Public Procurement as a Foundation of EU Accession: What Ukraine has Already Done and What is Still Expected of Us

Public procurement falls under the first negotiating cluster, “Fundamentals,” which was opened in Luxembourg a few days ago. This cluster is the set of core reforms by which the EU judges whether a candidate country is ready to join the Union. It includes chapters on the independence and effectiveness of the judiciary, the fight against corruption, the transparency and accuracy of data, and public procurement and financial control.

Why did public procurement end up in Fundamentals? As things stand, up to two trillion hryvnias pass through Prozorro each year — roughly half of Ukraine’s entire 2025 budget. Public procurement is therefore the foundation of how effectively the country spends its money. And the European Union is not only a political union but an economic one. So economic indicators and reforms weigh just as heavily on the decision to admit Ukraine as those concerning, say, the rule of law and justice. From this angle, it is equally clear why financial control belongs in Fundamentals — it is the oversight of how effectively the budget is spent.

Just before the negotiations opened, Ukraine took an important step toward European integration in this area: it passed the new Law on Public Procurement. Its purpose was to bring our procurement legislation into fuller alignment with the European directives. Fuller — because we had already implemented a substantial part of this harmonization under the Association Agreement between Ukraine and the EU.

Now we are waiting for feedback from the European Commission on how well the adopted law meets its requirements. In this piece, we look at what is expected of us next.

Final alignment of legislation

So we are still awaiting feedback on the newly adopted Law on Public Procurement. But under the Ukraine Facility we have a firm deadline by which our rules in this area must fully comply with the EU directives — September 2027.

This stage should not be underestimated. Within the European integration framework, the public procurement chapter also covers public-private partnerships (PPPs) and concessions. These have been somewhat overlooked lately, because international partners focus specifically on public procurement in their key requirements. Yet PPPs and concessions are no less important for European integration.

We updated our dedicated PPP law a year ago. However, in last year’s EU Enlargement Report on Ukraine, the European Commission pointed to a number of its inconsistencies with the directives. Yet Ukraine has so far done nothing to remove them. The final deadline here is the same as the previous one — September 2027.

We also have a great deal of work to do on defense procurement legislation, which likewise belongs to the procurement chapter. Here we are essentially only at the start of the journey — by the end of the year we must draft a concept note on updating the relevant law in line with the EU directives. This document should map out where our current legislation differs from the European framework and describe how we plan to close those gaps. The final deadline for aligning defense procurement legislation has not yet been announced.

In addition, we need to transpose into our legislation the EU directive on procurement by monopolies in certain economic sectors. Our main law on the subject reflects it only in part — for instance, we have a definition of such contracting authorities and thresholds for them. But the bulk of the transposition still has to be carried out. The deadline here, too, is September 2027.

Practical implementation

However, harmonizing the rules is only the first step. Next, their practical implementation has to be ensured. This means, in particular, the secondary legislation that has to spell out the detailed rules and instructions for applying the law, which sets only the general framework. For the new Law on Public Procurement, we need to develop more than 40 such documents. These include, for example, methodologies for estimating the estimated value of procurements — which will help prevent overpayments — and detailed regulations for new European procedures such as the innovation partnership, designed for procuring technological solutions. A separate matter is making the technical changes to the electronic system to adapt it to the updated rules. The deadline for this work will be set once the President signs the adopted law and it is published — from that point we will have nine months to make all the necessary preparations for it to take effect. But will that be enough time? Given the shortage of financial and human resources, there is a real chance that not everything will be done in time. That is why priorities need to be chosen now.

We are already being urged to plan clearly for updating the secondary legislation and for the technical rollout of changes in Prozorro: among its conditions for granting Ukraine macro-financial assistance, the European Commission has singled out the development of a Public Procurement Development Strategy for 2027–2030. This should set out clear indicators and deadlines for gradually adapting the sector to the new law and — beyond secondary legislation and the technical rollout — plan communication activities and training for stakeholders. 

