The European Union will grant visa-free regime for Ukrainians by June, according to the Head of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker.
“We have discussed the issue of visa liberalization. It will happen by summer,” he said at a briefing after his meeting with Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman on Feb. 10 in Brussels.
Groysman visited Brussels on Feb. 9-10 as Europe’s attention was pulled toward Ukraine because of Russia-separatist militants’ shelling of Avdiyivka, a Ukrainian forces-controlled city some 14 kilometers north of separatist-occupied Donetsk.
Next in the visa liberalization process are the talks between European Parliament, European Commission and European Council, scheduled to take place on Feb. 28.
Once introduced, the visa-free regime will allow Ukrainians with biometric passports travel to the Schengen countries in the EU as well as Switzerland and Iceland for up to 90 days without a visa.
It is a key issue for Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko as the visa-free regime with EU was one of the main promises of his election campaign in spring of 2014. Since then, he’s been repeating the promise regularly, each time with a new deadline that the country kept missing.
Ukraine and EU first started negotiation the visa-free regime in 2008. In 2010, Ukraine was given a Visa Liberalization Action Plan to help the country meet necessary standards for getting visa-free access to the EU countries.
In December 2015, European Commission recognized that Ukraine fulfilled all necessary demands of the visa-free travel.
The referendum in the Netherlands on the EU-Ukraine association agreement held on April 6 suspended the ratification of the agreement and postponed the visa-free regime adoption in the EU.
In June 2016, Dutch Ministry of Security and Justice Klaas Dikhoff explained that some EU countries still have some objections for granting Ukraine and Georgia a visa-free regime while German Chancellor Angela Merkel linked visa-free travel to the adoption of the visa-free suspension mechanism that would allow the EU to bring back the visas in the case of irregularities.
European Parliament adopted the visa suspension mechanism last December.
“If not for the migration crisis in Europe, we would have got it (visa-free regime) at the end of last year,” Groysman said in an interview to Ukraine’s Channel 112 on Feb. 9.
“I saw the consistent position of the president of the European Council that the visa-free regime for Ukraine will be introduced,” Groysman said adding that it will happen before June.
