00:00Once again, we had Ukraine's president, who's been leading this war effort in this country for now, five years now.
00:08He's asking for a fixed date for Ukraine to join the European Union. Is this realistic at all?
00:17And I think that he is suggesting that that date could be as early as next year, 2027.
00:23Now, if Ukraine were to join the European Union according to the accession procedure that all countries up till now
00:31have had to follow, meeting various stringent criteria,
00:34then it's absolutely not realistic for Ukraine to join in 2027 and probably not in the next five years,
00:41especially not considering that EU officials have been complaining, actually, that in recent months,
00:45Ukraine has made very little progress on the reforms that it's supposed to be already putting in place
00:51in order to prepare for joining the EU.
00:53But a new kind of EU accession has been mooted.
00:57Some are calling it reverse accession.
01:00Ursula von der Leyen, the EU Commission president who's in Kiev, is in favor of basically the idea being that
01:06the country,
01:07Ukraine in this case, would join the European Union officially with the ceremony and all the rest of it,
01:13even before the criteria are met.
01:16And then gradually, as various criteria are met, would gain access to the various benefits of EU membership,
01:23membership of the Common Agricultural Policy, access to cohesion funds.
01:27Perhaps voting rights would not immediately all be conferred on the new country.
01:33Proponents of this idea say that it would draw a line in the sand, pass the point of no return,
01:38show that Ukraine is on its way westwards, whatever Russia thinks or wants,
01:44and basically thereby allow Ukraine to start its reform process once within the European Union or continue it.
01:54Those who are against it say that it would reduce the level of motivation for the Ukrainian authorities
01:59to pursue the necessary reforms,
02:01and also that it would deprive other European countries of the possibility of negotiating
02:06in terms of what they're prepared to accept in order for Ukraine to join Poland as a country
02:13that's particularly concerned, although broadly pro-Ukrainian,
02:16about the prospect of its very large neighbor suddenly joining the bloc.
02:19And Radislav Szykorski, the Polish foreign minister, who's also in Kiev,
02:23has been saying that he thinks the date of 2027 is absolutely not realistic at all.
02:27Gulliver, let's talk about negotiations to end this conflict,
02:31because we know that the U.S. President Donald Trump wants Ukraine to make concessions.
02:36The country's president, Vladimir Zelensky, says that's not going to happen.
02:39You're in Kharkiv at this pivotal point in the conflict.
02:45What are ordinary Ukrainians telling you when it comes to concessions?
02:51Most people I've spoken to have said that they don't think Ukraine should make any concessions.
02:57They don't think that it's morally acceptable.
02:59But more importantly, they don't think it would work.
03:02And Volodymyr Zelensky spelled that out in one of his most recent interviews.
03:07He doesn't think that giving up that part of Donbass, which Ukraine still controls
03:12and which Vladimir Putin seems to be making a condition for any peace agreement,
03:16would actually bring peace.
03:18He thinks that the Russians wouldn't stop there.
03:20They want to dominate the whole of Ukraine.
03:22That's the majority view in Ukraine.
03:23But if you look at opinion polls, the percentage of people who think that Ukraine should give up territory
03:30in order to get peace is gradually increasing.
03:33But the point there is that, yes, many more people would agree to give up territory
03:38in order to get peace if they really were going to get peace.
03:41And I think that the Ukrainian government would argue, kindly and understandingly perhaps,
03:46but they would argue that those who were saying that we should give up territory
03:49in order to get peace are simply mistaken because it wouldn't deliver the desired effect.
03:54Gulliver, thank you very much for that Gulliver Craig reporting there for us.
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