Ukraine expects to establish visa-free regime with EU next year

Ukraine plans to issue biometric passports starting on January 1st as it prepares to sign a visa-free regime with the EU at the Eastern Partnership Summit scheduled for May in Riga, Latvia.

“Next May it will have been 10 years since we declared a policy of seeking a visa-free regime with the European Union,” Vasyl Filipchuk, a former diplomat and director of the International Centre for Policy Studies, told SETimes. “It would be nice if we actually get to a visa-free regime next year. It would be symbolic.”

For visa-free travel to the EU states, Ukrainian citizens need biometric passports.

“Without mass issuance of biometric passports, all the government’s efforts concerning work on visa-free regime will be levelled,” Oleksandr Sushko, director of the Institute for Euro-Atlantic co-operation, told SETimes.

At the beginning of November, the government of Ukraine allocated 150 million hryvnia for the purchase of more than 600 terminals that will be used to collect data necessary to produce biometric passports. The technical capabilities necessary to provide the documents for all citizens currently are insufficient, but will be augmented by this expenditure.

“We have two months,” Ukraine’s Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said at a recent meeting. “Actually, we will put in an appropriate terminal in every district, and the system should work by the end of January.”

Experts said this investment was necessary and the government had to improve technical capabilities to meet the demand.

“In Ukraine, between 1 and 1.5 million people get international passports on average per year, and the number of people who need the passport is about 5 million,” Sushko said. “With current technical capabilities, we need four years to provide these people [with biometric passports]. That’s why the government decided to buy additional equipment.”

Sergiy Gunko, spokesman for the state migration service, said the new terminals will make the work more efficient.

“This is a computer complex that takes fingerprints, photos and forms an electronic data packet, which will be sent to the printing plant in Ukraine, where passports will be printed,” Gunko told SETimes. “These terminals will be set in the departments of migration services and help us to work.”

According to experts, there are many changes needed to establish a visa-free regime, but it is easy to accomplish them in six months.

“Technical questions still remain and there are many things we need to do,” Sushko said. “European partners want to be sure of reliability of these passports. So the process of issuing biometric passports should have a high level of protection to meet standards and to avoid passport falsifications.”

Migration officials added that with the new equipment they can guarantee that biometric documents have “the highest level of protection.”

“These passports will be protected to the highest standards,” Gunko said. “The internal network where we work already exists and it is not connected to the internet, and it is impossible to hack. Nobody will have access to the people’s data. It will be the highest level of protection.”

Filipchuk said the opportunity for Ukraine to obtain a visa-free regime with the EU is near, but he added that in addition to technical support, the government needs to launch the necessary reforms to make progress toward EU membership, including measures to end corruption.

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