“What is remarkable is that Ukraine and Moldova, despite finding themselves in a very tense situation regarding their security, are extremely keen to move closer to the EU and have therefore already begun negotiations and opened the first cluster.”
These are the words of the deputy director of the European Council on foreign relations (ECFR), Vesela Cherneva, and they come just as the official negotiation process for the two countries’ accession to the European Union has begun.
With this, the EU embarked on a truly geopolitical enlargement – driven not only by the pursuit of shared values, a larger market, and stronger common institutions, but also by the need to safeguard the continent’s security in a shifting environment.
According to Cherneva, the EU’s upcoming enlargement is the only way to institutionally anchor Ukraine within a serious and lasting framework, given that the US position has remained clear under both presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden: Nato enlargement to include Ukraine is not possible.
“Currently, EU membership is the only way to integrate Ukraine’s and Europe’s security systems. This is an entirely different discussion from negotiations on chapters, clusters, sanitary standards and other accession requirements. We are talking about security guarantees, but also about the transfer of military technologies from Ukraine to Europe and, more broadly, about how Ukraine – which currently possesses the strongest and most combat-capable army in Europe – can, while defending Europe, also become part of the European security debate,” Cherneva says.
Ognyan Minchev, political scientist, professor and executive director of the Institute for Regional and International Studies, an independent think-tank in Bulgaria, also believes that Ukraine’s importance is substantial and that the questions surrounding its integration are highly complex.
“Ukraine currently possesses the only genuinely combat-capable army on the European continent. Western European armies have very limited personnel numbers and, until recently, received extremely low levels of funding. The lack of real resources, including weapons, to address the challenges of military security makes Ukraine a more attractive partner,” he says.
Although many experts would point to Ukraine’s contribution to European security as the greatest benefit of its accession to the EU, the country can also contribute to development in other areas. There is undoubtedly great potential for development in the fields of agriculture and farming.
The country has a vast area of cultivated land and is among the world’s leading producers of a number of cereal crops such as wheat, maize, barley, rice, and others. It exports these products to third countries, and membership would increase the EU’s economic influence in these regions.
Ukraine’s accession could also lead to cooperation between different sectors and result in an increase in meat and dairy production as a consequence of increased cereal production.
Beyond agriculture, Ukraine’s pharmaceutical industry could offer the EU an opportunity to reduce its reliance on imports of generic medicines from China and various Asian countries. Thanks to its favourable climate, Ukraine also has great potential for various types of renewable energy.
Deposits of gallium, rutile, graphite, magnesium ores, lithium and other minerals vital to the green transition could contribute to European production and help the EU compete with China.
According to Minchev, integrating Ukraine represents a major challenge because it involves a large country that is institutionally weak, with high levels of corruption, poor economic organisation and significant shortcomings in the functioning of public life.
“Ukraine has been forced to transform itself into an effective fighting machine, but in other respects it remains a post-Soviet society with serious problems in the areas mentioned above. This makes its rapid integration into the EU extremely difficult,” Minchev says.
“For Moldova, we can say that it is a small but significant element in the broader domino effect of Black Sea security, which is becoming an increasingly crucial aspect of overall European security. This is because the confrontation between the Kremlin regime and Europe is effectively unfolding along the line of a new Iron Curtain being formed across Ukraine and the Black Sea region,” Minchev says.
According to Cherneva, Moldova’s accession is also crucial precisely because the country is a buffer state, and Russia has demonstrated that it does not tolerate buffers.
“Russia seeks to conquer and control such buffer zones. If Moldova does not want to share the fate of Belarus or Georgia, it must take rapid steps towards European integration,” Cherneva says.
For years, Moldova has served as a testing ground for Russia’s hybrid warfare. As Western European countries are only now confronting the full scale of Russian hybrid attacks, Moldova has already spent years developing its own resilience and countermeasures.
The country brings to European security valuable expertise gained from combating Russian disinformation and resisting repeated attempts by the Kremlin to interfere in its domestic political processes.
