"Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic and the Croatian government strongly support EU membership candidate status for Ukraine," government spokesman Marko Milic said on Tuesday.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed an official application for Ukraine’s accession to the European Union on Monday and addressed an extraordinary session of the European Parliament by video link on Tuesday.

“I believe that today we are showing everybody exactly what we are. The European Union is going to be much stronger with us, that’s for sure. Without you, Ukraine will be lonely,” Zelensky said. Milic recalled that Plenkovic and Zelensky had signed a declaration on the European perspective of Ukraine in Kyiv last December.

“We are among the countries advocating the European perspective of Ukraine and supporting its European reform processes. We think that is the best way for its internal consolidation, for improving living standards for Ukrainians and harmonizing the social market economy,” Plenkovic told a joint press conference with Zelensky at the time.

On Monday, the presidents of Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia said in an open letter that Ukraine “deserves receiving an immediate EU accession perspective.” Croatian President Zoran Milanovic also supported this initiative on Tuesday, saying that the fast-track integration of Ukraine into the European Union was one of the ways to stop the war and prevent it from spreading to other areas of Europe.