Albanian PM: Ukraine's EU membership is a lie

Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama, in an interview with Die Welt, called the EU accession promises made to Ukraine a lie, because in his view, under the current conditions and following the usual procedure, the country will never be admitted. According to him, everyone knows this, and European officials even admit in private that the standard accession process is unsuitable for handling the situation of a country at war. This is admittedly Rama's own judgment on the viability of the procedure, but it is uncomfortable precisely because he says out loud what official statements usually avoid saying.

The situation is well illustrated by Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos's statement as well: in her view, the accession date of January 1, 2027, set by Zelensky, is incompatible with a merit-based admission process. Although the war has returned enlargement to the EU's strategic priorities, the political target date cannot override legal requirements. Brussels has thus rejected this deadline while still leaving the possibility of accession open; the question is whether there is a viable path to that open door, or whether we merely point to it from time to time so that Kyiv can see that it is still standing in the same place.

Rama therefore proposes a fundamental overhaul of the enlargement method: strict performance requirements, combined with rapid, gradual integration into the work of EU institutions. Ukraine and the other candidate countries could take part in working processes and consultative bodies even before achieving full membership, so that integration would produce tangible results. This would make sense, because demanding that a war-torn country maintain the kind of institutional functioning designed for peacetime, while the aggressor is systematically destroying the conditions for it, is a rather peculiar bureaucratic feat. And it creates a convenient situation for Moscow, which, by continuing the war, can also obstruct Ukraine's integration into Europe.

The Albanian prime minister's other uncomfortably accurate remark concerns the right of veto. In his view, it is unacceptable for a single member state to be able to paralyze the decision-making of the entire Union, while Europe has to compete with China, the United States and India. As a small country, Albania itself could, upon eventual membership, enjoy the bargaining position created by the unanimity requirement, yet Rama is nonetheless pushing for its abolition. It seems that Orbán's veto terrorism has also taught others how easily a tool designed to protect national interests can turn into a blackmail weapon aimed at the entire community — and we need to think about this even when the weakening of smaller states' ability to assert their interests rightly worries us. Because you simply can't build a strong Europe this damn way, with a government friendly to Moscow able to block a joint decision at any time and then bill the others separately for the cost of getting around it. What suits those Russia-sucking bastards perfectly is for the strength of twenty-seven countries to remain twenty-seven players haggling with and waiting on each other, so that by the time a common position is reached, Putin has long since carried out the very thing we should have responded to.

What's more, the stakes are far greater than how successfully Europe competes with the American or Chinese economy. It is also about the Russian leadership finally understanding that it cannot shift its neighbors' borders at will, nor reshape European security according to its own military appetite. This would require coordinated arms production, sustained financing, a consistent sanctions policy and credible military deterrence. Europe has the economic and technological strength needed for this; it simply cannot turn it into joint action.

However painful it may be to admit, there is a great deal of truth in the Albanian prime minister's words. Edi Rama speaks from a country that endured one of the harshest, most militarized versions of communist dictatorship, where for decades citizens were fed the notion that everyone outside the walls of the besieged fortress was an enemy. From this historical experience, it is perhaps easier to recognize when the gap between political rhetoric and reality has grown so wide that no amount of diplomatic courtesy can bridge it. Rama's words hit home because they name both sides of this paralysis at once: we promise Ukraine a future for which the current procedure offers barely any usable path, while at the same time we preserve a decision-making system in which joint action can be paralyzed again and again.

Ugar