European leaders have approved the opening of accession negotiations for Ukraine, European Council President Charles Michel announced Thursday.
The announcement comes at a critical time for Ukraine as its counteroffensive against Russia’s invasion stalled in recent weeks and $60 billion in aid from the U.S. is stuck in Congress.
While accession talks are likely to continue on for many years, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the news was “a victory of Ukraine … a victory that motivates, inspires and strengthens.” This was a historic moment for Ukraine, which has made its aspirations to join the EU known for many years.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán who had vehemently opposed the opening of accession talks for Ukraine, criticized the agreement reached without him by European leaders.
Orbán left the room when the decision on enlargement was taken, according to a national official and a EU diplomat who were both briefed on the discussion. This allowed for an unanimous decision from the European Council, which another EU official, who like the others was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the circumstances, said was completely legal under EU law.
“If someone is absent, they are absent. Legally it is totally valid,” added the official.
EU leaders will still meet during the summit to debate the €50 billion aid package to Ukraine. The summit is supposed to end on Friday but could last longer if leaders cannot come to an agreement by then.
European leaders were quick to celebrate the announcement.
“Historic day! Against all odds, we achieved a decision to open accession negotiations with #Ukraine and #Moldova,” Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas said.
Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo similarly said the decision was “historic” and “an important message of hope for these countries and their citizens.”
Leaders also approved the opening of accession negotiations for Moldova.
Moldovan President Maia Sandu welcomed the agreement, and said her country was “committed to the hard work needed to become an EU member.”
The much-awaited decision came surprisingly early, as Orbán had been threatening to use his veto to block the opening of accession talks in the days leading up to the summit.
The European Council’s decision follows a recommendation from the European Commission, which had advised to open accession negotiations in November.
Ukraine applied to join the EU in February 2022 — just days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of the country — and was granted candidate status in June.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán regularly pushes the EU to the cliff edge, but diplomats are panicking that his hostility to Ukraine is now about to finally kick the bloc over the precipice.
A brewing political crisis is set to boil over at a summit in mid-December when EU leaders are due to make a historic decision on bringing Ukraine into the 27-nation club and seal a key budget deal to throw a €50 billion lifeline to Kyiv’s flailing war economy. The meeting is supposed to signal to the U.S. that, despite the political distraction over the war in the Middle East, the EU is fully committed to Ukraine.
Those hopes look likely to be knocked off course by Orbán, a strongman who cultivates close ties with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and who is widely seen as having undermined democracy and rule of law at home. He is demanding the whole political and financial process should be put on ice until leaders agree to a wholesale review of EU support for Kyiv.
That gives EU leaders a massive headache. Although Hungary only represents 2 percent of the EU population, Orbán can hold the bloc hostage as it is supposed to act unanimously on big strategic decisions — and they hardly come bigger than initiating accession talks with Ukraine.
It’s far from the first time Orbán is throwing a spanner in the works of the EU’s sausage making machine. Indeed, he has been the most vocal opponent of sanctions against Russia ever since Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. But this time is different, EU diplomats and officials said.
“We are heading toward a major crisis,” one EU official said, who was granted anonymity to discuss confidential deliberations. One senior EU diplomat warned this could become “one of the most difficult European Councils.”
Orbán is playing the long game, said Péter Krekó, director of the Budapest-based Political Capital Institute. “Orbán has been waiting for Europe to realize that it’s not possible to win the war in Ukraine and that Kyiv has to make concessions. (…) Now, he feels his time is coming because Ukraine fatigue is going up in public opinion in many EU countries.”
In theory, there is a nuclear option on the table — one that would cut Hungary out of EU political decisions — but countries feel that emergency cord is toxic because of the precedent it would deliver on EU disunity and fragmentation. For now, the European leaders seem to be taking to their usual approach of fawning courtship of the EU’s bad boy to try to coax out a compromise.
European Council President Charles Michel, whose job it is to forge deals between the 27 leaders, is leading the softly-softly pursuit of a compromise. He travelled to Budapest earlier this week for an intense two hour discussion with Orbán. While the meeting did not reach an immediate break-through, it was useful to understand Orbán’s concerns, another EU official said.
It’s all about the money
Some EU diplomats interpret Orbán’s threats as a strategy to raise pressure on the European Commission, which is holding back €13 billion in EU funds for Hungary over concerns that the country is falling foul of the EU’s standards on rule of law.
Others however said it’s a mistake not to look beyond the immediate transactional tactics. Orbán has long been questioning the EU’s Ukraine strategy, but was largely ignored or portrayed as a puppet for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“We were watching it, amazed, but maybe we didn’t take enough time to actually listen,” a second senior EU diplomat acknowledged.
Some EU diplomats interpret Orbán’s threats as a strategy to raise pressure on the European Commission | Peter Kohalmi/AFP via Getty Images
Increasingly, the leader of the Fidesz party has been isolated in Brussels. Previous peacemakers such as former German Chancellor Angela Merkel or other Orbán-whisperers from the so-called Visegrád Four — Slovakia, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic — are no longer there. The expected comeback of Donald Tusk for Poland, a pro-EU and anti-Russian leader, will only heighten Orbán’s status as the lonely, defiant hold-out.
“There is no one left to talk sense into Orbán,” a third EU official said. “He is now undermining the EU from within.”
Guns on the table
As frustration grows, the EU is weighing how to deal with the Hungarian threats.
In theory, Brussels could come out with the big guns and use the EU’s so-called Article 7 procedure against Hungary, used when a country is considered at risk of breaching the bloc’s core values. The procedure is sometimes called the EU’s “nuclear option” as it provides for the most serious political sanction the bloc can impose on a member country — the suspension of the right to vote on EU decisions.
Because of those far-reaching consequences, there is reticence to roll out this option against Hungary. When EU leaders brought in “diplomatic sanctions” against Austria in 2000, the day after the party of Austrian far-right leader Jörg Haider entered the coalition, it backfired. Many Austrians were angry at EU interference and anti-EU sentiment soared. Sanctions were lifted later that year.
There is now a widespread feeling in Brussels that Article 7 could create a similar backlash in Budapest, fueling populism and in the longer term potentially even trigger a snowball effect leading to an unintended Hungarian exit of the bloc.
Given those fears, diplomats are doubling down on ways to work around a Hungarian veto.
One option is to split the €50 billion from 2024 to 2027 for Ukraine into smaller amounts on an annual basis, three officials said. But critics warn this option would fall short in the goal of offering greater predictability and certainty to Ukraine’s struggling public finances. It would also send a bad political signal: if the EU can’t make a long term commitment to Ukraine, then how can it ask the U.S. to do the same?
The same dilemma goes for the EU’s planned military aid. EU countries could use bilateral deals rather than EU structures such as the European Peace Facility to send military aid to Ukraine — effectively freezing out Budapest. Yet this would mean that the EU as such plays no role in providing weapons, an admission of impotence that is hard to swallow and hurts EU unity toward Kyiv.
It’s “obvious” that concern is growing about EU political support for Ukraine, Lithuania’s Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis told POLITICO. “At first it’s Hungary, now, more countries are doubtful whether there’s a path.”
Asked about Hungary’s objections, Ruslan Stefanchuk, the chairman of Ukraine’s parliament, told POLITICO: “Ukraine is going to the European Union and Ukraine has followed all the recommendations (…) I want to make sure that all member states respect the progress that Ukraine has demonstrated.”
The long game
That leaves one other default option, and it’s an EU classic: kicking the can down the road and pushing key decisions on Ukraine policy to early next year. Apart from Hungary, Berlin is also struggling with the consequences of Germany’s top court wiping out €60 billion from a climate fund — thus creating a huge hole in its budget.
Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán, center, during a summit in Brussels | Nicolas Maeterlinck/Belga via AFP/Getty Images
Such a delay would also lead to stories about fractured EU unity, said another EU diplomat. But “in the real world it wouldn’t be a problem because the Ukraine budget is fine until March 2024.”
But for others, buying time is tricky. Europe is heading to the polls in June next year, which makes sensitive decision-making harder. “Getting closer to the elections will not make things easier,” the second EU official said, while stressing that fast decisions are key for Ukraine. “For Zelenskyy, this is existential to keep up morale on the battlefield.”
Both, like another official quoted in this story, were granted anonymity to speak freely.
Increasingly, Brussels is also worried about Orbán’s long game.
There is a constant stream of attacks coming from Budapest against Brussels, on issues ranging from democratic deficit to culture wars over the EU’s migration policy. The latest example is an aggressive euroskeptic advertising campaign featuring posters targeting European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen herself. The posters show von der Leyen next to Alexander Soros, the son of George Soros, chair of the Open Society Foundations, with the line: “Let’s not dance to the tune they whistle!”
“Nobody feels comfortable given what’s going on in Hungary,” Budget Commissioner Johannes Hahn told reporters on Thursday. “It’s very difficult to digest given the campaign that he’s leading against the EU and against the president. When he’s asking his people many things, he’s not asking if the Union is so much worse than USSR why is he not leaving?”
But Orbán seems more eager to hijack the EU from within rather than jump ship, as the U.K. did. Increasingly, he also feels the wind is blowing his way after the recent election results in Slovakia and the Netherlands, said Krekó, where the winners are on the same page as him when it comes to Ukraine, migration or gender issues.
Hungary’s prime minister was quick to congratulate the winner of the Dutch election, the vehemently anti-EU Geert Wilders, saying that “the winds of change are here.”
“Orbán plays the long game,” the third EU official said. “With Wilders, one or two more far-right leaders in Europe and a potential return of Trump he could soon be less isolated than we all think.”
Gregorio Sorgi, Nicolas Camut, Stuart Lau and Jakob Hanke Vela contributed reporting.
CORRECTION: This story has been amended to correct a quote on Ukraine’s budget.
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Barbara Moens, Nicholas Vinocur and Jacopo Barigazzi
The EU’s united front on Israel’s war with Hamas is already showing its first cracks.
On Monday, EU Enlargement Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi announced the Commission would put €691 million in aid to the Palestinian Authority under review, with all payments immediately suspended. Hours later, with that move causing concern across the bloc, the EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, said the Commission “will not suspend the due payments” as “punishing all the Palestinian people” would have “damaged the EU interests in the region and would have only further emboldened terrorists.”
Before the U-turn, there were alreadypublic disagreements within the Commission over whether to freeze aid to the Palestinian Authority. Meanwhile, Tuesday’s EU foreign affairs ministers meeting risks leading to an internal showdown, EU diplomats and officials warned, given the disagreements between EU countries on the conflict.
“Israel-Palestine is one of the most divisive issues in the EU,” said one EU official, who was granted anonymity to speak publicly. “The intra-European divisions on this conflict are almost as old as the conflict itself.”
The most immediate row is over the EU’s financial aid flows to the region.
As EU foreign ministers prepared to meet Tuesday, a growing row brewed over the Commission’s announcement to cut Palestinian aid.
Várhelyi’s announcement of a funding halt coincided with Israel’s defense minister ordering a “complete siege” of Gaza, cutting off water, food and energy supplies to more than 2 million people in the Hamas-controlled territory.
Following Várhelyi’s announcement, the Commission struggled to clarify which parts of Palestinian aid would be cut. EU Commissioner Janez Lenarčič, who is responsible for crisis management, said while he condemned the Hamas attack, EU humanitarian aid to Palestinians in need will “continue as long as needed.”
The splits within the Commission — Várhelyi, the Hungarian commissioner, previously blocked the disbursement of funding over the content of Palestinian schoolbooks, while Lenarčič hails from Slovenia, which is traditionally one of the more pro-Palestinian EU countries — presaged the debate between member states due to play out Tuesday.
By late Monday, the Commission was publicly backtracking on Várhelyi’s announcement, saying in a press release that it was “launching an urgent review of the EU’s assistance for Palestine.”
“The objective of this review is to ensure that no EU funding indirectly enables any terrorist organization to carry out attacks against Israel. The Commission will equally review if, in light of the changed circumstances on the ground, its support programmes to the Palestinian population and the Palestinian Authority need to be adjusted.
“The Commission will carry out this review as soon as possible with Member States … in the meantime, as there were no payments foreseen, there will be no suspension of payments.”
Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn was the first senior European official to publicly break rank, criticizing Várhelyi’s announcement. “The decision on this is up to the member states and it is only on Tuesday that the foreign ministers from the 27 EU countries will meet to discuss it,” Asselborn told Luxembourgish media.
The European Commission on Monday publicly disagreed over whether to freeze aid to the Palestinian Authority | Johanna Geron/AFP via Getty Images
According to Spain’s ABC, which quoted unnamed officials, Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares “has had a telephone conversation with the commissioner” in which he conveyed, in regard to the suspension of aid, “his disagreement with the decision, which the foreign ministers were not aware of.”
At a technical meeting between EU countries on Monday, several diplomats asked questions about the legal grounds for Várhelyi’s decision, just as Asselborn did publicly, one EU diplomat said. “Várhelyi might have been a bit too eager not to waste a good crisis,” the diplomat said.
Turning on the lights
Even before the announcement of cuts to Palestinian aid, there was internal division within the EU about how the bloc should respond.
Borrell issued a statement Sunday on behalf of the EU, condemning “in the strongest possible terms the multiple and indiscriminate attacks across Israel by Hamas.”
But several countries — including Ireland, Luxembourg and Denmark — sought a reference to de-escalation in the joint text, which was opposed by others, including Austria, three officials who were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive matters told POLITICO. For the more pro-Israeli countries within the bloc, a call for de-escalation could be seen as ascribing equivalence to both sides, diplomats said.
Borrell issued a statement Sunday on behalf of the EU, condemning “in the strongest possible terms the multiple and indiscriminate attacks across Israel by Hamas.” | John Thys/AFP via Getty Images
Some diplomats also pointed out the different reactions of the EU institutions over the weekend. The Berlaymont, the headquarters of the European Commission, was illuminated in the colors of the Israeli flag. The building of the European Council, on the other hand, was lit up without visualizing that flag — a sign of a more nuanced approach from member states.
Another EU diplomat said they wouldn’t have made the same choice to display the Israeli flag on the Berlaymont and said the image “surprised” them given the sensitivities.
The conflicts within Israel and the Palestinian territories have long been a divisive issue for the EU, even though itsupports a two-state solution, with the bloc struggling to find consensus and, therefore, forced to manage a range of views among its 27 member countries. France, the Nordic states, Belgium and Ireland traditionally support a position that is seen by some other countries as too pro-Palestinian.
Another official from a member state expressed concerns at the wisdom of the Commission’s stance. “Of course, we all condemn the heinous attack on Israel, but Israelis are likely to launch their own offensive in Gaza over the next week, and have already announced a siege, so a broad statement with more nuance would have been better,” said the EU official.
With the world’s spotlight on Israel, EU countries will have to walk a fine line at the foreign affairs ministers’ meeting. Some capitals want to make clear to the European Commission that it can not go too fast too quickly. At the same time, those arguing for some reflection are wary of being cast as pro-Hamas.
Another EU diplomat said it’s one thing to have a foreign policyin the EU’s immediate neighborhood, it’s another to see whether “we can indeed have a common foreign security policy on the global stage.”
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Saturday slammed a report from the European Parliament on the country’s EU accession talks and threatened to “part ways” from the bloc.
