Implementation of the EU Financial Acquis by Ukraine

The article analyzes the status of Ukraine’s implementation of the EU financial acquis in a staged manner. The purpose of the study is to clarify the ideological and methodological issues of implementation of the EU financial acquis into Ukrainian legislation; to analyze the general principles of legal regulation of the financial services market; to comprehend the main achievements and challenges of the EU acquis implementation in the banking sector. The methodological tools used in this study are mainly the general scientific principles of objectivity and historicism, and the methods of comparative legal and functional analysis. The author concludes that Ukraine’s activities in this area have become systematic since the entry into force of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement. The study emphasizes that in the process of implementing the Agreement, due to the change in the strategic goal of cooperation between Ukraine and the European Union, the scope of the EU financial acquis to be implemented by Ukraine has increased several times, and new historical challenges to Ukraine, mainly in the form of Russia’s military aggression, on the contrary, have sharply reduced the time period allocated for its implementation. It is proved that the quintessence of ideological and methodological challenges for Ukraine in this area of activity is due to the dual nature of the EU financial acquis: directives under the EU public legal order are subject to mandatory transposition into the national legislation of the EU member states, while regulations do not require such transposition. Due to the latter, there is a significant lag in the implementation of regulations in Ukraine. This explains the fact that Ukraine is currently at the third level – some compliance – out of all nine levels of implementation of the EU financial acquis. Of all the components of the EU financial acquis, Ukraine has implemented the general principles of legal regulation of the financial services market and the EU acquis in the field of banking services to the greatest extent. At the same time, Ukraine has not avoided serious mistakes. They relate mainly to its misperception of the fundamental objectives and mechanisms of the EU acquis in the field of banking services, as well as to the introduction by the national legislator of a method of protection of the violated right of a depositor of a systemically important bank in the event of its withdrawal from the financial market by the regulator which does not meet the EU standards.