Kiev | Reuters — Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy ordered his new government to submit a draft law for land market reform by the start of October and to prepare large-scale privatizations of state companies starting in April next year.
Zelenskiy has pledged to lift a longstanding ban on the sale of farmland, a move that supporters say will unlock enormous opportunities for investment in the agriculture sector of one of the world’s largest grain exporters.
It is part of a push to make Ukraine more attractive to investors and tackle entrenched corruption. The country’s economy has been propped up by Western aid since the 2014 Maidan protests and the outbreak of a conflict with Russian-backed forces in the eastern Donbass region of Ukraine.
Read Also
Canola, U.S. soybean crushes expanding
In calendar year 2025, the canola crushes in Canada and the United States remained above their respective five-year averages, Statistics Canada reported on March 13. While the U.S. soybean crush continued to expand, StatCan didn’t include any soybean crush data for 2025 due to confidentiality requirements under the Statistics Act.
Speaking at a televised meeting alongside his newly appointed Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk, Zelenskiy said he wanted parliament to “adopt a law on the agricultural land market and lift the moratorium on the sale of land by Dec. 1, 2019.
“Now we have a unique situation, a unique chance to carry out all necessary reforms. We have everything for this: the political will of the president, the majority in the Verkhovna Rada (parliament), the government and the prime minister ready to work,” Zelenskiy said.
He also announced a special law for the protection of foreign investment — the details of which were not specified — by the start of January.
Zelenskiy’s Servant of the People party won 254 of 450 seats in parliamentary elections in July, the first time a ruling president’s party has won an absolute majority in the legislature and the right to independently form a government.
Oleksiy Honcharuk, the newly appointed prime minister, announced Thursday Ukraine will no longer have a separate agriculture ministry, bringing it under the oversight of the economy ministry.
— Reporting for Reuters by Natalia Zinets and Pavel Polityuk; writing by Matthias Williams.