Yet Moldova’s accession would have implications extending far beyond security. Although it possesses far less agricultural land than Ukraine, the country has the potential to make a meaningful contribution to the European agricultural sector. Moldova has been gradually integrating into the EU’s Single Market through the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area (DCFTA).
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The European Commission says it will not compromise on protecting the EU’s external borders, but will also respect human rights, while declining to specify if a new emergency rule could suspend people’s basic right to asylum.
The vague statements by Magnus Brunner, the EU home affairs commissioner, in Brussels on Tuesday (29 September), followed an equally vague proposal announced by commission president Ursula von der Leyen in her State of the Union speech on 11 September, who pledged to create a “European emergency response framework”.
When asked if her new framework would include the possibility to suspend asylum at the EU’s external border in cases that mirrored this summer’s Ceuta crisis, when tens of thousands of people entered the Spanish enclave in north Africa, Brunner said: “I can’t go into details, because it’s a discussion which is going on at the moment”.
His non-committal take on the hot button issue also came after a resolution adopted by the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) in Brussels on Tuesday, which is demanding that member countries, in some cases, be given the option to temporarily suspend asylum applications.
Specifically, it calls on the EU “to adopt legislative measures authorising refusal of entry or returns without individual asylum procedures for illegal migrants used in a hybrid attack”.
Meanwhile, Brunner and von der Leyen come from the same conservative party in the EPP, posing questions to what extent political pressure has influenced the latest commission initiative.
Greece’s prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis (also EPP) in early August had already gone public with demands for new EU rules allowing for asylum to be suspended for newly arrived people.
The Polish government (EPP) also weighed in, claiming credit for getting von der Leyen to cite the idea in her big speech.
Warsaw had earlier this month extended its asylum ban on people entering from Belarus, in what rights groups say involves pushbacks that cause loss of life.
But for Brunner, the issue had already been broached in a commission asylum strategy report that was published back in January.
That report references “weaponisation of migration” by hostile countries, such as Belarus and Russia, and links it back to another commission document from December 2024 that argues there are certain exceptional situations in which the ban on pushbacks cannot apply.
For Michael O’Flaherty, who is the human rights commissioner at the Council of Europe, a rights watchdog based in Strasbourg, any effort to extend the existing EU ban criteria risked unraveling decades of human rights law.
The issue will be discussed by EU interior ministers on Thursday and Friday in Luxembourg, where migration weighs heavily on the agenda.
And those talks, in turn, will lean into and continue among heads of state and government at an EU summit on 15 October.
German investigators have linked an arson attack in Munich, the planned sabotage of drone manufacturer Skyeton near Prešov, and an attempted attack using an explosive drone at Leipzig-Halle Airport to Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, according to media reports.
The most important finding is that part of this network was said to have operated from Slovakia.
We do not yet know all the details of the ongoing investigation, and I trust that Slovak security authorities will thoroughly examine the circumstances of the case and determine the true scope of the entire operation.
However, according to the German security services’ findings so far, the Slovak connection is not marginal.
Slovakia may have served as one of the hubs of a wider network linked to Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU.
According to German security sources, two Bulgarian nationals detained after the arson attack in Munich on 3 September were part of a GRU-linked group operating from Slovakia. Incendiary devices were thrown near Rohde & Schwarz and Helsing, companies linked to the defence industry and support for Ukraine.
The same wider network was said to have been preparing an arson attack on Skyeton’s plant near Prešov, which produces reconnaissance drones for Ukraine. Slovak authorities thwarted the plan and detained Latvian and Ukrainian nationals. Another suspect was detained in Germany.
The nationality of those carrying out the attacks is not decisive.
The current model of Russian operations uses nationals of different countries, often recruited through intermediaries. A professional GRU officer can therefore remain several layers removed from the attack itself. Recruitment may take place via Telegram, payments through cryptocurrencies, and those carrying out the attacks may not even know precisely who the real instigator is.
German investigators argued there was also a link to an attempted attack using an explosive drone at Leipzig-Halle Airport on 4 August.
The target was reportedly a Ukrainian cargo aircraft used to transport material. The German government subsequently publicly attributed responsibility for the incident to Russia.
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