The governments of Ukraine and Israel have signed a free trade agreement between their two countries, in a move projected to boost bilateral trade turnover.
Ukrainian Economy Minister Stepan Kubiv and his Israeli counterpart, Eli Cohen, signed the agreement on the evening of Jan. 21, during Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s two-day state visit to Jerusalem, which began on Jan. 20.
Poroshenko and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood behind their respective ministers and looked on as the two men signed the documents.
In a brief speech before the signing, Poroshenko described the event as an “absolutely historic day” and said that Ukraine had learned from Israel how to defend itself and to build a strong army and economy.
In his remarks, Netanyahu praised Israel’s connection with Ukraine and described the free trade agreement as “something that will make it grow even bigger.”
Negotiations over the free trade agreement dragged on for more than seven years. However, during the last two years, the Ukrainian and Israeli leadership made additional efforts to finalize the agreement, Israel’s Ambassador to Ukraine, Joel Lion, told the Kyiv Post in a Jan. 16 interview.
In March 2018, the two governments finalized the agreement and began to work on legal technicalities of the agreement and its translation into Ukrainian and Hebrew.
“I want to congratulate both our countries, because today we are getting ready to sign a free trade agreement,” Poroshenko said earlier in the day during a meeting with Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, according to a statement on the Ukrainian president’s website. “For many years business and citizens of our countries have been waiting for this. There were many conversations, but no results.”
Currently, as of 2018 the annual trade volume between Israel and Ukraine stands at roughly $800 million. The free trade agreement is expected to increase bilateral trade by 15 percent in the next five years, bringing total trade to more than $1 billion, Elizabeth Solovyova, head of the Israeli Embassy’s trade and economic department, told the Kyiv Post in March 2018.
The agreement will also offer each country greater access to some of the top goods produced by the other. Free trade will open the Israeli market to Ukrainian grain, seeds, and steel — all exports in which Ukraine specializes. Currently, over 60 percent of Ukraine’s exports to Israel are agricultural goods.
Ukraine will also gain greater access to Israeli fruits, materials like rubber and plastic, and high quality Israeli medical equipment, Lion told the Kyiv Post.
After the agreement is signed, it will need to be ratified by both countries’ parliaments. That could be delayed by several months in Israel. In December, the country’s coalition government decided to dissolve the Israeli Knesset. Early elections will be held in April.
After ratification, the two countries should work to promote the agreement and widen it to services, Lion told the Kyiv Post.
During the visit to Jerusalem, Poroshenko discussed the issue of ratification with Knesset Speaker Yuli-Yoel Edelstein, who was born in the western Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi.
According to a statement on the president’s website, Poroshenko also expressed hope that the Knesset will recognize the Holodomor — the 1932-33 man-made famine that took the lives of at least 3.9 million Ukrainians — as “the genocide of the Ukrainian people.”
During his meeting with Rivlin, Poroshenko also thanked Israel for supporting Ukrainian independence and territorial integrity and asked the Israeli president to make a state visit to Ukraine in 2019. He also requested Israel’s assistance in freeing the 24 Ukrainian sailors who were captured by Russia in November in the waters off Crimea, which Russia has occupied since 2014.
The Israeli president thanked Poroshenko and Ukraine for supporting Israel internationally, according to a statement on Israeli foreign ministry’s website. He also praised Poroshenko’s “decisive words and actions against anti-Semitism in Ukraine and for creating a museum at Babyn Yar,” where in 1941 Nazi forces and Ukrainian collaborators killed over 33,000 Jews and many others in one of the largest massacres of World War II.
Additionally, Poroshenko visited the Yad Vashem memorial and lay a wreath at the monument to the victims of the Holocaust.