Questioned by journalists about the report, Erdoğan said that “the EU is trying to break away from Turkey,” according to Turkish state media Anadolu Agency.
“We will make our evaluations against these developments and if necessary, we can part ways with the EU,” Erdoğan said ahead of a trip to attend the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
The European Parliament report, adopted this week in Strasbourg, said talks over Ankara’s accession to the bloc should not be resumed in current circumstances, voicing the EU’s concerns about human rights and rule of law violations. Instead, European lawmakers advocated finding “a parallel and realistic framework” for relations between Brussels and Ankara.
“We have recently seen a renewed interest from the Turkish government in reviving the EU accession process,” said the lead lawmaker on the file, Spanish Socialist Nacho Sánchez Amor, upon adoption of the report on Wednesday.
“This will not happen because of geopolitical bargaining, but only when the Turkish authorities show real interest in stopping the continuing backsliding in fundamental freedoms and rule of law in the country,” Sánchez Amor said.
Tukrey-EU ties have deteriorated amid Erdoğan’s increasingly autocratic behavior following a failed coup attempt in 2016.
Talks over Turkey’s accession to the bloc have stagnated for years. In July, however, EU foreign ministers agreed to move forward with relations.
PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron missed the boat on Ukraine.
Faced with Russia’s military build-up and subsequent invasion of its neighbor, Macron dove down a rabbit hole of fruitless talks with Vladimir Putin. At a moment when he could have taken the helm as the leader of Europe, he miscalculated and failed to seize the political initiative.
Instead, in Europe, it was the likes of the Euroskeptic British premier Boris Johnson who took the lead on rallying support for President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and providing arms. While Johnson was a hero in Kyiv, Macron infuriated the Ukrainians by insisting that Putin should not be humiliated and suggesting that Moscow deserved “security guarantees.” Ukraine, the French president said, was “in all likelihood decades” from joining the EU.
But a sea change has taken place in Paris since. The French president has now picked up the mantle as one of Ukraine’s strongest allies, pledging support “until victory,” seeking to lead on issues such as NATO membership and military support, just as Europeans fret that U.S. support is flagging, with increasing concerns that a potential Donald Trump presidency could deprive Ukraine of its most important ally.
“Macron was fixated by the idea of playing a mediation role between Putin and Zelenskyy. And this meant he was extremely prudent when it came to arms deliveries,” François Heisbourg, senior adviser to the International Institute for Strategic Studies said. But early this year “Macron finally understood that Putin was taking him for a ride, and wasn’t interested in negotiating,” he added.
French diplomats, however, won’t go further than to say the president “has clarified” his position on Ukraine.
Where the French have broken most significantly from their long-standing position is on the issue of EU enlargement. Beyond the war in Ukraine, France is now seeking new allies, wants to lead on enlargement and is war-gaming how an enlarged EU would work. There is frenetic diplomatic activity behind closed doors in Paris and beyond. The French government is leading consultations and testing red lines ahead of a big speech Macron is set to give early next year, setting out his ambitions for enlargement that has already been dubbed “Sorbonne bis,” according to several French officials, in a reference to a policy-setting Europe speech Macron gave at the Sorbonne University in 2017.
Change of heart
For months following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, the French president appeared to zig-zag on how to deal with Russia. Putin was a personality he had struggled to read. In a 2019 interview with the Economist, Macron mapped out a picture of how he reckoned a logical Putin would ultimately come to the realization that he would need to form “a partnership project with Europe.” It was a generous vision of Putin’s mindset that underestimated the gnawing historical primacy of the Ukraine question.
In December last year, Macron’s U-turn started to become more evident. He gave a forceful speech saying he would support Ukraine “until victory.” Only a couple of weeks earlier he had stated that the West should give Russia “security guarantees.”
In May this year, Macron hinted at a new awareness, telling Central and Eastern Europeans in Bratislava that he believed France “had sometimes wasted opportunities,” and failed to listen to their memories of Soviet brutality.
That same month, France gave the U.K. permission to export Franco-British Storm Shadow cruise missiles to Ukraine, which was followed by deliveries of French long-range SCALP-EG cruise missiles. According to Heisbourg, it was a decisive signal, because France was doing what the U.S. has so far refused to do.
But Macron’s previous diplomatic serenades toward Putin have left their mark. According to a French diplomat, Macron “shot himself in the foot” in making too many overtures to Moscow, telling reporters that “Russia should not be humiliated.” In the early months of the war, “it overshadowed what we did do, the military support, the European unity,” said the diplomat who like others quoted here was granted anonymity to talk candidly about a sensitive matter. Another French diplomat put it more bluntly: “Macron missed his Churchillian moment.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris on May 14, 2023 | Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images
Macron’s government is now firing on multiple fronts in favor of Ukraine: EU enlargement, military support and NATO. This month, the French presidency announced they were opening talks with Ukraine to sign a bilateral security agreement following the NATO summit in Vilnius.
“We are not naïve, we took a big step … but we are not kidding ourselves that people will think France has changed overnight,” said a third French diplomat.
Speeding up on enlargement
As recently as 2019, Macron was opposed to opening membership talks with North Macedonia and Albania.
“France has never been anti-enlargement, but it has always been prudent about it,” said Georgina Wright, Europe director at the Paris-based Institut Montaigne. “France has always said the EU must deepen before it can widen, because there was a fear by enlarging the EU would become more dysfunctional,” she said.
But in a recent speech, Macron called for “boldness” in embracing enlargement, floating the idea of a “multispeed Europe” to keep up the drive toward greater integration.
For France, the change is also set against the realization that the Balkans and Moldova — not just Ukraine — are on the front lines of a hybrid war against Russia.
“There’s a real awakening that we are on the eve of a historic moment, similar to the Fall of the Berlin Wall, with a new wave of EU enlargement …which will help stabilize the Continent,” said Benjamin Haddad, an MP for Macron’s Renaissance party.
But the change of heart may also boil down to some hard-nosed political calculus. France’s initial diplomatic initiatives with Putin alienated Central and Eastern Europeans. With talk of the center of gravity shifting eastward, France needs support beyond its traditional allies such as Germany, Italy and Spain, if it wants to influence the change it now sees as inevitable.
Getting political
With the European election looming next year, France is gearing up for a battle of opposing visions, between Europhiles arguing the EU protects citizens and populists shining a spotlight on the Union’s failings.
In France, where the far-right National Rally is riding high in the polls, and most recently the former French President Nicolas Sarkozy slammed ambitions to bring Ukraine into the Union — an anti-enlargement position held by several French political heavyweights before him, the fight is expected to be bloody.
Haddad says his camp will argue that the EU, even enlarged, will protect citizens against the upheavals of the world: the war in Ukraine, “a predatory China,” and a possible Trump presidency. “If the far right had been in power … Russia would be occupying all of Ukraine,” he said.
But what may also undermine Macron’s new drive is what Heisbourg calls “the temptation towards mediation,” adding that the French president failed to recall France’s policy on Taiwan during a visit to Beijing, in a bid to get China to play a mediation role with Russia.
“This temptation makes our partners skeptical despite the real and profound change [in France], the fear is that we might return to our old ways,” he added.
The European Union has survived — and thrived — in the past five years and is ready for the next challenge: artificial intelligence.
That’s one of the prominent messages Commission President Ursula von der Leyen delivered in her annual State of the Union address — the last such speech ahead of the looming European election in 2024, and thus possibly in her career as leader of the EU executive.
Since her 2019 speech as president-elect, Ursula von der Leyen has stewarded the EU through a pandemic, economic crisis and a war on European soil.
With EU elections now only eight months away, this year’s speech focused on the Commission’s work over the course of its mandate, with von der Leyen claiming a 90 percent success rate in delivering on political guidelines she presented in 2019 (although this figure has been contested.)
