EPIC's Integration Readiness Index, published in June 2026 with the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, scores ten EU candidate countries from zero to ten using only European Commission progress reports from 2021 to 2025, benchmarked against Croatia's 2011 position the year before it joined. On that measure Ukraine sits at 5.85 for 2025 — just behind Moldova's 5.87, and ahead of Serbia and North Macedonia, both on 5.5. It is one of the index's clearer findings: two countries that applied only after Russia's full-scale invasion have already out-scored candidates that have waited a decade or more.
The catch is the vintage. Every point in that score reflects Commission assessments filed by the end of 2025. None of it captures what has happened at the negotiating table since — which this year is a great deal.
Ukraine and Moldova opened their first accession negotiating cluster, Fundamentals, on 15 June 2026, and their second, External Relations, on 14 July. Those two clusters cover, respectively, the rule of law and institutional core of the acquis and Ukraine's foreign, security and trade alignment with the Union — widely read as the two hardest blocks to clear, taken first by design. Speaking on 18 September, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine expects two further clusters to open for negotiation in September and October, with a further two unblocked by the end of the year — which would put all six of the EU's negotiating clusters formally open before 2027 begins. He also said Kyiv was still working through a list of issues with Hungary, which has used its veto to slow the process before, and that the government was preparing draft legislation for parliament tied to the talks.
The same week, EU officials confirmed they are examining whether to concentrate most of next year's €45 billion loan tranche — part of the Union's €90 billion commitment to Ukraine — into the opening months of 2027, rather than spreading it across the year as originally planned. The reason is blunt: Kyiv projects a €23.5 billion funding shortfall this year and a further €28.4 billion gap in 2027, as intensified Russian strikes on Ukrainian industry squeeze the tax revenue that funds the state. "It is clear that Ukraine is running out of money more quickly than we thought," Philipp Lausberg, a senior policy analyst at the European Policy Centre, said this week. Other partners had committed only around €15 billion of their expected roughly €45 billion share by March; Norway has since pledged about €7.9 billion for 2027, but an updated total from the rest has yet to materialise. Concentrating payments into early 2027 would ease the start of next year without closing this year's gap or increasing the total on the table.
EPIC's index includes an indicator called Accession Momentum, built to register exactly this kind of diplomatic acceleration, so Ukraine's score should move up when the Commission's next progress reports land in autumn 2026. But two of the index's other four indicators, State of Play and Recommendation Delivery, measure legal and administrative alignment that cannot be rushed by opening a cluster — transposing the acquis into domestic law does not happen on a negotiating timetable, let alone one set by a government simultaneously running a war economy. EPIC's own methodology note is explicit that the index measures the Commission's documented assessment of readiness, not an independent verdict on it — useful for consistency across candidates, less useful as a real-time gauge of a country moving this fast.
Ukraine's candidacy is not at risk of stalling diplomatically — if anything it is moving faster than any accession process in EPIC's ten-country field. The risk the index cannot yet price in is a mismatch between the speed of the talks and the capacity of a wartime state to absorb them: transposing law, building institutions and delivering reforms while also closing a widening budget hole that the EU's own loan mechanism is now scrambling to cover. Brussels can open clusters faster than any previous enlargement round. It cannot, by the same token, guarantee that Kyiv still has the fiscal room to walk through the doors it is opening. If the financing gap outpaces the readiness gap, momentum measured in Brussels will matter less than solvency measured in Kyiv.
