In two years, from June 11, 2017, when visa-free status between Ukraine and the European Union officially came into force, Ukrainians have made 42.6 million trips to the EU, the Interior Ministry has said.
Some 9.2 million Ukrainian citizens have crossed the border on biometric passports, of which almost three million Ukrainians traveled without visas, with new biometric passports, that is, they used the visa-free travel regime.
The largest number of Ukrainians, more than one million people, crossed the border with Poland. There were active sections of the border with Hungary and Romania, where border crossing under the visa-free regime amounted to more than 350,000 and 245,000 people, respectively. About 226,000 Ukrainian citizens crossed the border with Slovakia.
In addition, almost one million Ukrainians used air travel. Traveling by ship was the least popular mode of travel. Only 500,000 people crossed the state border this way.
In total, for the second year of visa-free travel (from June 11, 2018, to June 11, 2019), 2.35 million trips of visa-free Ukrainians were recorded. This is 4.2 times more than in the first year (from June 11, 2017, to June 11, 2018), when it was 560,000 people.
The State Border Service of Ukraine, within its competence, has fulfilled all the tasks that have been defined by the action plan to liberalize the EU visa regime for Ukraine.
There are now 157 checkpoints across the state border that are equipped with biometric control tools and connected to Interpol databases, and modern technical tools allow them to automatically check all types of biometric documents.