Looking to the future, the speech paid more attention than previous years to the impact of artificial intelligence and technology on the European Union, and plans for significant enlargement of the bloc.
We crunched the numbers on von der Leyen’s latest, and possibly last, script.
With research from POLITICO’s Research and Analysis Division.
Ben Cohen wasn’t talking about ice cream. He was talking about American militarism.
At 72, the co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is bald and bespectacled. He looks fit, cherubic even, but when he got going on what it was like to grow up during the Cold War, his tone became less playful and more assertive — almost defiant.
“I had this image of these two countries facing each other, and each one had this huge pile of shiny, state-of-the-art weapons in front of them,” he said, his arms waving above his head. “And behind them are the people in their countries that are suffering from lack of health care, not enough to eat, not enough housing.”
“It’s just crazy,” he added. “Approaching relationships with other countries based on threats of annihilating them, it’s just a pretty stupid way to go.”
It wasn’t a new subject for the famously socially conscious ice cream mogul; Cohen has been leading a crusade against what he sees as Washington’s bellicosity for decades. It’s just that with the war in Ukraine, his position has taken on a new — morally questionable — relevance.
Cohen, who no longer sits on the board of Ben & Jerry’s, isn’t just one of the most successful marketers of the last century. He’s a leading figure in a small but vocal part of the American left that has stood steadfast in opposition to the United States’ involvement in the war in Ukraine.
When Russian President Vladimir Putin sent tanks rolling on Kyiv, Cohen didn’t focus his ire on the Kremlin; a group he funds published a full-page ad in the New York Times blaming the act of aggression on “deliberate provocations” by the U.S. and NATO.
Following months of Russian missile strikes on residential apartment blocks, and after evidence of street executions by Russian troops in the Ukrainian city of Bucha, he funded a 2022 journalism prize that praised its winner for reporting on “Washington’s true objectives in the Ukraine war, such as urging regime change in Russia.”
In May, Cohen tweeted approvingly of an op-ed by the academic Jeffrey Sachs that argued “the war in Ukraine was provoked” and called for “negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and NATO non-enlargement.”
Ben Cohen outside the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington this month, before getting arrested | Win McNamee/Getty Images
I set up a video call with Cohen not because I can’t sympathize with his mistrust of U.S. adventurism, nor because I couldn’t follow the argument that U.S. foreign policy spurred Russia to attack. I called to try to understand how he has maintained his stance even as the Kremlin abducts children, tortures and kills Ukrainians and sends thousands of Russian troops to their deaths in human wave attacks.
It’s one thing to warn of NATO expansion in peacetime, or to call for a negotiated settlement that leaves Ukrainian citizens safe from further aggression. It’s another to ignore one party’s atrocities and agitate for an outcome that would almost certainly leave millions of people at the mercy of a regime that has demonstrated callousness and cruelty.
Given the scale of Russia’s brutality in Ukraine, I wanted to understand: How does one justify focusing one’s energies on stopping the efforts to bring it to a halt?
Masters of war
Cohen’s political awakening took place against the background of the Cold War and the political upheaval caused by Washington’s involvement in Vietnam.
He was 11 during the Cuban missile crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Part of the reason he enrolled in college was to avoid being drafted and sent to the jungle to fight the Viet Cong.
When I asked how he first became interested in politics, he cited Bob Dylan’s 1963 protest song “Masters of War,” which takes aim at the political leaders and weapons makers who benefit from conflicts and culminates with the singer standing over their graves until he’s sure they’re dead.
“That was kind of a revelation to me,” Cohen said. Behind him, the sun filtered past a cardboard Ben & Jerry’s sign propped against a window. “I hadn’t understood that, you know, there were these masters of war — essentially I guess what we would now call the military-industrial-congressional complex — that profit from war.”
Cohen saw people from his high school get drafted and never come back from a war that “wasn’t justified.” As he graduated in the summer of 1969, around half a million U.S. troops were stationed in ‘Nam. Later that year, hundreds of thousands of protesters marched on Washington, D.C. to demand peace.
It was only much later, while doing “a lot of research” into the “tradeoffs between military spending and spending for human needs,” that Cohen came across a 1953 speech by Dwight D. Eisenhower, which foreshadowed the U.S. president’s 1961 farewell address in which he coined the phrase “military-industrial complex.”
A Republican president who had served as the supreme allied commander in Europe during World War II, Eisenhower warned against tumbling into an arms race. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” he said.
“That is a foundational thing for me, very inspiring for me, and captures the essence of what I believe,” Cohen said.
“If we weren’t wasting all of our money on preparing to kill people, we would actually be able to save and help a lot of people,” he added with a chuckle. “That goes for how we approach the world internationally as well,” he added — including the war in Ukraine.
Pierre Ferrari, a former Ben & Jerry’s board member who was with the company from 1997 to 2020, said Cohen’s view of the world was shaped by the events of his youth.
“We were brought up at a time when the military, the government was just completely out of control,” he said. “We’re both children of the sixties, the Vietnam War and the new futility of war and the way war is used by the military-industrial complex and politics,” Ferrari added, pointing to the peace symbol he wore around his neck.
Jeff Furman, who has known Cohen for nearly 50 years and once served as Ben & Jerry’s in-house legal counsel, acknowledged that his generation’s views on Ukraine were informed by America’s misadventures in Vietnam.
“There’s a history of why this war is happening that’s a little bit more complex than who Putin is,” he said. “When you’ve been misled so many times in the past, you have to take this into consideration when you think about it, and really, really try to know what’s happening.”
Ice-cold activism
Politics has been a part of the Ben & Jerry’s brand since Cohen and his partner Jerry Greenfield started selling ice cream out of an abandoned gas station in 1978.
The company’s look and ethos were pure 1960s; they named one of their early flavors, Cherry Garcia, after the lead guitarist of the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, whose psychedelic riffs formed the soundtrack of the hippy counterculture.
Social justice was one of the duo’s secret ingredients. For the first-year anniversary of the gas station shop’s opening, they gave away free ice cream for a day. On the flyers printed to promote the event was a quote from Cohen: “Business has a responsibility to give back to the community from which it draws its support.”
In 1985, after the company went public, they used some of the shares to endow a foundation working for progressive social change and committed Ben & Jerry’s to spend 7.5 percent of its pretax profits on philanthropy.
In the early years, the company instituted a five-to-one cap on the ratio between the salary of the highest-earning executive and its lowest-paid worker, dropping it only when Cohen was about to step down as CEO in the mid-1990sand they were struggling to find a successor willing to work for what they were offering.
Most companies try to separate politics and business. Cohen and Greenfield cheerfully mixed them up and served them in a tub of creamy deliciousness (the company’s rich, fatty flavors were in part driven by Cohen’s sinus problems, which dulls his taste).
In 1988, Cohen founded 1% for Peace, a nonprofit organization seeking to “redirect one percent of the national defense budget to fund peace-promoting activities and projects.” The project was funded in part through sales of a vanilla and dark-chocolate popsicle they called the Peace Pop.
It was around this time that Cohen opened Ben & Jerry’s in Russia, as “an effort to build a bridge between Communism and capitalism with locally produced Cherry Garcia,” according to a write-up in the New York Times. After years of planning, the outlet opened in the northwestern city of Petrozavodsk in 1992. (The company shut the shop down five years later to prioritize growth in the U.S., and also because of the involvement of local mobsters, said Furman, who was involved in the project.)
Cohen, with co-founder Jerry Greenfield, actress Jane Fonda and other climate activists, in front of the Capitol in 2019 | Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images
Even after Ben & Jerry’s was bought by Unilever in 2000, there were few progressive causes the company wasn’t eager to wade into with a campaign or a fancy new flavor.
