Photo from UNIAN
The official earlier said an agreement on a common aviation area between Ukraine and the EU would be signed the year following Brexit.
Ukraine's Infrastructure Minister Volodymyr Omelyan says the EU-Ukraine Open Skies Agreement will be signed in the spring of 2019, which will allow Ukrainian and European airlines to operate freely in the airspace of the European Union and Ukraine.
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"I believe that the goodwill of Spain and the European Commission will yield a solution for us in the near future. I hope that this agreement will be signed next spring," the minister said at a conference on the completion of the Twinning project, titled "Approximation of the legislation of Ukraine in the fields of certification of aerodromes/airports and airworthiness with the relevant EU norms and standards."
The minister also stressed that the issue of signing the agreement is a significant deterrent to the development of full-fledged aviation services in this direction.
As UNIAN reported, Omelyan earlier said that an agreement on a common aviation area between Ukraine and the European Union would be signed the following year after the UK's withdrawal from the EU.
Ukraine has been negotiating on the common aviation area with the EU for several years, which would allow Ukrainian and European airlines to operate freely in each other's airspace. However, the signing of the agreement is impossible without solving a dispute between Britain and Spain over Gibraltar, which has become more salient after the Brexit referendum.
Ukraine has no right to independently make any unilateral decisions in this regard. The EU and Ukraine have been discussing the Gibraltar issue since June 2014. Yet, the other provisions of the agreement were initialed back in 2013.