Partners news

Tuesday, August 10

Boryspil Airport opened a ‘mass vaccination center’ yesterday, where Ukrainians and foreigners with residence permits can get vaccinated on a first come, first served basis, the airport reports. Working from 9 am to 3 pm on ground floor of Terminal D, the center ...

Kyiv Boryspil airport handled almost 1.2 million passengers in July – 72% of the pre-pandemic level of July, 2019. Kharkiv airport handled 148,000 passengers in July – 13% more than in July, 2019. International traffic was 24% higher than in July, 2019. Lviv airport handled 251,000 passengers in July — 3% mo...

Betting on the comeback of air travel, Wizz Air is hiring 300 new pilots by the end of this year and plans to hire a total of 4,600 new pilots by 2030. Central Europe’s largest discount carrier, Budapest-based Wizz Air has Ukraine bases in Lviv and Kyiv Sikorsky.

Editor’s Note: Beyond the daily static, a banker and I agreed over lunch yesterday that many numbers look pretty good for Ukraine – high export prices for iron, steel and grain; IT growing at double digits; reserves...

Monday, August 9

Cherkasy Airport, once one of the busiest in the Soviet Union, will reopen next year for charter and scheduled flights, Prime Minister Shmyhal said after an inspection on Friday. Over the last three years, the runway and the terminal have been repaired. Serving a region of 1.2 million people, Cherkasy suffers from comp...

Ukraine will hold 150 events nationwide to mark the nation’s 30th Independence Day on Aug. 24. The Culture Ministry has posted an interactive map showing a calendar of events in each region. In Kyiv, one highlight will be a parade down Kreschatyk with 5,000 soldiers and 400 armored units. There...

Editor’s Note: Russia never ceases to come up with amazing coincidences. In the early morning hours of Jan. 8, 2020, of the dozen commercial airliners that took off from Tehran International Airport, the only plane ...

Friday, August 6

Belarus ‘president’ Alexander Lukashenko called Ukraine an “additional threat” yesterday and vowed to close the 1,084 km land border. “From today, no one from the west or south should set foot in Belarus,” Lukashenko said. “Close every meter of the border.” On July 2, Lukashenko ordered the border closed, but apparently the closing ...

Tense bilateral relations have taken their toll on trade and tourism. In the first half of this year, 115,000 Belarusians entered Ukraine, only 25% the level of the first half of last year, Artem Shevchenko, spokesman for Ukraine’s Internal Affairs Ministry, told report...

Travel across the line of control in the Donbas is down by 95% compared to 2019, according to statistics supplied by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. During the first six months of this year, there were 311,000 crossings registered at checkpoints in Luha...

Racing the spread of the Delta variant of Covid-19, 159,121 people were vaccinated on Wednesday. To date, 6 million Ukrainians – about 20% of the adult population — have received one or two doses. To date, there are 143 known cases of the highly ...

Starting today, Ukraine mandates airport PCR testing for all arriving unvaccinated Ukrainians and foreigners . Ukrainians who traveled abroad before Wednesday are exempt. People arriving from India and Russia have to self-isolate for two weeks. On arrival, by land or air, all unvaccinated Ukrainians and fore...

“US plans to require COVID-19 shots for foreign travelers,” headlined an AP story yesterday from Washington. “No timeline has yet been determined,” the story said. “Eventually all foreign citizens entering the country, with some limited exceptions, are expecte...

Editor’s Note : As the US moves to join the EU in requiring an internationally recognized vaccination passport, the lure of getting vaccinated in Ukraine is fading. Not only is there a tedious bureaucratic obstacle c...

Thursday, August 5

Used car imports jumped by 40% during the first half of this year, compared to January-June of 2020, reports Ukravtoprom, the car industry association. In June, used cars accounted for 80% of first time car sales. Of the 195,5000 used cars sold, the most popular bran...

New car sales jumped by 28% during January-July, compared to same period last year, reports Ukravtoprom. Of the 58,100 new cars on Ukraine’s roads, the sales leaders were: Toyota, Renault, Kia, Skoda and Hyundai. At current rates, Ukraine will impor...

More than 17,000 cars illegally imported from the EU were legalized during a 6-week low tax amnesty that ended July 31, reports the State Customs Service. More than $22 million in duties were paid. The leading regions for car legalizations were: Zakapattia – 2,797; Kyiv – 1,539; Odesa – 1,487; Chernivsti – 1,455; and L...

