India, May 28 -- Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic pushed back Wednesday against proposals for an abbreviated EU membership procedure for Ukraine, insisting that Kyiv must clear the same bar as every other candidate country and warning that special shortcuts for one applicant would undermine the credibility of the bloc's enlargement process for all of them.

"If we abandon the concept of so-called individual merits for each country and if there are shortcut procedures, there cannot be a short path for some and a long path for others," Plenkovic told reporters. He added that the fiscal implications of Ukraine's entry, its size, its war-damaged economy, and its agricultural sector, would create budgetary pressure in ways no recent c...