, there is a problem that population does not understand the scope and complexity of European integration tasks.
With the start of EU accession negotiations, the attention of European institutions to Ukraine’ implementation of reforms is increasing. “No one will care about the general temperature in the chamber. They will care about whether the norms we have adopted (because it’s a great achievement if we have voted) really work. As of 2022, our assessment of the implementation of the Agreement (the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement – Ed.) is perfect – it is 30%… We’ve counted 400 acts. How many does the Government Office count? Three thousand. I don’t know if there are so many, so now the negotiation process is like a tabula rasa for me. I don’t know much. I think a lot of experts don’t know either,” says Lyubov Akulenko, Executive Director of the Ukrainian Center for European Policy.
According to her, the best progress in the implementation of the Association Agreement has always been in the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area. This was because the process was driven by private business, which united to obtain better terms of trade with the European Union.
So far, the war has wreaked havoc in many sectors of the economy, where Ukraine has already made significant progress, for example, in technical regulation and trade in industrial goods. A large part of the reference base was stored in Kharkiv and was destroyed. The Russians caused significant damage to the energy and telecommunication sectors. Certain procedures that are part of the Agreement have ceased to operate. There is no state market supervision in the industrial sector, the ProZorro public procurement system is only partially operational, there is no state aid supervision, etc.
“We aren’t moving where complex and systemic changes are needed: creation of a higher court for intellectual property, customs reform, carbon emissions trading, introduction of safety standards in road transport,” says Lyubov Akulenko. The example of motor vehicles is particularly illustrative and is a certain surprise for citizens. As part of the Association Agreement, Ukraine was supposed to bring back technical inspection of cars. A few years ago, the Ministry of Internal Affairs tried to regain control over road safety in a peculiar way, the expert explains: “Having taken the requirements for professional drivers, they wanted to introduce them for ordinary drivers.” These are much stricter requirements for health and for vehicle inspection. “Then the public rejected this initiative, but the problem will have to be solved. And the question arises: how to communicate it? How to communicate unpopular things so that European integration does not become associated with corruption,” Akulenko emphasizes.
In addition, she says, almost all the acts adopted in Ukraine to implement the Association Agreement deviated from European requirements due to various groups of influence in the Parliament, which otherwise would not have voted at all. At that time, the EU didn’t notice it, because it didn’t promise us anything. Now, during the screening, all this will be revealed.
Another big problem is weak institutional capacity, and, therefore, an imperfect bureaucratic work of public authorities, which did not make compliance tables for each regulatory act adopted in a particular area. “Europeans complain that they ask our government officials to provide these compliance tables, but there are none. The problem may be the lack of an adequate number of specialists. No one has done this before, we didn’t take it seriously,” says the executive director of the Ukrainian Center for European Policy.
Unlike our neighbors, who joined the EU in 2004 and 2007 and moved in separate, narrow sectors, Ukraine will negotiate accession based on so-called clusters, which unite entire spheres of life. The first such negotiation cluster, “Fundamentals,” includes political reforms, anti-corruption, judicial reform, democratic institutions, law enforcement agencies, human rights, media reform, public procurement and statistics. The process is complicated by the fact that there is no European acquis (law and practice, “accumulated legislation” – Ed.) in many of these areas, as it is a political tradition that is formed specifically in each country. The EU approaches these issues in a general way, while other clusters provide a specific list of legislation. “When you have general wording, you don’t know what you are doing… You can say about each reform that something has not been done yet. This is the trap that the Western Balkans fell into,” Lyubov Akulenko explains.
According to her, another major problem of the state is the inability to conduct economic modeling, which shows why a particular norm is expensive, and we cannot implement it now. Without this, Ukraine will not be able to have convincing arguments during the negotiations.
Besides, an obstacle on the way to the EU is the unreformed state administration system. In 2023, the National Civil Service Agency conducted a survey of state bodies in order to understand their institutional capacity in terms of European integration. “12 spheres of the negotiation process have been identified, which, have no institutions that will be responsible for this sector, whereas 27 have several bodies. What does this imply? If we do not assign policies to institutions, we will enter the negotiation process in a complete mess. There will be areas where no one is responsible, and there will be areas with several institutions. And if several institutions are responsible, it means that no one is responsible,” Akulenko warns. The expert draws attention to a catastrophic outflow of personnel even from public organizations. At the same time, even the experts who have experience working with the Association Agreement do not have such experience in the context of the negotiation process.
A separate problem of European integration is its communication. Society has already encountered manipulations about the increase in fuel prices, which are tied to the EU requirements. Chair of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Ukraine’s Integration into the EU Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze says that the Association Agreement does provide for an increase in the excise duty on fuel, but she emphasizes that the time for its implementation has not come yet. “The state should start communicating these processes now. The essence of the changes and the expected outcome should be explained to people. However, the government decided to do the opposite. First, it started European integration from the end. Instead of focusing on the first cluster of negotiations, dedicated to democracy and the rule of law, the servants of the people are raising excise taxes on fuel. This norm is indeed provided for in the Association Agreement, but the deadline for its implementation has not come yet. This is a pure initiative of the government disguised as European integration,” she wrote on her Facebook page and added: “If all this stuff and nonsense generated by Bankova continues to be labeled as European integration, we will soon receive negative support for joining the EU”.
In her turn, Lyubov Akulenko reminds of the obligation to abandon diesel-powered vehicles, which can also cause dissatisfaction among people. “It is necessary to explain that they have to pay for their security. But the longer the process lasts, the harder it will be to explain it to people. This is evidenced by the example of the Western Balkans, where support for joining the EU has currently fallen below 50%,” she says.
Meanwhile, the head of innovative projects of the National Network of Hyperlocal Media Rayon.in.ua Natalia Pakhaichuk notes that the European integration topic is promising and popular; the main thing is to be able to correctly present it to the audience. She gives an example from the environmental protection sphere, in particular, the creation of nature reserves, when people have to change their centuries-old way of life. “Imagine: people went to their river all their lives and fished, hunted, mowed grass, grazed cattle there without control… And suddenly, they cannot do any of this. You have no idea what riots we had to cover, which happened between the population and the administrations of national parks, for example, Nobel (the Nobel National Nature Park – EDIT.) in the Rivne region. Creation of a hydrological reserve is another example of misunderstanding among the local population living along the Styr River in the south of the Volyn region. These are areas that are part of the Emerald Network territory (a network of territories of special environmental importance in Europe and Africa – EDIT.) requiring additional protection. We undertook obligation to create these protected areas long ago, and they are of enormous global importance. People don’t know about it,” Pakhaichuk says. She emphasizes that a very big problem is the lack of communication between local governments and communities about how the new status of the territories can be used for their development, for example, in terms of recreation and tourism.
The journalist says that currently, materials about business and new trade opportunities with the EU are very popular, which inspire people to start or improve their own business. In addition, many opportunities open up in the field of education, public diplomacy, obtaining grants, etc. According to her, this is a very fertile field for journalists. European integration topics make it possible to attract new readers and even new financial opportunities for editorial offices through receiving European money for development.
Natalia Pakhaichuk is also convinced that it is already necessary to tell Ukrainians about how European societies are organized, what internal processes are taking place there, how they affect aid to Ukraine and our refugees in the EU. She notes that sooner or later Ukrainian citizens will become voters in the elections to the European Parliament. Therefore, it is important to carry out educational work so that Ukrainians do not elect their MEPs just for fun.”This is a long-term prospect, but it is necessary to educate a voter,” Natalia Pakhaichuk emphasizes.