As part of REUNIR’s regular EU Presidency briefings, the coordinator on 10 March 2025 presented the main aims and first findings of the project to Mr Paweł Łacki, Chair of the Council’s Working Party on Enlargement and Countries Negotiating Accession to the EU (COELA), and Mr Tomasz Wiśnieski, Head of Unit on EU Enlargement of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Poland. They had an open exchange on the tension between the geopolitical need to accelerate the pre-accession track of Ukraine and the obstacles posed by one member state in particular, delaying the opening of the second Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) on the “fundamentals” cluster. Doubts were cast on the viability of any strategic framework on how to deal with bilateral disputes, noting that similar attempts had proven unsuccessful in the past. This is partly due to individual member states arguing that their claims are closely related to the EU acquis and can therefore not be dealt with outside the formal accession framework, and partly because enforcing a duty of sincere cooperation on such member states is still deemed liable to the principle of unanimity.