The ice cream maker has marketed “Rainforest Crunch” in defense of the Amazon forest, sold “Empower Mint” to combat voter suppression, promoted “Pecan Resist” in opposition to then-U.S. President Donald Trump and launched “Change the Whirled” in partnership with Colin Kaepernick, the American football quarterback whose sports career ended after he started taking a knee during the national anthem in protest of police brutality.
More recently, however, the relationship between Cohen, Greenfield and Unilever has been rockier. In 2021, Ben & Jerry’s announced it would stop doing business in the Palestinian territories. Cohen and Greenfield, who are Jewish, defended the company’s decision in an op-ed in the New York Times.
After the move sparked political backlash, Unilever transferred its license to a local producer, only to be sued by Ben & Jerry’s. In December 2022, Unilever announced in a one-sentence statement that its litigation with its subsidiary “has been resolved.”Ben & Jerry’s ice cream continues to be sold throughout Israel and the West Bank, according to a Unilever spokesperson.
Cohen himself is no stranger to activism: Earlier this month, he was arrested and detained for a few hours for taking part in a sit-in in front of the U.S. Department of Justice, where he was protesting the prosecution of the activist and WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.
Unilever declined to comment on Cohen’s views. “Ben Cohen no longer has an operational role in Ben & Jerry’s, and his comments are made in a personal capacity,” a spokesperson said.
Ben & Jerry’s did not respond to a request for comment.
The world according to Ben
For Cohen, the war in Ukraine wasn’t just a tragedy. It was, in a sense, a vindication. In 1998, a group he created called Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities published a full-page ad in the New York Times titled “Hey, let’s scare the Russians.”
The target of the ad was a proposal to expand NATO “toward Russia’s very borders,” with the inclusion of Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. Doing so, the ad asserted, would provide Russians with “the same feeling of peace and security Americans would have if Russia were in a military alliance with Canada and Mexico, armed to the teeth.”
Cohen is by no means alone in this view of recent history. The American scholar John Mearsheimer, a prominent expert in international relations, has argued that the “trouble over Ukraine” started after the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest when the alliance opened the door to membership for Ukraine and Georgia.
In the U.S., this point has been echoed by progressive outlets and thinkers, such as Jeffrey Sachs, the linguist Noam Chomsky, or most recently by the American philosopher, activist and longest-of-long-shots, third-party presidential candidate Cornel West.
“We told them after they disbanded the Warsaw Pact that we could not expand NATO, not one inch. And we did that, we lied,” said Dennis Fritz, a retired U.S. Air Force official and the head of the Eisenhower Media Network — which describes itself as a group of “National Security Veteran experts, who’ve been there, done that and have an independent, alternative story to tell.”
It was Fritz’s organization that argued in a May 2023 ad in the New York Times that although the “immediate cause” of the “disastrous” war in Ukraine was Russia’s invasion, “the plans and actions to expand NATO to Russia’s borders served to provoke Russian fears.”
The ad noted that American foreign policy heavyweights, including Robert Gates and Henry Kissinger, had warned of the dangers of NATO expansion. “Why did the U.S. persist in expanding NATO despite such warnings?” it asked. “Profit from weapons sales was a major factor.”
Cohen andGreenfield announce a new flavor, Justice Remix’d, in 2019 | Win McNamee/Getty Images
When I spoke to Cohen, the group’s primary donor, according to Fritz, he echoed the ad’s key points, saying U.S. arms manufacturers saw NATO’s expansion as a “financial bonanza.”
“In the end, money won,” he said with a resigned tone. “And today, not only are they providing weapons to all the new NATO countries, but they’re providing weapons to Ukraine.”
I told Cohen I could understand his opposition to the war and follow his critique of U.S. foreign policy, but I couldn’t grasp how he could take a position that put him in the same corner as a government that is bombing civilians. He refused to be drawn in.
“I’m not supporting Russia, I’m not supporting Ukraine,” he said. “I’m supporting negotiations to end the war instead of providing more weapons to continue the war.”
The Grayzone
I tried to get a better answer when I spoke to Aaron Maté, the Canadian-born journalist who won the award for “defense reporting and analysis” that Cohen was instrumental in funding.
Named after the late Pierre Sprey, a defense analyst who campaigned against the development of F-35 fighter jets as overly complex and expensive, the award recognized Maté’s “continued work dissecting establishment propaganda on issues such as Russian interference in U.S. politics, or the war in Syria.”
Maté, who was photographed with Cohen’s arm around his shoulders at the awards ceremony in March, writes for the Grayzone, a far-left website that has acquired a reputation for publishing stories backing the narratives of authoritarian regimes like Putin’s Russia or Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. His reports deny the use of chemical weapons against civilians in Syria, and he has briefed the U.N. Security Council at Moscow’s invitation.
When I spoke to Maté, he was friendly but guarded. (The Pierre Sprey award noted that “his empiricist reporting give the lie to the charge of ‘disinformation’ routinely leveled by those whose nostrums he challenges.”)
He was happy however to walk me through his claims that, based on statements by U.S. officials since the start of the war, Washington is using Kyiv to wage a “proxy war” against Moscow. Much of his information, he said, came from Western journalism. “I point out examples where, buried at the bottom of articles, sometimes the truth is admitted,” he explained.
He declined to be described as pro-Putin. “That kind of ‘guilt-by-association’ reasoning is not serious thinking,” he said. “It’s not how adults think about things.” When I asked if he believed that Russia had committed war crimes in Ukraine, he answered: “I’m sure they have. I’ve never heard of a war where war crimes are not committed.”
Still, he said, the U.S. was responsible for “prolonging” the war and “sabotaging the diplomacy that could have ended it.”
‘Come to Ukraine’
The best answer I got to my question came not from Cohen or others in his circle but from a fellow traveler who hasn’t chosen to follow critics of NATO on their latest journey.
A self-described “radical anti-imperialist,” Gilbert Achcar is a professor of development studies and international relations at SOAS University of London. He has described the expansion of NATO in the 1990s as a decision that “laid the ground for a new cold war” pitting the West against Russia and China.
But while he sees the war in Ukraine as the latest chapter in this showdown, he has warned against calls for a rush to the negotiating table. Instead, he has advocated for the complete withdrawal of Russia from Ukraine and “the delivery of defensive weapons to the victims of aggression with no strings attached.”
“To give those who are fighting a just war the means to fight against a much more powerful aggressor is an elementary internationalist duty,” he wrote three days after Russia launched its attack on Kyiv, comparing the invasion to the U.S.’s intervention in Vietnam.
Achcar said he understood the conclusions being drawn by people like Cohen about Washington’s interventions in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. But, he said, “it leads a lot of people on the left into … [a] knee-jerk opposition to anything the United States does.”
What they fail to account for, however, is the Ukrainian people.
“In a way, part of the Western left is ethnocentric,” said Achcar, who was born in Senegal and grew up in Lebanon. “They look at the whole world just by their opposition to their own government and therefore forget about other people’s rights.”
Cohen, with late-night TV host Jimmy Fallon in 2011 | Mike Coppola/Getty Images for Ben & Jerry’s
His point was echoed in the last conversation I had when researching this article, with Tymofiy Mylovanov, president of the Kyiv School of Economics and a former economy minister.
“It doesn’t really matter who promised what to whom in the 1990s,” Mylovanov said. “What matters is that there was Mariupol and Bucha, where tens of thousands of people were killed.”
Mylovanov taught economics at the University of Pittsburgh until he returned to Ukraine four days before Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“Things like war are difficult to understand unless you experience them,” he said. “This is very easy to get confused when you are sitting, you know, somewhere far from the facts and you have surrounded yourself by an echo chamber of people and sources that you agree with.”
