One of the consequences of the 2022 escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian war was the reactivation of the EU enlargement agenda and the alteration of its geopolitical context. With six of the nine current EU candidate countries being Orthodox-majority states, religion has gained renewed relevance within enlargement debates. Partially, this resurgence of interest is linked to the long-standing ambivalence surrounding Orthodoxy’s place in the European project — an ambivalence reinforced by post-Cold War civilisational narratives and perceived historical divergences between Eastern and Western Christian political traditions. In the contemporary war context, this discussion has acquired sharper political contours. Orthodoxy has been actively instrumentalised not only for legitimising the war itself but also more broadly as a channel of influence aimed at reversing the geopolitical orientation of Orthodox-majority states. Within this debate, religious rights — particularly freedom of religion or belief — have gained new political weight, raising questions about how such rights are to be assessed in accession processes shaped by security pressures.
This paper examines how freedom of religion or belief is framed in debates on the prospective EU membership of three Eastern European candidates: Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia. It contrasts European Parliament discourse with the European Commission’s technical assessments in the Enlargement Package, drawing on post-2022 parliamentary resolutions, parliamentary questions, and country reports (2023–2025). By comparing political and technical institutional logics, the paper identifies asymmetries in institutional approaches to religion, highlighting an uneven readiness to engage with the instrumentalisation and politicisation of freedom of religion, and the dilemmas that arise when enlargement policy intersects with security pressures.
