June 4 (Reuters) – President Volodymyr Zelenskiy pledged on Thursday that Ukraine would keep to a clear timetable in talks on joining the European Union and in sticking to its obligations with the 27-nation bloc.
Zelenskiy was speaking a day after the EU’s rotating presidency under Cyprus said it had started preparing to open negotiations on the first group of negotiating chapters with Ukraine and neighbouring Moldova. The first chapter covers rule-of-law and democratic standards.
“We will have a very clear schedule for moving forward in these talks, especially after changes in Hungary,” Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address.
“We have kept to the schedule and now in June we very much expect the opening of (negotiating) clusters for which Ukraine has prepared. We have done our part of the work. The next step is up to the European Union.”
Agreement to proceed with the talks followed an announcement by Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Magyar that his country had reached an agreement with Kiev on the rights of Ukraine’s 100,000-strong ethnic Hungarian community.
Magyar had previously said that agreement on the long-running dispute was essential if Budapest were to agree to Ukraine joining the EU. Magyar’s predecessor, nationalist Viktor Orban, had opposed Ukrainian EU membership.
Zelenskiy has long pressed for Ukraine to join the EU as a means of anchoring Western values in the country more than four years into its war with Russia.
He said Ukrainian officials were in contact with the EU every day on membership plans, describing the contact as “important for our motivation”.
He also said Ukraine was meeting European officials to discuss boosting his country’s air defences, coordinating sanctions against Russia and joint arms production.
(Reporting by Ron Popeski and Bogdan Kochubey; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)
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