A law about classrooms in Ukraine’s far west has opened the door to the next phase of Kyiv’s bid to join the European Union. On Tuesday, ministers meeting in Luxembourg formally launched two further negotiating clusters for both Ukraine and Moldova, leaving just two of the six still closed.
The trigger came a day earlier. Ukraine’s parliament backed a bill on schooling for national minorities by 266 votes, and President Volodymyr Zelensky signed it within hours. Under the new rules, a school may apply for special status if most of its pupils learn in a minority tongue recognised as one of the EU’s official languages, and its head or deputy has to speak it. Russian is not covered. Around 80,000 ethnic Hungarians living in Zakarpattia are the main beneficiaries, though Kyiv legislators argue the text mostly writes down rights that already existed in practice.
Budapest had vetoed these two packages four times, most recently on Sept. 8. That stance dates back to the Viktor Orbán era. Since Péter Magyar won power in April, Hungary has traded blanket obstruction for specific demands, and the new law met one of them. Officials on both sides are now trying to arrange a first face-to-face meeting between Magyar and Zelensky on the margins of this week’s summit in Brussels, although no date has been confirmed.
The freshly opened clusters are among the heaviest in the process. The first is about plugging Ukraine into Europe’s common market, including rules for trade, cross-border investment and fair competition. The other spans taxation, industrial and digital policy, jobs, schooling and research.
Ireland, which currently chairs the Council, wants the remaining green-agenda and agriculture-and-cohesion clusters opened before January. Farming looks like the hardest part: Brussels has suggested lasting limits on Ukrainian access to subsidies, which Kyiv rejects. And opening chapters is not the same as closing them, which will require unanimity at every turn.
