Compliance Negotiations over the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement: Continuity and Change after Ukraine’s EU Candidateship

States’ compliance with the rules set by international treaties has been extensively researched both by international lawyers and political scientists. Compliance literature has identified various factors that explain states’ (non-)abidance by their obligations under international treaties. The above is also true for the EU Studies scholarship, where significant attention is paid to factors that enable or hinder EU and partner countries’ compliance with EU rules. Yet, an aspect that has received limited attention both under International Studies and EU Studies literature deals with compliance negotiations. Jönsson and Tallberg (1998) define such negotiations as "the process of bargaining between the signatories to an agreement already concluded, or between the signatories and the international institution governing the agreement, which pertains to the terms and obligations of this agreement" (p. 372). In our previous work, we advanced the research on compliance negotiations by exploring the phenomenon in the EU ‘integration without membership’ context, using empirical evidence from the implementation of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement (Rabinovych and Pintsch, 2023, forthcoming with the Journal of European Integration). The current paper extends our previous research by exploring whether and to which extent the granting of an EU candidate country status to Ukraine amidst Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country has changed the EU-Ukraine compliance negotiations. Based on interviews with EU and Ukrainian officials involved in various sector reforms, we demonstrate that it has been EU-Ukraine political dialogue that underwent the strongest change due to the rise of EU’s bargaining power in EU-Ukraine negotiations. In contrast, evidence from the environmental sector showcases the continuity of the EU’s non-conflictual problem-solving-oriented approach to compliance negotiations in Ukraine. We conclude that, amidst the war, the EU takes a selective approach towards using its bargaining power over Ukraine, prioritizing "costly" political reforms over sectoral ones.