The Chairperson of the Committee on Ukraine's Integration into the EU Ivanna Klympush-Tsyntsadze together with the First Deputy Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Oleksandr Korniienko met with Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania Simonas Šatūnas.
Ivanna Klympush-Tsyntsadze thanked Lithuania for its comprehensive and dedicated support of Ukraine. “I admire the fact that Lithuania is now showing leadership and readiness to take on additional work and additional tasks in terms of supporting Ukraine on its European integration path,” the Chair of the Committee said.
The Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania came to Ukraine with a mission to analyse the needs of how Lithuania can help in the negotiation process between Ukraine and the EU to ensure that Ukraine goes through the entire integration process as successfully as possible.
We talked about the need to strengthen institutional capacity and build civil services. “It’s a shame that the developments since 2016 on the civil service reform strategy, which we agreed with the European Union at the time, were crossed out in 2019. And now we are actually starting from scratch. And this is the basis that will help us not only to make our way to membership, but also to be an effective member of the European Union at the central and regional levels. We need to invest as much as possible in training people, in their education, in improving their professional qualities in the civil service and in local authorities,” Ivanna Klympush-Tsyntsadze said.
The parties also discussed the need to strengthen institutional capacity – to increase the number of specialists of both the Committee for Ukraine's Integration into the EU and sectoral committees in the field of European integration. They also discussed the need to amend the rules of procedure of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine to ensure the efficient and high-quality passage of European integration bills through the parliament, which has an extremely important function in the European integration process. “We need to engage various stakeholders in an in-depth discussion to enable us to make the difficult decisions that European integration entails. Unfortunately, martial law imposes certain restrictions. And this is a challenge,” said Ivanna Klympush-Tsyntsadze.
The First Deputy Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada and Chairman of the Committee on Ukraine's Integration into the EU expressed hope that the intergovernmental conference, which will adopt the EU-Ukraine negotiation framework, will take place in late June. “Our Lithuanian colleagues assured us that they are actively working further to ensure this result, so that the EU can actually open negotiations with Ukraine in the first half of this year, and so that we can move on to the next stages of our work – screening, that is, assessing Ukrainian legislation for compliance with EU law,” said Ivanna Klympush-Tsyntsadze.