Similar work needs to be done in the area of public-private partnerships. Under the law passed last year, the government must bring its regulations into line with it by September 2026. This involves updating more than 30 pieces of secondary legislation governing, among other things, how a private partner is selected, how the effectiveness of a PPP is assessed, the engagement of advisers, the provision of additional state support, the calculation of concession payments, and so on. Yet the regulatory base is being updated at an extremely slow pace.

For now, the government has simply pushed some of the changes back. For example, the requirement to use Prozorro to select a concessionaire has been postponed until early 2027. This functionality has not yet been built into the system.

This state of affairs with drafting PPP regulations is due partly to a shortage of specialists in the Ministry of Economy unit responsible for this area. International partners, the European Commission in particular, are not actively pushing us toward further changes until we fully align the underlying law itself with the directives.

Protecting business rights and oversight

In the list of accession criteria that European Pravda published in March this year, strengthening oversight and legal protection belonged to the second set of tasks for closing the negotiations — those concerning the practical implementation of legislation. But this is a sizable and weighty set of tasks that can fairly be treated as a separate strand of work. It also partly overlaps with the chapter on financial control.

Let us start with legal protection. The European Commission has set the requirement to ensure the effective functioning of a system of legal remedies, in particular in the areas of PPPs, concessions, and defense procurement — that is, to introduce the right to appeal to the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine. 

On the other hand, the new Law on Public Procurement introduces the right to appeal for a large share of procurement transactions made through Prozorro Market, where businesses previously had no way to defend their rights. The law also replaces some procurements that could be conducted directly during the war with negotiated procedures, which likewise allow for appeals. 

So European integration through these reforms will significantly increase the workload on the AMCU, and strengthening the body’s institutional capacity will only become more pressing. In 2025, the AMCU board that reviews complaints about violations of public procurement law had 6 of the 10 commissioners provided for by law. The body has not announced a competition for the remaining posts, but it will need to, so that the AMCU can handle its expanded range of tasks. 

Another important area is the work of the State Audit Service as the main oversight body in public procurement. It is the body that carries out preventive control — monitoring procurements. Here we have seen positive movement over the past year: auditors have finally been given access to the personal data of offenders so that they can hold them to account. To the same end, the deadlines for going to court have been extended. Auditors have also received expanded powers to oversee EU funds and have developed a Roadmap for strengthening procurement oversight overall. All of this was part of the Ukraine Facility conditions.

A comprehensive overhaul of procurement monitoring remains a challenge. This concerns its preventive nature, its focus on material violations, and the obligations that auditors impose on offenders in their monitoring conclusions, which should be proportionate to the seriousness of the violations. Beyond this, within the financial control chapter we have commitments regarding other functions of the State Audit Service. In particular, for 2026 we received clear condition for part of the European Commission’s macro-financial assistance — to separate the audit and inspection functions within the body.

The opening of the first negotiating cluster should by no means be seen as a finish line. It is rather the start of an enormous amount of work. The reforms within the public procurement and financial control chapters are only a small part of the first cluster — and in the negotiations we will have six such clusters, 35 chapters in all.

There is already word that other clusters may open as early as July, which would let Ukraine advance on several negotiating tracks at once. However, the public procurement and financial control chapters alone are enough to show that a quick conclusion to the negotiations should not be expected. We have plenty of reforms that have stalled in place, and plenty more that have not really even begun. 

That said, it is important to keep in mind that all these changes are needed not only so that Ukraine becomes an EU member. First and foremost, we advocate for these reforms and help the state implement them in order to make it stronger. We need effective public procurement and sound financial control so that a budget constrained by the war is spent wisely. To keep it from being plundered, we are pushing to strengthen the anti-corruption bodies. And the same motivation should apply to every reform we implement in the course of the negotiations. Because the European Union is not an end in itself. We want to be in the EU because it is a civilizational choice and a matter of worldview — to be an effective, democratic, and strong state. 

This material was made possible with the support of the MATRA program of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Ukraine.