~ 13 min read
Anna Tsirat, JSD | JVS Law
On 8 July 2026, Ukraineʼs Cabinet of Ministers approved, by Ordinance No. 677-r, the Civil Aviation and Airspace Development Strategy to 2030 — together with an operational plan for 2026–2028. Let us state the verdict first, because a year of tracking this document through three redactions has earned the reader a straight answer. What was adopted is procedurally stronger and institutionally quieter than anything that preceded it: the Strategy has learned to report, but it has not dared to decide. Everything cheap, measurable and externally anchored has an executor and a deadline. Everything institutional and expensive — who will own the airports, whether there will be a state airline, where the money comes from — is declared without a single implementing measure. And four days after the signature, the President announced a government reset that includes dismantling the very ministry the Strategy places at the centre of its machinery.
For readers who followed our earlier analysis of the unannounced working revision — the “quiet redraft” — this piece completes the trilogy: the June 2025 consultation draft, the silent rewrite, and now the binding act, laid side by side.
The ledger of what survived
Credit first, because the document is not empty. The best addition of the quiet redraft survived and gained teeth: a joint threat and risk assessment with EASA is the first task of reopening airports — and, more importantly, the first measure of the approved operational plan, with the State Aviation Administration, the General Staff and UkSATSE named as executors. Reopening remains framed as a safety-management procedure under Annex 19 and ICAO Doc 9859, not a legal side-effect of lifting martial law: that is the right architecture, and it now has a budget line of institutional attention.
The reporting machinery is genuinely new. Ministries report quarterly starting in 2027; a consolidated annual report is submitted to the Cabinet by 1 May; a second operational plan is due by 31 October 2028. Compare the June 2025 draft, which assigned reporting duties to occupied territories and allocated nothing to monitoring: the accountability plumbing now exists, whatever flows through it. New international anchors appeared too — the Hague Convention of December 2025 establishing the International Compensation Commission for Ukraine is invoked as the mechanism for recovering the value of destroyed air-navigation infrastructure, and the acquis roadmap is to be fixed by a State Aviation Administration order before the end of 2026. And one practical item deserves attention from carriers and independent handlers: the implementation of Directive 96/67/EC on access to the ground-handling market is planned as a discrete measure for 2027 — a genuine market-opening commitment.
What also survived, however, is what should not have. The analytical baseline still rests on 2021 statistics — and Ukraine International Airlines still opens the list of the industryʼs “leading carriers”. In June 2025, that was a methodological flaw in a draft; in July 2026, it is the wording of a binding government act describing an airline in bankruptcy proceedings. Three redactions, and no hand has touched the analytical core — confirming the diagnosis we offered a year ago: this system edits what has an external sponsor and leaves untouched what requires internal analytical work.
Cape Town: the deletion is now final
The June 2025 draft contained one task worth more to aviation finance than the rest of the document combined: introducing legal mechanisms for the effective application of the Cape Town Convention. The quiet redraft removed it. The adopted text confirms the removal — the word “Cape Town” does not appear once in the binding act.
For the audience that will actually decide whether aircraft return to Ukrainian airports — lessors and financing banks — this means the cheapest and most consequential commitment available to the state has officially fallen off the strategic horizon until 2030. The gap it addressed is unchanged: an IDERAʼs force still ends in the offices of the aviation authority, customs does not treat it as self-executing, and no established Ukrainian case law on aircraft repossession exists. The fix can still arrive as standalone legislation outside the Strategy — arguably a more realistic route — but the sectorʼs foundational planning document is now silent on the precondition of based aircraft.
Three redactions, three ownership formulas
Readers of “The Quiet Redraft” will recall the question we said every investor should keep open: who, exactly, will sign the other side of your future contract? The adopted text answers it with a third formulation in three redactions. The June 2025 draft contained no consolidation task. The quiet redraft introduced the merger of state and municipal airport complexes into “a single joint-stock company”. The deputy ministerʼs announcement on adoption day spoke of “a unified management company for the national airport network”. And the binding text says something different again: the creation of an aerodrome network “through their merger into a single business entity”, with the expected result defined as “a network of state-owned aerodromes”.
Each shift matters. “Aerodromes”, not “airports” — a different asset perimeter. “A single business entity” — a formula that fits a joint-stock company, a state enterprise or anything else: the legal form has again not been chosen. And most tellingly, the municipal link has vanished from the formula: the hardest question of the quiet redraft — how municipal airports reach state ownership without their communitiesʼ consent — has been resolved by deletion. The ministryʼs public communication diverges from the text of the act it announces. For anyone structuring entry into Ukrainian airport infrastructure, the practical conclusion is unchanged from our checklist and now carries an official date: the institutional design of the airport system remains unfixed, and it has changed in every redaction including the last one.
