14 April, 13:23
Since 2014, Ukraine has been officially on its way to the European Union. That is twelve years of movement toward a destination that, by some curious geometry, never gets closer.
Maidan. The Association Agreement. Visa-free travel. Membership application. Candidate status. Negotiation clusters. The Kos Plan. And now the results of the "Membership CHECK" monitoring: five zeros out of ten priority benchmarks. Zero real steps on prosecutorial reform in three months. Five months without a Minister of Justice — and zero progress on documents the Cabinet was simply supposed to table in parliament.
Nobody is surprised. And that, in itself, is the diagnosis.
Ukraine's EU integration is not a process of approaching a goal. It is a self-sustaining process whose goal is its own continuation. A textbook economy of losses — just at geopolitical scale.
Look at the architecture. There are donors — international institutions financing reforms, technical assistance, monitoring, consultants, trainings, reports on trainings, and reports on reports. There are beneficiaries — the Ukrainian bureaucracy that administers, absorbs, and redistributes those funds. There is procedure — an endless sequence of plans, roadmaps, audits, and new plans to implement the audits. And there is the result: its principled absence, which justifies the next round of financing.
Sabotage here is not a deviation from the norm. It is a function. Ukraine's bureaucracy does not fail reforms through incompetence — it slows them because an unfinished reform feeds, and a finished one does not. Five months without a Minister of Justice is not an organisational malfunction. It is the working condition of a system in which responsibility for progress can always be offloaded onto a vacant position.
Prosecutorial reform is the purest example. The authorities personally promised Ursula von der Leyen they would fix the selection procedure and restore transparent competitive appointment of the Prosecutor General. Three months later — zero. This is not forgetfulness, and it is not a technical delay. The prosecutor's office is a power resource. Whoever controls the selection of prosecutors controls the selectivity of criminal prosecution. Handing that resource over to a transparent competition means losing it. No beneficiary of the system will voluntarily do that — regardless of what was promised in Brussels.
The European Union, for its part, understands this perfectly well. But Brussels has its own process logic: as long as negotiations continue, there is leverage, there are pressure instruments, there is justification for continued support. Completing negotiations removes that leverage. Hence the mutually convenient infinity: Kyiv simulates reforms, Brussels simulates satisfaction with progress, and both sides get what they need.
The closer Ukraine formally approaches membership, the more obvious it becomes that the real distance is not shrinking. This is not a paradox and not a tragedy. It is architecture. The road to Europe that will never end is the most expensive and longest infrastructure project in the country's history — no budget ceiling, no completion date, but a perfectly calibrated system for absorbing funds at every kilometre.
Pothole repair, as always, can only dream of such efficiency.