“In that sense,” he added. “I invite these people to come to Ukraine and judge for themselves what the truth is.”
TBILISI — Georgia’s annual LGBT+ Pride event was evacuated by the police on Saturday after hundreds of counter-protesters stormed the site.
In a statement, organisers of the festival in the capital of Tbilisi announced that they had been forced to shut down the annual festivities after the authorities failed to maintain the perimeter.
“Today’s developments indicate that today’s planned events were pre-coordinated and agreed upon between the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the violent group Alt-Info,” Tbilisi Pride said.
The interim deputy minister of internal affairs, Aleksandre Darakhvelidze, said that “the pride festival was to take place in an open territory” and therefore authorities were “unable to provide protection.”
Smoke rose above the site, a field just outside the city, as LGBT+ rainbow flags were burned and right-wing activists danced to traditional Georgian folk music. Attendees had been told to board buses for safety moments before.
Reacting to the attacks, the British Ambassador to Georgia, Mark Clayton, said he was “shocked and saddened to see that despite the planning and preventive measures, Tbilisi Pride festival was cancelled due to safety risks for participants.”
Shocked and saddened to see that despite the planning & preventive measures, @Tbilisipride festival was cancelled due to safety risks for participants. I call on authorities to ensure that all who broke law & aggressively disrupted a peaceful gathering will be brought to justice. pic.twitter.com/6rOsPQqm8n
He called on the Georgian government to “ensure that all who broke law and aggressively disrupted a peaceful gathering will be brought to justice.”
Despite the condemnations, Shalva Papuashvili, chairman of Georgia’s parliament, insisted “the police had an appropriate response” and “properly ensured the safety of both participants and journalists.”
Rémy Bony, executive director of LGBT+ NGO Forbidden Colours, said that EU countries should give refuge to the organisers at their embassies because “their lives are in danger. Thousands of anti-LGBTIQ hooligans are hunting them down.”
🏳️🌈🇬🇪The Embassies of the EU member states in Georgia must open their doors for the organisers of Tbilisi Pride immediately.
Their lives are in danger. Thousands of anti-LGBTIQ hooligans are hunting them down. Georgian authorities are not able to provide safety. pic.twitter.com/8cYtIoRP6N
Alt-Info, a far-right group with close ties to the Georgian Orthodox Church, has repeatedly organized counter-protests against the annual festivities. In 2021, dozens of journalists were injured at the annual event and a cameraman later died.
In the wake of the violence that year, the EU mission to the country issued a strongly-worded letter to the government in which they decried “direct attacks on Georgia’s democratic and pro-European aspirations” and criticized the burning of an EU flag outside the parliament.
Speaking to POLITICO from the crowd on Saturday, Levan Chachua, the leader of the nationalist, religious Georgian Idea political group, said: “I would refuse to … join the EU if that will prevent us from entering the heavenly kingdom.”
Georgia has a stated intention to join the EU. But Brussels has warned that its government, which has sought closer ties with Russia since the start of the war in Ukraine, has presided over a significant backsliding in human rights and civil liberties.
Paul Ronzheimer is the deputy editor-in-chief of BILD and a senior journalist reporting for Axel Springer, the parent company of POLITICO.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba warned European allies that it would be “suicidal” not to accept Ukraine into NATO after the war with Russia is over.
Kuleba’s comments come ahead of a NATO summit in mid-July when Kyiv’s membership bid is set to be the most politically sensitive point of discussion. Ukraine is looking to get a commitment from the defense alliance on its NATO aspirations, but a number of allies say a serious discussion on Ukraine in NATO can happen only after Russian forces are no longer on its territory.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on June 22 that the NATO summit in Vilnius on July 11-12 should focus on strengthening Ukraine’s military power instead of opening a process for Kyiv to join the transatlantic alliance.
“After the war ends, it will be suicidal for Europe not to accept Ukraine into NATO because it will mean that the option of … war will remain open,” Kuleba told Axel Springer, POLITICO’s parent company, in an interview on Friday in Kyiv.
“The only way to shut the door for the Russian aggression against Europe and Euro Atlantic space as a whole is to take Ukraine in NATO, because Russia will not dare to repeat this experience again,” Kuleba said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has a vision for Ukraine to join NATO, as well as the EU, once Kyiv has repelled Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion. Ukrainian Ambassador to NATO Natalia Galibarenko told POLITICO in late June that Kyiv is seeking “some kind of invitation — or at least commitment … to look at the timeframe and modalities of our membership” at the Vilnius summit.
Kuleba in the interview pushed back on Germany and others advocating against such a commitment, warning against an outcome similar to the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, when Berlin and Paris rejected NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia.
“Do not repeat the mistake Chancellor Merkel made in Bucharest in 2008 when she fiercely opposed any progress towards Ukraine’s NATO membership,” he said.
“This decision opened the door for Putin to invade Georgia and then to continue his destabilizing efforts in the region, and then eventually illegally annexing Crimea,” Kuleba said. “Because if Ukraine was accepted in NATO by 2014, there would not [have been] the illegal annexation of Crimea. It would not be war in Donbas, there would not be this large-scale invasion,” he said.
Kuleba rejected statements by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán that it will be “impossible” for Ukraine to win against Russia, saying he is “tired of countering all these meaningless arguments.”
Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal has a tight two-year timetable for securing EU membership that is bound to dominate discussions at this week’s historic EU-Ukraine summit, the first to take place on Ukrainian soil.
The problem? No one within the EU thinks this is realistic.
When EU commissioners travel to Kyiv later this week ahead of Friday’s summit with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the heads of the European Commission and Council, their main task is likely to involve managing expectations.
Shmyhal himself is imposing a tough deadline. “We have a very ambitious plan to join the European Union within the next two years,” he told POLITICO. “So we expect that this year, in 2023, we can already have this pre-entry stage of negotiations,” he said.
This throws down a gauntlet to the EU establishment, which is trying to keep Ukrainian membership as a far more remote concept.
French President Emmanuel Macron said last year it could be “decades” before Ukraine joins. Even EU leaders, who backed granting Ukraine candidate status at their summit last June, privately admit that the prospect of the country actually joining is quite some years away (and may be one reason they backed the idea in the first place.) After all, candidate countries like Serbia, Turkey and Montenegro have been waiting for many years, since 1999 in Ankara’s case.
Ukraine is a conundrum for the EU. Many argue that Brussels has a particular responsibility to Kyiv. It was, after all, Ukrainians’ fury at the decision of President Viktor Yanukovych to pull out of a political and economic association agreement with the EU at Russia’s behest that triggered the Maidan uprising of 2014 and set the stage for war. As European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen put it: Ukraine is “the only country where people got shot because they wrapped themselves in a European flag.”
Ukraine’s close allies in the EU such as Poland and the Baltic countries strongly support Kyiv’s membership push, seeing it as a democracy resisting an aggressor. Many of the EU old guard are far more wary, however, as Ukraine — a global agricultural superpower — could dilute their own powers and perks. Ukraine and Poland — with a combined population of 80 million — could team up to rival Germany as a political force in the European Council and some argue Kyiv would be an excessive drain on the EU budget.
Short-term deliverables
Friday’s summit in Kyiv — the first EU meeting of its kind to take place in an active war zone — will be about striking the right balance.
Though EU national leaders will not be in attendance, European Council officials have been busy liaising with EU member states about the final communiqué.
Some countries are insisting the statement should not stray far from the language used at the June European Council — emphasizing that while the future of Ukraine lies within the European Union, aspirant countries need to meet specific criteria. “Expectation is quite high in Kyiv, but there is a need to fulfill all the conditions that the Commission has set out. It’s a merit-based process,” said one senior EU official.