A national carrier, arriving at signature
The adopted text contains one task that appeared in neither public redaction: “organisational measures for the establishment of a national air carrier”. It is the largest institutional decision in the entire document — the state announcing its intent to create an airline — and it entered the text at the final step, between the working revision and the signature, without a day of public discussion. Its genealogy is well known: a national carrier has been publicly championed by President Zelensky since 2019, and the government was working on the project on the eve of the full-scale invasion. Its construction in the adopted text is equally telling: a task with no measure, no executor and no deadline in the approved plan — structurally a signal rather than a programme.
When the first real “organisational measure” does arrive, it will land on well-mapped legal terrain. The declared state model means building from scratch — which makes this, first of all, a State aid question: the capitalisation, starting fleet and route support of a new state airline will be measured against the private investor test, and the freshest European precedent sets the bar — the Commission cleared the transition from Alitalia to ITA Airways only on proof of the new companyʼs economic discontinuity from the old one. Ukrainian specifics add a mirror-image hygiene requirement: a new state flagship will need to keep documented legal distance from the bankruptcy estate of the historical carrier — in brands, designations and legacy rights — so that no thread pulls it into someone elseʼs insolvency. None of this is in the Strategy; all of it will be in the first transaction.
Tasks without measures — and a plan that needs no money
The adopted package is most revealing when the Strategyʼs tasks are read against the operational plan approved alongside it. The Strategy declares: a national carrier; financing for airport development backed by state guarantees; the merger of aerodromes into a single entity; strategic development plans for airports; a multimodal logistics hub. The 2026–2028 plan contains not one measure under any of these headings. What it does operationalise is the EASA assessment, certification checks of damaged airports, personnel training and ground-handling rules — the inexpensive regulatory layer.
The document explains the asymmetry itself, in a sentence worth quoting: implementation of the Strategy “does not require additional financial, material, technical, human or other resources”. A strategy whose stated purpose is the recovery of aviation infrastructure destroyed by armed aggression — requiring no additional resources. The operational plan, meanwhile, is to be financed from “international technical, grant and humanitarian assistance, private investment” and other permitted sources. We wrote recently, analysing the EUʼs new State aid framework, that the honest accounting of Ukraineʼs airport reconstruction reads: commercial structures for the main gateways, scarce and targeted public money for the airports that open first, private conviction for the rest. The adopted Strategy has now confirmed that accounting in its own financial section.
The KPI annex completes the picture. Three targets are measurable: four airports back in operation by 2028 (unnamed); 16.2 million passengers in 2028 — the 2021 level; cargo and flight counts to match that level. Note the construction of the passenger target: it is calendarised to 2028 rather than pegged to the reopening event — achievable only if the sky opens well before that year. The Strategy has silently embedded an optimistic security scenario into its own indicators without stating it anywhere in the text. The remaining indicators are formulated as “an upward trend” — including the share of implemented acquis and the volume of private investment (baseline: zero; target: a trend). An indicator whose target is a direction cannot be failed; nor can it be managed.
Four days — and what to watch
The story acquired an epilogue while this text was being finalised. The ordinance is dated 8 July. On 12 July, the President announced a large-scale government renewal — including, per parliamentary and media reports, the division of the Ministry for Development of Communities and Territories into two separate bodies, with transport and infrastructure moving to a restored Ministry of Infrastructure. Between the signature of the Strategy and the announced dismantling of the ministry that prepared it: four days.
We draw no conclusions about motives — the chronology speaks without them. But the practical consequence is unmissable: Ordinance No. 677-r became institutionally obsolete before its first reporting cycle. The ministry is named throughout as the owner of the machinery — the recipient of quarterly reports, the author of the consolidated annual report, the drafter of the second operational plan — and every one of those duties must now find a successor, as must the Interagency Coordination Center for reopening, established the same day and built around the ministry being reorganised. Twenty-two years ago, Ukraineʼs slot-coordination rules were signed one day after the decree liquidating the body they were addressed to. The Strategy to 2030 was approved four days before the announced dismantling of the ministry meant to run it. The handwriting is recognisable.
What to watch, with dates: the State Aviation Administrationʼs acquis roadmap order, due in 2026 — where the fate of the airport charges Directive 2009/12, quietly dropped from the adopted text, will become visible; the first consolidated report, due by 1 May 2027 — the test of whether the reporting machinery works rather than merely exists; the first organisational measure on the national carrier — its legal form and funding source; the legal form of the “single business entity” for the aerodrome network, and whether the municipal link returns; the fate of Ordinance No. 677-r itself in the government reorganisation; and the second operational plan, due by 31 October 2028 — where the institutional declarations either finally acquire measures, or officially migrate into the next decade.
A year ago we called this series “an aviation strategy without a sky” — and the sky has not opened. But the industry now has a binding strategy, a plan and a reporting cycle — and a documented history of how the text was edited on its way to signature. The first justifies careful optimism. The second justifies reading every future redaction of anything very, very closely.
About the Author
Anna Tsirat — JSD, partner at JVS Law (Kyiv). Practice: international aviation law, airport investment structuring, aviation finance and leasing.
For a preliminary assessment of airport and infrastructure projects in Ukraine
