At today’s EU summit, Europe’s leaders will continue their tortuous efforts to agree the shape of a Russian oil embargo. And the next summit at the end of June will prove no less challenging when the question of Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova joining the bloc will be high on the agenda.

The EU’s enlargement process is creaking and close to stalled. And there are major disagreements across member states on what to do about Ukraine’s bid to join. This looks quite a long way from the question of how an independent Scotland, so recently in the EU, could re-join. But enlargement politics and processes can often have a wider fall-out affecting all aspirant members.

Ukraine’s President Zelensky showed real political astuteness, back in February in the early days of the war, in calling for rapid EU accession. This put EU leaders on the spot and led to Georgia and Moldova putting membership bids in too. It has also resulted in a remarkably swift response by the European Commission which will produce its opinion on these bids before the June summit.

Despite the outpouring support for Ukraine, EU splits on enlargement and its detailed, technocratic processes are not to be leap-frogged so easily. Yet Zelensky’s bold pitch in February has led to the real possibility that Ukraine may get EU candidate status in June.

This would be a huge EU shift. Back in the 1990s, when enlargement politics after the fall of the Berlin Wall were in full swing, the EU effectively decided to halt its eastward enlargement at Poland. The three Baltic states got on the membership train but Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova did not. This looked short-sighted at the time, much more so with hindsight.

If the Commission recommends candidate status for Ukraine in June, it will be hard for EU leaders not to agree given the geopolitical context. But it has to be a unanimous decision so there’s no guarantee. While leaders of Nordic, Baltic and central and east European governments have been outspoken on bringing Ukraine into the Union, the western member states have been much more cautious.

France, in particular, never keen on enlargement at the best of times, is emphasising both how long the accession process is and the need to be able to manage and lead the EU at its current size. President Macron’s suggestion in early May of a new European Political Community, that could include non-EU members from Ukraine to the western Balkans to the UK, has been received with a mixture of suspicion in some quarters, not least in Ukraine, and encouragement in others.

So far the EU’s leaders as a group have very deliberately avoided endorsing Ukraine’s EU bid, cautiously recognising its “European aspirations” instead at its March summit. This prevarication will not wash come June. France and Germany could decide that geopolitically they have to give Ukraine candidate status in June but then push that process into the sidings, as they develop some twice-yearly pan-European summits to be labelled the new European Political Community.

One view that unites the pro-enlargement member states with the more reluctant member states is that EU laws and standards cannot be weakened. There is no short-cut to membership. But membership is political not just technical, as the stalled processes of the various six western Balkan candidates and potential candidates underline. The EU’s last enlargement was Croatia almost a decade ago.

Giving candidate status to Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova would be a huge and positive political statement. But accession negotiations may not follow on very quickly, not least while the war continues. The EU would also be negotiating with three countries with part of their territory occupied by Russian troops.

Curiously, there is a relevant EU precedent here. Cyprus joined the EU in 2004, despite the then 30-year division of the island and the presence of Turkish troops in the north. In a somewhat surreal move, the EU declared that its laws and rules applied to the whole island but were suspended in the north. A similar move might be envisaged for Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova although its geopolitical and security implications would be much, much weightier.

There’s a lot of moving parts here. The full implications of Russia’s war in Ukraine for European, and global, political and security relations and stability is yet to be seen. Add EU enlargement politics into that, and where the EU goes next looks unclear indeed. But the EU can at times be bold and strategic – as it was, eventually, with the ‘big bang’ 2004 enlargement.

Scotland and the rest of the UK’s security is impacted by the Ukraine war and by EU decisions on enlargement, despite Brexit removing any UK influence on such choices. But does the EU’s caution and splits on enlargement really change an independent Scotland’s path to the EU?

Overall, it would seem not. Scotland is a peaceful, small, democratic, northern country with a functioning market economy. If Norway or Iceland changed their current stance, it’s difficult to see the EU reacting with the doubts and headaches that enlargement further south and east causes. Even a putative new European Political Community would not necessarily be a drag on an independent Scotland’s EU hopes, if it were a grouping that could be joined rapidly.

And certainly, there is no accession queue: candidates are meant to join as soon as they meet all EU criteria. But there is a risk that a complex, cumbersome enlargement to the East, linked to demands for more political reform in the EU, plus the creation of a new outer European circle of political summits, could entangle all countries aspiring to EU membership in a deliberate accession slowdown, whatever their starting points.

An independent Scotland’s best hope is that its EU membership bid would look straight-forward and easy for the EU to absorb. And that it would be joining an EU that had made the right strategic choice of giving Ukraine a clear path towards the EU.

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