The National Security and Defense Council instructed the Cabinet of Ministers to assign the duties of CEO of Ukrzaliznytsia to Infrastructure Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov . If approved by the railroad’s Supervisory Board, Kubrakov would succeed Ivan Yuryk and become the fourth head of the railroad in the two years of the Zelenskiy presidency. The Council also formally ...

Through radical cost cutting, UIA turned a $108 million loss in the first half of last year into $810,000 net profit for January-June of this year , the airline reports. During the first half of this year, Ukraine’s national flag airline carried 1 million passengers, up 8% yoy, but down 71% compared to the first half of 2019.

Today, Ukraine International Airlines carries almost twice as many passengers on charter flights than on regularly scheduled flights, the airline reports. By comparison, during the first half of 2019, only 2% of UIA passengers flew charter. UIA carried out 2,039 regularly scheduled flights during the first half of this year – an 85%...

With international air travel repeatedly disrupted by lockdowns, UIA says it has refunded $44 million to ticket holders since April 2020. Air cargo during the first half of this year totaled only 1,937 tons, 82% less than in the first half 2019.

Summer travel from Lviv is off to a strong start. Passenger traffic at the airport hit 251,000 in July – 3% more than July 2019. The number of flights – 2,144 – was up 11% yoy. From January to July, traffic numbers were 763,400 – 36% below the same p...

Ukrainians were the largest nationality among foreign tourists visiting Turkey during the second quarter, reports TurkStat. From April to June, 349,196 Ukrainians visited Turkey, more than the 236,307 from Germany and more than triple the number of Russians. Russian tourism was down after the Kremlin susp...

Where will you fly next? The State Aviation Administration has approved several new routes. SkyUp won the rights to from Kyiv Boryspil to Kuwait, to Funchal (Madeira), Portugal and, from Kyiv and Lviv to Bahrain. Bees Airline...

Editor’s Note : Bottled up for a year, travel mania has exploded. I am hearing of long weekend trips to Greece, France, Turkey. On quiet afternoons in Kyiv, you could fry an egg on the empty cobblestones. Vaccine res...

Wednesday, August 4

After a slow start, Ukraine’s coronavirus vaccination campaign is now one of the fastest in Europe, Yuriy Hanychenko, head of the Kyis School of Economic Center for Health Care Economics, said yesterday in an online briefing on Covid-19. “Every week, Ukraine is vaccinating 1.3% of the population,” h...

With 5 million more vaccines arriving in August, health authorities plan to administer 50% more shots this month than last, Health Minister Viktor Liashko writes on Facebook. With a Delta virus epidemic expected to start in Ukraine by the end of August, the vaccination campaign is a race against time.

Dnipro will provide free metro and tramway passes to all residents who are fully vaccinated, Mayor Boris Filatov wrote Monday on Facebook. In addition, all city employees must be vaccinated – or undergo weekly tests. He wrote: “Now all my subordinates are obliged to be vaccinated, and if they...

Today, the Carpathian Office of Ukrainian–Polish Cooperation opens in the Karpaty Hotel in Truskavets, Lviv region. The goal of the Office is promote tourism and investment in the Eastern Carpathians, a region including Eastern Poland and Western Ukraine. Branch offices are to open in other Carpathian mountain town...

Catering to Ukraine’s migrant workers in Poland, FlixBus is launching a new cross-country route – from Kharkiv to Lutsk to Lublin to Warsaw. With the expansion, FlixBus will serve all of Ukraine’s 24 regional capitals, largely with routes to Central Europe and the Baltics.

Nervous about the brain drain to Ukraine, Belarus’ government may be behind Monday’s murder in Kyiv of Vitaliy Shyshov, exiles told the UBN yesterday. Shyshov ran Belarusian House, an NGO devoted to helping Belarusia emigrants find work and housing in Ukraine. For the last year, Ukraine’s Ministry of Digitalization has...

Editor’s Note: When elites cling to power by murdering their children, the handwriting is on the wall for the regime. The crowd of Belarusian exiles gathered in Kyiv last night were of the same generation as the man...

Tuesday, August 3

Two prominent, US-trained economic officials exchanged punches last week in an argument over a government post, reports the Kyiv Post. Former Finance Minister Oleksandr Danyliuk was disqualified July 29 from running for head of the newly created Bureau of Economic Security. Danyliuk was disqualified for not pro...

