The Council of the European Union said the second accession conference with Ukraine was held in Luxembourg on 15 June and opened negotiations on Cluster 1, known as “Fundamentals”. In a separate release the same day, the Council said Moldova had reached the same milestone by opening negotiations on the first cluster. European Council President Antonio Costa and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had said on 12 June that member states had agreed to open the cluster for both countries.
Cluster 1 is not a ceremonial heading. The Council said it covers the functioning of democratic institutions, public administration reform and economic criteria. For Moldova, the Council listed chapters on judiciary and fundamental rights, justice, freedom and security, public procurement, statistics and financial control. It also said the fundamentals cluster is the first to open and the last to close, and that progress under it determines the overall pace of negotiations.
That design is the point. Enlargement is often described in geographic or historical terms, especially for Ukraine during Russia’s war. The accession machinery is more exacting. Countries must align with EU law and show that institutions can apply it. AP reported that Ukraine’s path requires alignment across 35 policy chapters, with the first phase centred on rule of law, democratic institutions and corruption control.
The war gives Ukraine’s bid its urgency, but it does not suspend the EU’s method. If anything, it makes the fundamentals cluster more important. A country can be strategically indispensable and still have to prove that courts, procurement systems, statistics and financial controls can withstand membership. Brussels is trying to reconcile those two truths without turning accession into either charity or geopolitics alone.
Moldova’s case carries a related lesson. The Council said the EU set interim benchmarks for the horizontal level of the cluster and the rule-of-law chapters, and that those benchmarks must be met before the process can move into its concluding phase. That gives the Commission and member states tools to slow the process if reforms stall. It also gives Chisinau a clearer map of what counts as progress.