The EU has finally prolonged duty-free trade with Ukraine, but with safeguards.

The EU Council approved the extension of preferential trade with Ukraine for another year until June 5, 2025. In contrast to similar decisions in previous years, this year the EU decided to continue duty-free trade with Ukraine, but with restrictions. The decision provides two protective mechanisms to safeguard the EU market:

1. A strengthened version of the current protective mechanism will be applied based on regular monitoring, allowing the EC to introduce any measure under certain conditions.
2. A new protective mechanism that will oblige the EC to re-impose quotas if poultry meat, eggs, sugar, oats, corn, cereals, and honey imports exceed the arithmetic average of the quantities imported in the second half of 2021, and in 2022-2023.

The EU’s autonomous trade preferences apply to agricultural goods that are not fully liberalized in the Association Agreement. These are 36 categories of goods for which tariff quotas were provided and goods to which the input price system is applied. Also, anti-dumping measures will not be applied to Ukrainian metal products.