Domotor questions who would end up paying for Ukraine’s EU membership and at what cost

“This is a serious question, and we haven’t yet got an answer,” Csaba Domotor, a parliamentary cabinet state secretary, said in a video posted on Facebook on Saturday.

Top EU officials who were in Kiev in the past few days said that almost all conditions for accession talks to begin had been met, he said, adding that “this may be all very well, but how much is this going to cost?”

Noting that Ukraine “is a huge country” whose development was well below that of the EU average, the country would require “massive amounts of support”. Yet, he added, no one had attached a price to the policy.

Referring to a Financial Times article, he said a document leaked from Brussels indicated that all EU member states would have to pay more into the EU budget and receive less from it.

Ukraine would receive 61 billion euros from the cohesion fund with the consequence that under the mechanism for distributing funds “at least 9 member states” would no longer be entitled to cohesion subsidies, Domotor said.

Neither would Ukraine’s accession have an insignificant impact on agricultural subsidies, he said. With its 41 million hectares, the country would be the EU’s largest recipient of farm payments.

So countries like Hungary would find subsidies per hectare falling by 20 percent. Also, Ukrainian grain would push down prices and lead the way to genetically modified imports.

“Besides, how can we be expected to give extra money when we haven’t received funding owed to us for years?” he said.