The Quiet Redraft: What the Revision of Ukraine’s Civil Aviation Strategy Tells Investors

Contents

• A Strategy That Is Hard to Find
• Reading the Edit Marks
• What Was Added — and Where It Came From
• The Cape Town Signal: What Was Dropped
• The Holding Company Nobody Announced
• The Unchanged Core: What It Tells Investors

~ 14 min read

Anna Tsirat, JSD | JVS Law

In June 2025, Ukraine’s Ministry for Development of Communities and Territories released for public consultation a draft Civil Aviation Strategy to 2030 — the sector’s first attempt at a post-invasion planning document. The consultation closed, and then came silence: no report on the proposals received, no announcement of the document’s fate. Yet the document kept moving. A reworked version now sits in the file storage of the Ministry’s website — with a new title, a downgraded legal form, shifted timelines, and one institutional novelty whose significance extends well beyond the drafting stage.

For an investor weighing entry into Ukrainian airport infrastructure, this document matters twice over: once for what it says, and once for how it came to say it. Both readings belong in the same diligence file.

Some history first. JVS examined the June 2025 draft in a three-part analysis published at the time (in Ukrainian: part one, part two, part three). The findings were uncomfortable for a document with a 2030 horizon: the analytical baseline was frozen in 2021, with a carrier in bankruptcy proceedings listed among the industry’s four leading airlines; several of the “problems” the Strategy undertook to solve were already regulated by legislation in force; the monitoring chain assigned reporting duties to occupied territories while the financing section allocated nothing to monitoring at all; and the central operational question — the mechanics of reopening the sky, including coordination with EASA and EUROCONTROL — was simply absent.

What happened next is a case study in procedural opacity. Ukraine’s rules on public consultations, set by Cabinet Resolution No. 996 of 3 November 2010, make consultations mandatory for draft acts that “define strategic goals, priorities and objectives” in a given field, and require a published report explaining the treatment of every proposal received — including reasons for rejection — within two weeks of the decisions taken. As of July 2026, no such report can be found. Instead, the reworked draft surfaced as an orphaned file: no landing page links to it, no consultation announcement accompanies it, and it opens only by direct URL. Search-engine AI overviews already paraphrase it as an adopted Cabinet framework — an unadopted working text acquiring the public appearance of law. Meanwhile, the State Aviation Administration has posted its own medium-term work plan for 2026–2028 — precisely the first implementation stage of the revised Strategy — and, at the time of writing, that file returns an access error.

Three formal changes frame the revision. The document’s approval clause was changed from a Cabinet resolution to a Cabinet ordinance — in Ukrainian practice, the difference between a normative act and an organizational one — which is to say, a quiet reduction in the document’s legal weight. The implementation stages slid by a year, from 2025–2027 and 2028–2030 to 2026–2028 and 2029–2030 — a tacit admission that the first year of the original plan was consumed by inter-agency clearance. And the text carries a tell: in one problem statement, the editors left behind the service mark “(Мінфін+)” — a Ministry of Finance clearance annotation that should never have reached a public server. The document narrates its own biography: this is not a redraft shaped by public consultation; it is a redraft shaped by a tour of government offices. The fiscal handwriting of that tour is visible throughout, as the next two sections show.

The revision contains genuine improvements, and the most important one goes to the question our 2025 analysis pressed hardest on: how, concretely, does the sky reopen? The first task in restoring airport operations is now a joint risk assessment with EASA and other stakeholders under Annex 19 to the Chicago Convention and ICAO Doc 9859 — reopening reframed as a safety-management procedure with an identified international counterpart rather than a legal side effect of lifting martial law. The move is real but incomplete: operational arrangements with EUROCONTROL — network management, NOTAM coordination, and FIR reconfiguration — are still lacking.

Other additions follow the same pattern. A measurable target appears for the first time: the recovery of 2021 passenger volumes within two years of flight resumption. Airport charges are now expressly anchored to Directive 2009/12/EC, with consultation, non-discrimination, and transparency requirements — language any airport investor will recognise as the beginning of a bankable tariff regime. A cybersecurity block references the ICAO Cybersecurity Action Plan. Noise-monitoring systems with corrective measures, under the ICAO Balanced Approach, are included in the tasks. And the draft now provides for agreements that delineate responsibilities among aerodrome operators, ground handlers, and the air navigation service provider.

Note the provenance of every improvement: EASA, an EU directive, ICAO. Each added provision has an external source and an external addressee. The system responded where an international counterpart sits at the clearance table — an observation that becomes the key to this article’s conclusion.

The costliest deletion fits in one line. The June 2025 draft included, among its tasks, the introduction of legal mechanisms to ensure the effective application of the Cape Town Convention. The revised draft drops that task.

For the audience this Strategy most needs to persuade, the deletion outweighs every addition. Decisions to base aircraft at Ukrainian airports will not be made by airlines; they will be made by the airlines’ lessors and financing banks, for whom the practical enforceability of Cape Town remedies — including whether an IDERA actually operates against customs authorities and courts — is the precondition for the conversation. As JVS argued in Restarting Flights: Ukraine’s Aviation Insurance Facility, lessors will demand contractual protections and state-backed assurances on repossession as a condition of any restart architecture. The one line in the Strategy that addressed this problem is gone; the signal the market will read is the opposite of what the recovery requires.

