Ukraine's Ambassador to Canada Andriy Shevchenko forecasts the negotiations between Ukraine and Canada on the visa regime liberalization will take years.
“It is difficult to predict something, this is the task for years and I hope not for decades. We are working to make this happen as soon as possible,” he said in an exclusive interview with Interfax-Ukraine.
Shevchenko said at present this issue is especially relevant.
“We have a large number of refusals to Ukrainian citizens during formalization of Canadian visas. Last year the number of failures reached 30 percent. This means that every third Ukrainian who applied for a Canadian visa has not received it. In comparison, all the Schengen countries have a figure of about 3.4% for the previous year. That means this is an inadequate figure for us. I would like to remind Ukraine has made a visa-free regime for Canadians. Therefore we’ve raised the issue,” the ambassador explained.
According to him, President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko at a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau discussed launching the process of assessment of Ukraine’s compliance with the criteria Canada now has.
“Right now Canada is making decision on a visa-free regime on the basis of seven criteria: the socio-economic situation in the country, immigration statistics, quality of documents, security, border control, human rights and the so-called bilateral issues. This is quite a serious matrix according to which we should work,” Shevchenko said.
