The European Union is officially starting full membership negotiations with Ukraine and Moldova on June 25.
They are rushing to formalize Ukraine's EU membership process before Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban takes over the EU Presidency on July 1. This is because Orban's government, which will determine the policies of the EU for six months, could freeze Ukraine's accession process.
Hungary will set the weekly agenda until Dec. 31, chair the ministerial meetings in Brussels and effectively decide which issues will be prioritized and which will be pushed to the bottom of the list.
Afterward, the process can continue from where it left off. Criteria like Maastricht or Copenhagen are not obstacles for Ukraine, which had its procedures initiated just six months after its application. These conditions have been placed only before Türkiye, which has been waiting at the door for 70 years. They have already violated the rule of not admitting a country with border disputes into the EU by admitting Greek Cypriots. Moreover, they did so by leaving out the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), which said "yes" in the island's unification referendum while the Greeks in the south said "no."
I am not saying this to express disappointment or complain about the double standards that everyone now accepts. On the contrary, looking at the situation Ukraine has been dragged into with its dream of integration with the West, as Türkiye, I am relieved and think, "We dodged a bullet."
We all witnessed it live. In the gamble of NATO expansion, Ukraine, which was taken over in 15 years by installing pro-Western governments, was sacrificed before our eyes. Now, with the EU carrot, they want to continue using Ukraine as a pawn against the China-Russia alliance for a while longer. By not inviting Russia, a party to the war, to the "Peace Conference" in Switzerland, they demonstrated their determination to escalate the crisis and provoke Putin. They need a pawn to maintain the tension without getting their hands dirty.
Recently, at the G-20 Summit in the Apulia region, the project that U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen described as "not theft" was accepted. It was approved to give $50 billion from seized Russian assets to Ukraine.
Is this lawlessness, this primitive blockade pushing Putin toward North Korea a surprise, or was it a foreseen development?
How many more years will this war, in which the West has invested to continue, last? And if it ever ends, do you think there will still be a Ukraine left to join the EU?
Poor Ukrainian people... They have lost their lives, families, jobs and homes. Millions of them have been scattered all over the world. As if what they have already endured was not enough, now they are being distracted by the EU fairy tale. Who knows, maybe there are even some among them who are rejoicing, thinking "Hooray, we are going to join the EU."
What more needs to happen for them to realize that the West does not see them as "Europeans" and that this adventure will only lead to more destruction?
If Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had listened to the advice of mediator Türkiye rather than that of the United States and the EU, at the meeting held in Istanbul in March 2022, the crisis might not have deepened this much, and the consequences might have been less severe.