The other deletions share a signature. The dedicated state airport development fund became “the creation of legislative grounds for sustainable financing” — an instrument replaced by a promise to someday create grounds for an instrument. Deregulation of airports serving fewer than five million passengers a year ended. The subsection on European integration — a Ukrainian delegation to the Joint Committee under the Common Aviation Area Agreement, prioritised implementation of the updated Annex I — was compressed into a single line. “Preferential taxation” of alternative-energy projects became a neutral “implementation of projects.” Everything that cost budget money or reduced revenue was edited out; the “(Мінфін+)” mark suggests whose pen prevailed. Fiscal clearance is a legitimate government function — but the honest description of the result is not a development strategy; it is a strategy within the perimeter of what the Ministry of Finance agreed not to delete.

Context matters here. The corporatisation of Ukraine’s state airports is not a sectoral initiative: Law No. 4196-IX, which repealed the Commercial Code with effect from 28 August 2025, makes the transformation of all state enterprises into companies mandatory within a three-year transition ending in August 2028. The Ministry’s Order No. 1863 of December 2025 (Lviv) and Order No. 388 of February 2026 (Boryspil) implement that general obligation; the genuinely sectoral choices inside them are the joint-stock form — the only option suited to concessions and full corporate governance — and the early timing within the statutory window.

Which makes the Strategy’s quiet novelty stand out. Where the June draft spoke of “a managing company or state body” for airport administration, the revision tasks the state with “merging airport complexes in state and municipal ownership (upon their transfer to state ownership) into a joint-stock company,” with the expected result of “a single joint-stock company” — and elevates Lviv to the status of a second principal hub alongside Boryspil. If corporatisation is compliance, this merger is the one genuinely discretionary institutional decision in the entire construction — and it is being taken in a redraft that bypassed consultation.

The formula admits at least two different structures, and the Strategy chooses neither. If a holding model is meant — a company owning the share packages of the corporatised airports — the special regime of the Law on Holding Companies No. 3528-IV applies: creation by the state property authority with Cabinet approval; the state as sole shareholder until privatisation; and share packages contributed to the charter capital that may not be alienated, pledged, or contributed to other companies, held under the right of “economic management.” That last element collides head-on with the transition reform: from 28 August 2025, Law No. 4196-IX prohibits assigning property to legal entities under economic management at all, and the institute itself sunsets in August 2028, to be replaced by a usufruct of state property. The holding-company statute has not been aligned with the reform — the mechanism prescribed in Article 6 can no longer be executed as written. Add the pledge prohibition, which cuts off standard equity-level security structures in airport finance, and the holding route is, today, legally unpaved.

If instead a single operating company with airports as branches is meant — the railway model — investors know the pathologies: cross-subsidisation, the dissolution of individual asset economics, opacity for anyone entering one airport rather than the system.

Either way, three practical questions follow. Municipal airports can attain state ownership only by the voluntary decision of their territorial communities — a political precondition the Strategy does not mention, and one that, in turn, triggers mandatory public consultation under Resolution No. 996, since the interests of territorial communities are at stake. Existing long-term arrangements with private operators must somehow coexist with consolidation. And the EBRD/IFC work on private-participation models for individual airports runs on a different geometry than a national holding: a concession of Lviv and a concession within a holding are different transactions with different counterparties. The question an investor should keep open is the simplest one: who, exactly, will sign the other side of your future contract?

Now for what the editing never touched. The entire analytical section is reproduced verbatim: passenger statistics for “the reporting year” 2021; a bankrupt carrier still listed among the four leading airlines of a strategy running to 2030; a monitoring chain that still includes the authorities of occupied Crimea; and a financing section unchanged to the word — implementation “at the expense of” enterprises’ own funds, budgets, and technical assistance, with not a single protected line for monitoring and evaluation.

The scorecard against the 2025 JVS critique reads: sky-opening mechanics — addressed in substance, partially (EASA in, EUROCONTROL still out); declarative drafting — improved cosmetically (one real KPI, the boilerplate intact); the outdated baseline, the occupied-territory reporting, the unfunded monitoring — untouched, zero edits. The pattern is the finding. The revision absorbed everything that had an external bearer — EASA, an EU directive, ICAO, the Finance Ministry’s objections — and touched nothing that required internal analytical work: recount the baseline, revise the entity list, cost the monitoring honestly. The OECD’s recent assessment of Ukraine’s recovery architecture identified institutional capacity, not money or analysis, as the binding constraint on the country’s recovery; this document, in two redactions, is that diagnosis illustrated at sectoral scale. For investors, it is also a live demonstration of why institutional counterparty capacity belongs on the same risk register as war insurance and demand recovery — a point we develop as a distinct diligence workstream in our airport investment analyses (see Airport Governance Models: Ukraine’s Path Forward).

What to watch, concretely: whether the Strategy is finally adopted, in what legal form, and whether adoption is preceded by the consultation report that Resolution No. 996 requires; whether the single-company merger survives into the final text, and in which structural variant; whether the Cape Town task returns — the cheapest available investment in bringing aviation capital back; and whether the analytical baseline is ever updated to 2024–2025 data. A strategy that leans on a world that no longer exists cannot plan the world that will. The revision shows the system can respond — the question the final text will answer is to whom.