Page 65 - UKRRptFeb19

Kherson airport, a candidate for Ryanair and Wizz Air service this summer, increased its passenger flow by 42% last year , to 150,000, reports the centre for Transportation Strategies. Southern Ukraine’s closest airport to Crimea, Kherson hopes to win travelers from the occupied peninsula which, due to sanctions, only offers flights to Russia. Last year, almost two thirds of Kherson’s travelers flew international.
Russia’s ban on Ukrainian overflights boosts prices of tickets on flights from Kyiv to Central Asia, China, India , Thailand and the Caucasus, Pavel Ryabikin, Boryspil Airport’s General Director, tells Interfax-Ukraine. For example, UIA’s flight to Beijing must fly around Russian airspace, taking an extra four hours and costing the airline an extra $120,000 for each flight. UIA recently suspended flights to Astana because Air Astana can fly two hours faster to Kazakhstan’s capital, saving passengers time and money.
Three years in a row the Ukrainian airline industry has shown an increase of 30%, President Petro Poroshenko has informed on Twitter. “The state is doing everything possible to attract investments. One of the promising areas is air transportation, where there is an increase of 30% for three years in a row,” Poroshenko said.
● Trains
With 20 new trains to the EU,Ukrzaliznytsia nearly doubled its passenger traffic last year to Europe . This international traffic growth helped boost Ukrzaliznytsia’s long distance passenger counts by 7%, to 55.9mn last year, Kravtsov says.
While rail passenger volumes to the EU doubled last year, passenger volumes to Russia fell by 15%, Infrastructure Minister Volodymyr Omelyan tells Pryamiy TV. After launching 20 new trains to the EU last year, Ukrzaliznytsia now plans to launch dedicated express service to Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Omelyan wants to end rail passenger trains to Russia, a break unlikely to take place in an election year.
Under pressure to improve rail service, Ukraine’s main freight car producer has almost doubled production of wagons this year, to 3,292 . Kriukiv Railway Car Manufacturing Plant in Kremenchuk, Poltava, is filling orders from Ukrzaliznytsia. Ukraine’s state railroad suffered a major setback when separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk refused to return 30,000 freight wagons, the equivalent of about one-third of the railroad’s rolling stock in 2014.
● Ships
In the first half of January, only eight ships docked at Ukraine’s Sea of Azov ports – half the average of the same period 2016-2018, Andriy Klymenko, chairman of the Maidan of Foreign Affairs, tells Ukrinform. “There are now [shipping] companies that indicate on their sites that they are not sending their vessels to Libya, Iran and the Sea of Azov,” he says, referring Mariupol and Berdyansk ports. He cites research by BlackSeaNews, that shows average waiting times for Ukraine-bound ships to traverse the Kerch Strait from the Black Sea quadrupled – from 28.4 hours in July to 124.2 hours in November.
65 UKRAINE Country Report February 2019 www.intellinews.com