When the twenty-seven heads of state and government arrive in Brussels on Wednesday for the European Council’s June summit, they will carry with them an agenda that, taken together, amounts to something close to a civilisational reckoning. Ukraine’s accession, the budget that will define the bloc’s priorities for the next seven years, the question of how Europe pays for its own defence — none of these are new to the summit table. What is new is the weight of the moment pressing down on all of them simultaneously.
The week has already produced one result that would, in ordinary times, have commanded the summit’s full attention on its own. On Monday evening in Luxembourg, Ukraine and Moldova formally opened their first cluster of accession negotiation chapters with the European Union — the so-called “fundamentals” cluster covering economic criteria, democratic institutions, and public administration reform. The opening followed a breakthrough that diplomats had spent months carefully engineering: Hungary’s two-year veto on Ukraine’s accession process had finally been lifted, after a back-channel agreement between Budapest and Kyiv on minority language rights for ethnic Hungarians living in Ukraine. Costa and Von der Leyen marked the occasion with a joint statement. “Enlargement is a strategic choice,” they said. “In a world marked by growing uncertainty, a larger European Union is in our common interest.”
That framing is not rhetorical. It is the core argument of the summit, the one that ties its three principal items together. Costa’s invitation letter to leaders, circulated last week, described the dual-track approach — supporting Ukraine while maintaining sanctions pressure on Russia — as “working,” and called on the summit to send “a strong signal of unity.” The political timing was deliberate. Zelenskyy, frustrated since spring by Washington’s pivot toward the Middle East, had explicitly called on Europeans in May to appoint a common representative and take over the diplomatic initiative. Draft summit conclusions seen by the Kyiv Independent indicate that EU leaders are set to endorse language committing the bloc to “step up its engagement” in diplomatic efforts to end the war, in line with the union’s treaty obligation to promote peace. The same draft calls on Russia to agree to a “full, unconditional and immediate ceasefire” before any such engagement can meaningfully begin.
The problem is that Hungary has not finished making its presence felt. Even as the accession process formally opened, Prime Minister Peter Magyar arrived in Brussels signalling his intention to water down the summit conclusions on Ukraine’s EU path, insisting that Kyiv must complete all accession chapters without shortcuts and that no accelerated track should be implied by the summit’s language. Magyar, who defeated Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party in last year’s elections, has presented his approach as a more constructive version of the obstructionism that defined his predecessor — finding compromise rather than flipping tables, as he put it — but the practical effect on the summit’s conclusions is likely to be similar. He has said Hungary will hold a referendum on Ukrainian membership if and when Kyiv completes all 33 negotiating chapters, a process he projects will take ten to fifteen years. The ambition of opening all remaining clusters by summer, which Costa had publicly aired, now faces another round of managed retreat.
Lithuania’s President Gitanas Nausėda put the frustration plainly: individual leaders who try to build their own channels with Moscow represent only their own countries. Europe must speak with one voice. That aspiration — unity, coherence, a single European interlocutor in future peace negotiations — is what the summit’s Ukraine discussions are nominally designed to advance. Whether they will is a different question, and the answer depends less on what the twenty-seven agree to say than on whether Hungary’s new government, having extracted its concessions on minority rights from Kyiv, is prepared to let the enlargement process run at the pace the rest of the bloc intends.
The defence agenda is, by comparison, less contested in principle and more contested in practice. Costa’s letter flagged the crash of a Russian drone carrying explosives into a residential building in Romania as evidence of the “urgency of advancing our shared defence readiness agenda, including by strengthening the EU’s Eastern flank.” That incident — a Russian weapon landing on the territory of a NATO and EU member state — sits behind the summit’s defence discussions not as a rhetorical device but as a concrete reminder of what European unpreparedness looks like when it meets an active war.
The institutional groundwork has been laid quickly. The ReArm Europe Plan, formally titled Readiness 2030, targets €800 billion in defence investment across the bloc, with the Commission raising up to €150 billion through the SAFE instrument — loans to member states for joint procurement in missile defence, drones, and cyber capabilities. As of February, seventeen member states had activated the national escape clause in the Stability and Growth Pact, allowing them to increase defence spending outside normal fiscal constraints; the flexibility runs for four years and allows annual excess spending of up to 1.5% of GDP. A deal reached just last week between the Council presidency and Parliament negotiators will simplify the legal and administrative framework for the defence sector, and includes a landmark provision associating Ukraine with the European Defence Fund.
The summit will not resolve the deeper question that hangs over all of it: how to finance new defence priorities within an MFF that is already under severe pressure from every direction. The Commission has proposed €131 billion for defence and space in the 2028–2034 budget. Against the headline ambition of €800 billion in total investment, that figure is relatively modest — the expectation being that the bulk comes from national budgets and the SAFE loan instrument, with EU-level allocation providing coordination and a political signal rather than the primary financial firepower. But the MFF negotiations themselves are not resolved, and the summit is not expected to close them. The European Parliament Think Tank’s outlook for the summit noted that while a negotiating box with figures is now on the table — prepared under the Cyprus presidency — the real challenge will be making progress on the revenue side, including new own resources. The October summit is pencilled in as the next substantive moment for MFF progress.
Leaders will also hold what the Council’s agenda describes as a “strategic debate on global macroeconomic imbalances” over dinner — a discussion framed around competitiveness, global economic asymmetries between Chinese overproduction and American overconsumption, and Europe’s position in between. China is unlikely to be named in the conclusions; it rarely is, at this level, in this format. But the intellectual content of the conversation will be about China, and about whether the EU’s own trade and industrial policy is calibrated for a world in which Washington is no longer a reliable partner on multilateral rules.
All of which brings the summit back to its underlying theme. The enlargement opening on Monday, the defence readiness agenda, the budget negotiations, the push for a European role in Ukraine peace talks — these are not separate policy tracks. They are, taken together, a single European argument: that the bloc is prepared to take responsibility for its own neighbourhood, its own security, and its own future, in a period when the external guarantors it has relied on for seventy years are less reliable than they were. Whether the twenty-seven can agree on what that responsibility actually requires — in practical terms, in budgetary terms, in diplomatic terms — is what the next two days will determine.
Zelensky left the session with EU leaders early on Wednesday evening, pausing before journalists on his way out. “Partners are great, they are our friends,” he said. “We will open all the clusters, I am sure of this.” Whether Budapest agrees, and on what timetable, is the question that will outlast this summit, as it has outlasted every one before it.
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