Ukraine’s “largest and most modern sports cluster” will be created on 22 hectares of southern Kyiv’s Stalin-era VDNH Expocenter , Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy presidential chief of staff, writes on Facebook. Without citing a timeline or a budget figure, Tymoshenko says the project by Lithuanian urbanist Tadas Yonauskis includes a...

July’s average monthly air temperature in Kyiv was 24.6°C (76°F), or 3.3°C (6°F) above the climatic norm, according to data from the Borys Sreznevsky Central Geophysical Observatory. For more than half of the days in July – 17 — temperatures rose above 30°C (86°F). Four temperature records were set ...

Preparing for a fourth Covid wave, the government plans to require vaccinations of teachers, restaurant and hotel workers and store clerks, Mykhailo Radutsky, head of the Rada Health Committee, writes on Facebook. He says half of Ukraine’s teachers are already vaccinated.

Health officials are testing a QR code certificate that would give vaccinated people special access to concerts and other public gatherings , Ihor Kuzin, Ukraine’s Chief Sanitary Doctor, says in a lenthy interview with Ukrayinska Pravda. He says: “We will consider it after the testing is complete. It will be a QR code that will prove its ...

Ukrainians with an international vaccination certificate attesting to two shots of AstraZeneca, Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines can now travel to 23 European countries: France, Spain, Sweden, Germany, Finland, Italy, Romania, Greece, Bulgaria, Austria, Serbia, Georgia, Lithuania, Latvia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovakia, Switzerland, Moldova, Turkey, Sloveni...

Gearing up for EU work, travel or study, 1.2 million Ukrainians have obtained biometric passports since the start of the year . Almost half a million were issued in June and July. A biometric passport allows the Ukrainian holder to visit the EU for 90 days at a stretch without a visa.

Editor’s Note: Preparing for my US vaccination vacation this month, I made a run out to Boryspil Airport yesterday. A friend sneered that I would sit in traffic due to reconstruction of the 17 km access highway. So,...

Monday, August 2

As part of a drive to privatize all state bakeries, the Radyvyliv Bakery in Rivne region will be auctioned off Aug. 30, the State Property Fund reports on Facebook. The starting price is $5.3 million for a complex that includes 414 hectares and 65,000 ...

As many as 100,000 bicycles stolen in Germany every year are sold in Ukraine, reads a Deutsche Welle article headlined: “How Germany’s stolen bikes end up in Ukraine.” Last year, more than 260,000 bicycles were stolen in Germany with a total value of almost €200 million. ...

Starting next Sunday, UIA starts flying twice a week between Kyiv Boryspil and Nice. SkyUp follows suit on the same route on Aug. 19. In addition, on Aug. 20, SkyUp starts flying three times a week between Kyiv Boryspil and Paris Beauvais. To enter France, foreigners need a vaccinatio...

Starting Thursday, all foreigners and un-vaccinated Ukrainians entering Ukraine will have to enroll on arrival in the bilingual English-Ukrainian Vdoma app . Within three days, they have to take a Covid test, If negative, they are disconnected from Vdoma. If positive, they must undergo 10 days of self-isolation.

Editor’s Note : Would NATO go to war over Snake Island? Russia may gamble no. That is one subtext in an essay for The Hill by Harlan Ullman: “Is Ukraine Putin’s Taiwan?” In 2009, the International Court of Justice ad...

Friday, July 30

Editor’s Note: In their joint statement on Nord Stream 2, Berlin and Washington repeatedly threaten to retaliate if Russia uses “energy as a weapon.” Why threaten? Why not act now? It is happening now. Gazprom is pi...

Thursday, July 29

Failure to reach an agreement with the IMF and the resignation of one third of top officials at the bank over the last year are the leading complaints against Kyrylo Shevchenko, Governor of the National Bank of Ukraine, reports Economichna Pra...

The hryvnia has crossed the symbolic barrier of 27 to dollar, strengthening to today’s official level of 26.86. To prevent the hryvnia from overvaluing, the central bank has bought $2 billion from the population this year, Bohdan Danylyshyn, chairman of the Nati...

All 12 Republican Senators on the Senate Banking Committee are threatening to block two Treasury nominees unless the Biden administration reverses its stance on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia to Germany and imposes new sanctions on the project, Bloomberg reports from Washington. “We urge you to reverse course on Nord Stream II and join us in Congress’ long-standing def...

With health officials warning of a fourth Covid wave at the end of August , Kyiv is asking all ‘critical’ employers to submit by next Tuesday a list of all employees who will need Metro passes. Preparations for a new lockdown come after Jarno Habicht, head of the World Heal...