Ukraine is a conundrum for the EU. Many argue that Brussels has a particular responsibility to Kyiv | Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images
Still, progress is expected when Zelenskyy meets with von der Leyen and European Council President Charles Michel.
Shmyhal told POLITICO he hopes Ukraine can achieve a “substantial leap forward” on Friday, particularly in specific areas — an agreement on a visa-free regime for industrial goods; the suspension of customs duties on Ukrainian exports for another year; and “active progress” on joining the SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) payments scheme and the inclusion of Ukraine into the EU’s mobile roaming area.
“We expect progress and acceleration on our path towards signing these agreements,” he said.
Anti-corruption campaign
The hot topic — and one of the central question marks over Ukraine’s EU accession — will be Ukraine’s struggle against corruption. The deputy infrastructure minister was fired and deputy foreign minister stepped down this month over scandals related to war profiteering in public contracts.
“We need a reformed Ukraine,” said one senior EU official centrally involved in preparations for the summit. “We cannot have the same Ukraine as before the war.”
Shmyhal insisted that the Zelenskyy government is taking corruption seriously. “We have a zero-tolerance approach to corruption,” he said, pointing to the “lightning speed” with which officials were removed this month. “Unfortunately, corruption was not born yesterday, but we are certain that we will uproot corruption,” he said, openly saying that it’s key to the country’s EU accession path.
He also said the government was poised to revise its recent legislation on the country’s Constitutional Court to meet the demands of both the European Commission and the Venice Commission, an advisory body of the Council of Europe. Changes could come as early as this week, ahead of the summit, Shmyhal said.
Though Ukraine has announced a reform of the Constitutional Court, particularly on how judges are appointed, the Venice Commission still has concerns about the powers and composition of the advisory group of experts, the body which selects candidates for the court. The goal is to avoid political interference.
Shmyhal said these questions will be addressed. “We are holding consultations with the European Commission to see that all issued conclusions may be incorporated into the text,” he told POLITICO.
Nonetheless, the symbolic power of this week’s summit is expected to send a strong message to Moscow about Ukraine’s European aspirations.
European Council President Michel used his surprise visit to Kyiv this month to reassure Ukraine that EU membership will be a reality for Ukraine, telling the Ukrainian Rada (parliament) that he dreams that one day a Ukrainian will hold his job as president of the European Council.
“Ukraine is the EU and the EU is Ukraine,” he said. “We must spare no effort to turn this promise into reality as fast as we can.”
The key question for Ukrainians after Friday’s meeting will be how fast the rhetoric and promises can become a reality.
KYIV — Even when the Russians are invading your country, that doesn’t stop the clock when it comes to sweeping out corruption and fixing the judiciary in line with EU convergence criteria.
With the EU set to issue reports on Kyiv’s progress in March and then again in October, Ukraine’s advances on rule of law are swifter than expected, but it’s a case of two steps forward and one (very worrying) step back.
For Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has declared that his country’s “future is in the EU,” it is vital to maintain momentum, when he knows Kyiv’s membership faces resistance from traditional EU members, whose powers would be diluted by such a big new member. France’s President Emmanuel Macron said in May that Kyiv was “in all likelihood decades” from EU membership, and Western European countries express constant concerns about insecurity, corruption and the cost of rebuilding a nation shattered by war.
In that context, Ukraine is now moving surprisingly quickly. The appointment of a new chief prosecutor has given the fight against graft a boost with many high-profile cases finally resulting in sentences. The Ukrainian parliament also liquidated the Kyiv Administrative District Court, infamous as the most corrupt court in Ukraine.
On the downside, however, concern is now growing over the Constitutional Court, with its supreme legal oversight that can overrule government decisions. A new reform threatens to allow political interference in a body that would filter candidates for judges. This could throw a major hurdle in the path of Ukraine’s European aspirations. Both the European Commission and the Venice Commission, a Council of Europe advisory body on constitutional law, have already sounded the alarm.
Shutting Ukraine’s most corrupt court
Ukraine’s liquidation of the Kyiv Administrative District Court is being widely viewed as one of the most positive steps in the battle against corruption, but it didn’t come easily.
Zelenskyy submitted the bill to kill off the court as a priority back in April 2021. However, the Ukrainian parliament did so only on December 13, four days after the U.S. Department of State sanctioned its chairman, Pavlo Vovk, for soliciting bribes in return for interfering in judicial and other public processes.
The U.S. sanction on the court’s head judge was the final straw, said Mykhailo Zhernakov, chairman of the board of the Dejure Foundation, a nongovernmental organization focusing on legal reform.
But Vovk’s removal was also the fruit of intense pressure from Ukrainian civil society groups that exposed the court’s misdeeds and anti-corruption organizations that investigated its lead judges.
In 2020, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) released the so-called Vovk tapes — wiretaps of both Administrative Court judges and top lawyers in connection to a criminal case against Vovk — which revealed a large number of fake lawsuits, unlawful rulings and pressure by Vovk on judges and officials.
“What made the Kyiv Administrative District Court so powerful was its unique jurisdiction that covered not only local authorities of Kyiv, but also all the government bodies located in Kyiv. And that means all government bodies,” Zhernakov said. “That broad jurisdiction gave them an enormous concentration of power. And that is why it must be divided with the creation of the new administrative court.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky | Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images
After the tapes were published by local investigative journalists, the public got an insight into massive obstruction of justice and bribery flourishing at the highest level. All of the judges and officials identified on the tapes deny their authenticity to this day, however.
Vovk himself called the liquidation of the court “a rushed decision” by parliament, adopted under pressure from “certain activists and lobbyists groups.” British Ambassador Melinda Simmons, by contrast, called it a “good day for judicial reform.”
Rostyslav Kravets, a lawyer defending many Ukrainian judges, said the accusations against Vovk were all fabricated and slammed the court reform as “backed by foreign forces.”
Activists and Ukraine’s international partners have indeed repeatedly asserted that foreign experts should guarantee transparent competition over appointments in the Ukrainian judicial system, highly infiltrated by political connections, but Kravets resented the international pressure.
“This is wrong. Can you imagine me coming to London to help them elect judges?” Kravets said. “Europe has been trying to sell the idea that all judges in Ukraine are criminals, who take bribes. That forced many to leave their posts or rule in favor of unlawful decisions.”
A second step forward
The second major advance has come with the appointment of Oleksandr Klymenko as the chief anti-corruption prosecutor.
In 2021, the notorious Kyiv Administrative District Court blocked the appointment of the former detective from the NABU anti-corruption bureau. Klymenkobecamefamous for investigating a bribery case against another top official in Zelenskyy’s administration: Oleg Tatarov, deputy head of the president’soffice. Although Tatarov was charged with bribery, his case was transferred from the jurisdiction of independent anti-corruption bodies to the security service of Ukraine. Shortly afterward, the case died.
Deputy head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, who is responsible for law enforcement, Oleg Tatarov | Genya Savilov/AFP via Getty images
Tatarovpublicly promised to prove his innocence and said the case against him was a personal vendetta by Artem Sytnyk, then head of the NABU.
On the same day that Ukraine liquidated the administrative court, however, it made a major misstep on reforming its all-important Constitutional Court.
On December 13, Ukraine’s parliament voted on a law to reform the Constitutional Court, but watchdogs pointed out the potential for political interference in the way judges are appointed in the new system.
The new procedure establishes an advisory group of three government officials and three independent experts with the same number of votes during the selection of judges. They would choose candidates by a simple majority vote. The decision of the group is also not final, making it possible for candidates who did not pass the evaluation to still run for Constitutional Court seats.
On December 19, the Venice Commission recommended changing the new law and introducing a seventh member to the advisory group to give the independent experts a casting vote during the selection. It also recommended making the decisions of the advisory group binding, making it impossible for candidates with negative evaluations to become Constitutional Court judges.
