The State Aviation Administration of Ukraine (SAAU) has unveiled a raft of changes to the country's domestic and international aviation policies in a bid to improve its accessibility and competitiveness.
In an announcement last week, the SAAU said it was permanently removing restrictions that had, in the past, required native Ukrainians to own more than 50% of the share capital of an airline. Another measure that has been repealed is a law forcing existing majority foreign-owned Ukrainian carriers to operate domestic flights for twelve months before applying for international traffic rights. The restrictions had hampered the launch of the Ukrainian division of Turkey's AtlasGlobal (Istanbul Airport), AtlasGlobal UA (Lviv), and were also blamed for the closure of Wizz Air Ukraine (Kyiv Igor Sikorsky), Wizz Air's now defunct Ukrainian subsidiary.
Internationally, Ukraine has begun opening up its skies to several former Soviet republics. With Armenia and Estonia, it has pledged to remove all restrictions governing the number of weekly flights, and the number of designated carriers and destinations that can be served in either country. With Belarus, the market has been thrown open to all operators from either country while the number of daily frequencies for either side to operate between Minsk National and Kiev has been increased to eleven.
