EU Roadmaps Put Montenegro First and Moldova Ahead of Ukraine

BRUSSELS, Nov. 5, 2026 — The European Commission has published its first EU accession roadmaps, with dated milestones for four candidate countries already in membership talks. In the roadmaps, Montenegro is on track to sign an accession treaty in June 2027, Albania aims to finish talks by the end of 2027, and Moldova is scheduled to close far more negotiating chapters next year than Ukraine.

The roadmaps are annexes to the Commission’s annual enlargement communication, COM(2026) 690, released on Wednesday. The Commission’s summary of the package also found significant progress in North Macedonia, uneven progress in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo, a continued standstill with Türkiye and a halted accession process for Georgia.

What the document says

The communication says the roadmaps build “on experience from the 2004 and 2013 enlargements” and will give the talks “greater predictability.” They come with a caveat that appears in every annex: the roadmaps “prejudge neither the outcome nor the pace of negotiations or any decision taken by the Council, the Commission or the European Parliament.” The Commission says it may update them once a year.

The document counts 16 intergovernmental conferences, the formal meetings where chapters are opened and closed, since October 2025. Each of the 35 negotiating chapters covers one area of EU law, such as taxation, energy or the judiciary. Opening or closing any chapter requires the unanimous agreement of all EU member states, according to a Congressional Research Service overview of the process.

The four roadmaps compared

| Country | Status in the 2026 report | Next steps in the roadmap | Target | |—|—|—|—| | Montenegro | 21 chapters closed, 14 this year; all closing benchmarks met | 5 chapters at the November conference, 9 in December; final conference December 2026; draft treaty spring 2027 | Treaty signature, indicative June 2027 | | Albania | All clusters opened in just over a year; 4 chapters closed, 31 remaining | 6 chapters in the rest of 2026, 10 in the first half of 2027, 15 in the second half, with the rule-of-law cluster closed last | Close talks by end of 2027, which the Commission calls “ambitious but achievable” | | Moldova | 4 of 6 clusters opened (June, July, October); “very substantial progress” toward interim rule-of-law benchmarks | Open clusters 4 and 5 by end of 2026; 25 chapters scheduled to close in 2027 (9 in the first half, 16 in the second) | Provisionally close talks by early 2028, “ambitious but achievable” if the current pace holds | | Ukraine | Same 4 clusters opened on the same dates; rule-of-law task force launched in October | Open clusters 4 and 5 by end of 2026; meet interim benchmarks in the first half of 2027; 7 chapters scheduled to close in 2027 (1, then 6) | Close talks by end of 2028, which the Commission says requires “an acceleration of the pace of reforms” |

The chapter counts for Moldova and Ukraine are our count of the priority lists in Annexes III and IV. Both annexes state that “all 35 chapters and cluster 1” remain to be closed. Some press summaries have given slightly different totals.

Moldova and Ukraine: one track, two speeds

Until now, the EU has moved Moldova and Ukraine forward as a pair. Both won candidate status in June 2022 and opened talks in June 2024, CRS notes in its report on Moldova. The 2026 roadmaps keep the two countries in step through the end of this year, with both due to open their last two clusters. After that, the plans diverge. Moldova’s 2027 list covers most of the single-market chapters. Ukraine’s covers education, science, intellectual property, social policy, enterprise, external relations and foreign and security policy.

The Kyiv Independent reported that the tandem is set to end once the final clusters open in December. In October, President Volodymyr Zelensky argued for keeping the pair together: “Moldova and Ukraine are certainly stronger when we move forward on this track together… because it is fair,” he said, according to the outlet.

Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign policy chief, defended Ukraine’s record at the press conference launching the package. “Ukraine is carrying sweeping reforms under Russian bombs, no candidate country has ever undertaken reforms of this scale while being at war,” she said. She added: “we should move to open all negotiation clusters before the end of the year.”

Security moves to the center

This year’s report is the first with a dedicated section on security and defense, Kallas said. “Enlargement is direct investment in Europe’s security,” she told reporters, and “gray zone attacks and sabotage against Europe are on the rise.” On Tuesday’s U.S. elections, she said: “I hope that the new Congress and the new Senate will continue supporting Ukraine.”

The roadmaps also extend “gradual integration,” which gives candidates parts of membership before they join. According to the communication, Moldova has joined the Single European Payments Area (SEPA), the Roam Like at Home area and the Common Transit Convention. Ukraine joined Roam Like at Home on Jan. 1, 2026. The document links Ukraine’s SEPA prospects to aligning its laws on money laundering and terrorist financing with EU rules.

Analysis: why it matters

The roadmaps turn a process known for open-ended delays into a schedule with dates that member states can hold candidates to, and that candidates can hold Brussels to. That works in both directions. A dated plan makes it harder for a single capital to stall quietly, because a delay would show up against a published timetable. But every closing still needs unanimity, and the caveat in each annex lets the EU slow down without breaking a promise.

Montenegro is the near-term test. If its final conference happens in December and the treaty is signed in mid-2027, it would be the first new member since Croatia in 2013. Even then, ratification by every member state comes next, a step a 2021 CRS overview says has typically taken one to two years.

The sharper political question is Ukraine. The roadmaps put in writing that, on current plans, Moldova would close more than three times as many chapters as Ukraine in 2027. The Commission’s message is that Ukraine’s 2028 goal is possible only with faster rule-of-law reform. Kallas is framing enlargement as security policy at the same moment the Commission is applying the usual reform tests. Watch three things: whether clusters 4 and 5 open for both countries at the December conference, whether Ukraine meets its interim benchmarks by mid-2027, and whether any member state uses its veto on chapter closings to hold up the schedule.

Sources

• European Commission: 2026 Communication on EU Enlargement Policy and roadmaps, COM(2026) 690 (PDF)
• European Commission: Assessing candidate countries’ progress towards EU membership (Nov. 4, 2026)
• EEAS: Enlargement package press conference by Kaja Kallas and the Commissioner
• Kyiv Independent: Moldova outpaces Ukraine on new EU membership roadmap
• Congressional Research Service: European Union Enlargement, RS21344
• Congressional Research Service: Moldova: Background and U.S. Policy, R48664

Additional sources

• Congressional Research Service: European Union Enlargement, RS21344 (explains the 2020 revised methodology that grouped the 35 chapters into six thematic clusters, and describes long-standing U.S. support for EU enlargement)
• Kyiv Independent: Moldova outpaces Ukraine on new EU membership roadmap (reports that Ukraine’s rule-of-law task force is chaired by Prime Minister Serhii Koretskyi, and quotes the Commission as saying enlargement “is advancing more than at any point in time in the past 15 years”)
• Congressional Research Service: Moldova: Background and U.S. Policy, R48664 (notes that Moldova’s 2024 EU referendum passed 50.4% to 49.6% and that Russia keeps an estimated 1,500 troops in Transnistria)

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