The European Union opened two new blocks of Ukraine's accession negotiations in Luxembourg on Tuesday: cluster 2, on the internal market, and cluster 3, on competitiveness and inclusive growth. Kyiv now has four of the six clusters open — and the deadlock that had stalled the process since mid-year broke the day before, when Hungary released the decision.
The meeting was the 4th Accession Conference with Ukraine. The EU delegation was led by Thomas Byrne, Ireland's Minister of State for European Affairs and Defence, on behalf of the Irish Presidency of the Council of the European Union, with Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos taking part. Ukraine's delegation was headed by Deputy Prime Minister Vsevolod Chentsov.
"We have today reached another milestone on Ukraine's EU membership journey," Byrne said, according to the statement released by the Council of the European Union. The same two clusters were opened on the same day for Moldova, which is negotiating in parallel.
What Hungary demanded
Opening a cluster requires unanimity among the 27 member states, and Budapest was for months the only capital withholding it. The Hungarian government tied any progress to guarantees for the Hungarian minority living in Ukraine — a dispute going back to Ukraine's 2015 education law and 2017 language law, which restricted the use of minority languages in schools.
The tone shifted after Péter Magyar won Hungary's April election and replaced Viktor Orbán's blanket blocking with point-by-point bargaining: Budapest began demanding concrete commitments rather than freezing the process as a whole. The final understanding came after talks in Luxembourg on Monday between Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha and his Hungarian counterpart, Anita Orbán, according to Euronews. The 27 approved the negotiating positions the same day.
What the minority law says
The key piece was passed by the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine's parliament, in two readings in a single sitting. The amendments to the education law create a distinct legal status for schools where more than half of pupils study in a minority language that is an official EU language — a test that covers Hungarian, Romanian and Bulgarian, and leaves Russian outside the law's scope.
Schools that already qualified when the law took effect keep that status as long as at least 20% of their pupils still study in the language. The text also widens the use of minority languages in school activities and communication, adds safeguards for native-language teaching when schools are reorganised or closed, and lets pupils request translated exam questions, except in language and literature subjects. Ukrainian remains the language of state education.
For Transparency International Ukraine, the episode showed political will more than reform progress: "A significant part of the reforms from the Roadmap is still ahead," said Andrii Borovyk, the organisation's executive director, who considers the overall pace behind the targets set in June.
Four of six — and what is left
Still pending are cluster 4, on the Green Agenda, and cluster 5, on resources, agriculture and cohesion — the latter seen as the most contentious, because folding Ukraine's farm sector into the Common Agricultural Policy touches subsidies and competition in countries with a strong rural lobby.
Opening a cluster is also not the same as closing it: each block must be closed by unanimity too, so any one of the 27 can stall the process later on. Hungarian and Ukrainian diplomats are working to arrange a first bilateral meeting between Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Magyar, possibly on the sidelines of this week's European summit in Brussels — with no date set and no official confirmation.
With information from the Council of the European Union, Euronews and United24 Media.