Only the next day, however, Zelenskyy, on his way from the frontline city of Bakhmut to Washington, signed the bill into law, ignoring the Venice Commission’s recommendation.
“Simple majority voting means that independent experts will need the votes of the political appointees from the government to select a candidate to the next stage. With these kind of rules, the advisory group won’t be able to push through independent candidates,” said Zhernakov from the Dejure Foundation.
Ukraine’s reformists need pressure from abroad
Ukrainian civil society groups called on international partners to keep up their pressure over the Constitutional Court reform. Zhernakov argued that, because of the Russian invasion, some foreign partners were now shying away from public criticism of Kyiv in order not to play into the hands of Russia or of Ukraine’s critics in the EU.
“Due to Zelenskyy’s well-deserved popularity, international partners prefer not to criticize Ukraine as harshly as they did before as they don’t want to undermine him in any way during active warfare. But there has to be a red line,” Zhernakov said.
On December 23, the European Commission finally weighed in. Ana Pisonero, spokesperson for enlargement, said the Commission expected Ukrainian authorities to fully address the Venice Commission recommendations, and would monitor the process.
Vitaliy Shabunin, the head of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, a Kyiv-based watchdog, said in a statement that, if not changed, the new selection procedure would give effective control over the Constitutional Court to the president’s office. The president’s office did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
“This is a fantastic risk. The Constitutional Court is the only institution that currently limits political power in the country. And precisely because it is not controlled by the government, it can control the government,” Zhernakov said.
In a sign of the Constitutional Court’s importance, it ignited a crisis in 2020 when it recognized certain parts of Ukraine’s law as unconstitutional. That decision canceled public access to the electronic declaration of assets, as well as criminal punishment for lies in electronic declarations. Those changes practically paralyzed the fight against corruption in Ukraine, the National Agency on Corruption Prevention reported. The court’s decision was criticized by the Venice Commission and condemned by international society.
More than a thousand officials avoided responsibility for lying in declarations, and only the efforts of the authorities and the public made it possible to neutralize the threat to the anti-corruption infrastructure.
Civil society and international partners with the help of Zelenskyy managed to clean the Constitutional Court, as well as other high judicial authorities. And the ex-chairman of the court fled abroad.
When asked why Zelenskyy had now signed such a controversial law, Zhernakov said that while the Ukrainian government has been doing a lot to bring Ukraine closer to the EU, there are still people in the president’s office resisting change.
“And while Zelenskyy is in Bakhmut or in the U.S., they are slipping in things like this. Because they want to keep control over the key legislative institutions,” Zhernakov said.
Civil society is getting ready to fight back, although now the space for criticism is limited because of war. Zhernakov said the risk was that Russia would unfairly use criticism like that over the Constitutional Court to cast Ukraine as an undemocratic and corrupt country.
“Usually, Russian propaganda is baseless and can be refuted with simple fact-checking. But when instead of EU integration reforms the authorities sign the laws like the Constitutional Court one, they give not just a weapon, but a HIMARS to Russian propaganda,” Zhernakov said.
BALI, Indonesia — Senior Indonesian politicians are calling on Western leaders to make concessions on how far to go in criticizing Russia over the war in Ukraine in a last-ditch effort to avoid leaving the G20 summit later this week without a joint declaration, three diplomats with knowledge of the ongoing negotiations told POLITICO.
According to these diplomats, U.S., European, Australian, Canadian and Japanese officials are among those under pressure from Indonesian counterparts, all the way up to President Joko Widodo, to show “flexibility” and consider using less tough rhetoric in order for Moscow — represented at the Bali summit by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov — to say yes to a communiqué at the end of the gathering.
Widodo “considers it a personal success” if a G20 declaration could be reached, one of the officials said, adding that the Indonesian leader has lamented repeatedly that he is chairing the “most difficult” G20 summit ever.
He is also seeking to avoid kicking Russia out and making it the G19, which the G8 did in the wake of Moscow’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014.
One possibility would be to focus squarely on the aspect of “upholding international law.” If adopted, that would be much more coded wording than what’s been used by the G7, which has repeatedly condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine.
The latest G7 statement, following this month’s meeting of foreign ministers from the group, criticized Moscow for “its war of aggression against Ukraine” and called for Russia to withdraw. “We condemn Russia’s recent escalation, including its attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure,” it said. The G7 countries also blasted “Russia’s irresponsible nuclear rhetoric,” according to the Nov. 4 statement.
“Obviously we can’t be as tough as we do it in G7 when you need the Russians, Chinese and Saudis to agree,” a Western diplomat said, referring to the larger G20 grouping. “The question is how much we need to delete.”
China, Saudi Arabia, India and Brazil, four of the fellow G20 countries, are described as “sitting on the fence” over the issue.
Beijing, in particular, would find it impossible to accept any direct criticism of Russia. Chinese President Xi Jinping, who will be attending the G20 summit personally, has so far only made an effort to show disapproval of any threats of using nuclear weapons, without attributing such threats to Moscow.
Another issue for Widodo is the likely lack of a family photo for the two-day summit that starts on Tuesday. According to convention, all the G20 leaders would line up and take a group picture to show solidarity. This time, however, Western leaders have hesitation about being in the same frame as Lavrov, a key aide to Putin, whom U.S. President Joe Biden has called a “killer.”
Widodo is described as “interested” in assessing fellow leaders’ opinions on having such a family photo.
Much of his lobbying has taken place in Cambodia, where he’s attending the East Asia Summit. Also in Cambodia were Biden, European Council President Charles Michel, Canada’s Justin Trudeau and Australia’s Anthony Albanese. Russia’s Lavrov and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang were also in Phnom Penh.
Indonesian President Joko Widodo has urged Western countries for more “flexibility” | Sonny Tumbelaka/AFP via Getty Images
Speaking in Cambodia, Albanese confirmed to reporters that officials are still negotiating over the wording a G20 final communiqué.
“You know the way that these conferences work. We’ve just got through an East Asia Summit, an ASEAN meeting and a range of other summits. So we’re waiting to see what happens, but I go into the G20 with a great deal of confidence,” Albanese said.
Lavrov criticized Washington for stirring up confrontation in Asia. “There is a clear trend on militarization of the region through coordination of efforts of local U.S. allies such Australia, New Zealand, Japan with NATO enlargement,” he said.
The presidents of nine NATO countries in central and eastern Europe declared on Sunday that they would never recognize the annexation by Russia of several Ukrainian regions. Hungary and Bulgaria were conspicuously absent from the signatories.
In a joint statement, the leaders also supported a path to NATO membership for Ukraine.
The nine leaders demanded that “Russia immediately withdraw from all occupied territories” and encouraged “all allies to substantially increase their military aid to Ukraine,” according to the statement.
“We reiterate our support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine,” they wrote.
The statement comes two days after Russian President Vladimir Putin declared he was annexing four Ukrainian regions, a move the West has described as an illegal land-grab. It was signed by the presidents of Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Montenegro and North Macedonia.
The signatories also wrote that they “firmly stand behind” a NATO decision in 2008 over Ukraine’s future membership to the alliance. At the time, NATO allies pledged that Ukraine would eventually become a member. But as that process stalled over the years, it seemed increasingly unlikely that Ukraine’s bid would become a reality.
In the wake of the annexations, Ukraine formally applied for a fast-track accession to NATO, with hopes to jump-start its membership bid.
On Sunday, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tweeted that 10 NATO countries supported Ukraine’s membership to the alliance — including many countries that used to belong to the former Soviet bloc.
NATO countries however have hesitated at including a new member that is at war — and by treaty they would be forced to defend. In recent months, NATO has also welcomed the application of two new countries in Europe – Finland and Sweden, spurred by security concerns after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
