Negotiations formally opened

On 25 June 2024 the first intergovernmental conference between the European Union and Ukraine was held in Luxembourg, and negotiations were formally open. Moldova held its own on the same day.

What follows a first conference is not dramatic. It is screening: a chapter-by-chapter comparison of Ukrainian legislation against the entire body of European law, conducted by officials in meetings that produce documents rather than photographs. Thirty-five chapters, thousands of legal acts, and an honest inventory of every place the two systems do not match.

Why the boring phase is the important one

Screening produces the real negotiating agenda. It establishes what has to change, what transition periods will be needed and where the genuinely hard problems are — agriculture, environment, the fundamentals cluster covering courts and public administration.

For a business, this is when accession stops being a political direction and becomes a schedule of specific regulatory changes with dates. That is the point at which you can plan against it, and it is why I pay more attention to screening reports than to summit declarations.