Ukraine abrogates CIS airspace and civil aviation agreements

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has signed decree No. 70/2021 on the country’s “withdrawal from international treaties concluded within the framework of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS),” the president’s official website has announced. The move ends almost 30 years of cooperation under the pacts. Specifically, Ukraine is pulling out of the Agreement on Civil Aviation and the Use of Airspace, which 12 former Soviet countries signed in Minsk on December 25, 1991, namely Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Ukraine. Under that treaty, the airspace of the signatory states is considered to be common airspace. The parties to the agreement also created the Council on Civil Aviation and the Use of Airspace, as well as the council’s executive body, the Interstate Aviation Committee. According to the new presidential decree, Ukraine is no longer a signatory of the Agreement on the Use of Airspace, signed in Tashkent on May 15, 1992. In this document, the governments of eleven countries – the same as the above minus Georgia – agreed that the participating states would provide airspace over their territories for the activities, for example, of the armed forces of CIS countries, “actions that lead to disruption or complications in their normal functioning,” a February 23 statement issued by the president’s office said. In his decree, Zelensky tasked the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with notifying the Council on Civil Aviation and the Use of Airspace of Ukraine’s withdrawal from the treaties. In April 2018, as Ukraine continued to fight against Russia-backed separatists in the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, then-president Petro Poroshenko announced plans to quit the Commonwealth of Independent States altogether. The following month, he signed a decree formally ending Ukraine’s participation in CIS statutory bodies and recalling Kyiv’s envoys from the commonwealth’s bodies. This did not include the civil aviation and airspace treaties, however.