Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, today (Monday, 19 August 2019), at the presidential palace in Kiev, issued statements to the media and attended a signing ceremony for bilateral agreements.

 

The following agreements were signed:

 

* A cooperation plan between the Israeli government and the Ukraine Cabinet of Ministers on education, culture, sports and youth for 2019-2022;

 

* An MOU on agricultural cooperation between the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and the Ukraine Ministry of Agrarian Policy and Food;

 

* An MOU between the Israel Patent Office (Ministry of Justice) and the Ukraine Ministry of Economic Development and Trade;

 

* An application agreement on encouraging the study of Hebrew at educational institutions in Ukraine and the study of Ukrainian at educational institutions in Israel, between the Israeli Ministry of Education and the Ukraine Ministry of Education and Science.

 

PM Netanyahu at the joint statements:

 

"President Zelensky, Volodymyr, congratulations once again on your great victory. Your double victory. 

 

I noticed also that since you were elected the growth rate of Ukraine has nearly doubled. I don't think it's [unclear]. I think it reflects the way people are impressed, the way that I've been impressed from this visit, upon your vision of a prosperous and peaceful Ukraine. And I look forward to working with you as we've discussed on advancing our common goal of peace and prosperity. I was here twenty years ago so I can see the changes that have taken place and also your desire to accelerate change. 

 

I'd like to take this opportunity to invite you to Jerusalem as president. We agreed it would happen next week. Well it will happen soon and you are always welcome in our eternal capital. 

 

Both our countries are young, but our peoples are ancient and our common ties go back centuries, many centuries. The Jewish community in Ukraine is over 1,300 years old. And I want to thank you for agreeing on a mutual development project for Uman that is very important for the Ukraine and for the Jewish people as well. We've had periods of great splendor in our joint relations, but we've also had periods of unimaginable tragedy. During the Holocaust, hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered in the territory of Ukraine and later today we will visit Babi Yar, where tens of thousands of Jews were slain by the Nazis and their collaborators.

 

Yet alongside this horrific chapter of our shared history, I want you to know that Ukraine played a tremendously important role in the development of the modern Jewish state. In fact, I think it's unimaginable to conceive the growth or rebirth of the Jewish state and the rebirth of the Hebrew language without the role played by tremendous giants, literary giants and political giants who came from Ukraine. Writers such as Shalom Aleichem, Shaul Tchernichovsky, Hayim Nahman Bialik, without a doubt two of the greatest Hebrew poets in modern times, and many of the founders of the modern Zionist movement started here too.

 

Ukraine gave us visionaries like Ahad Ha'am and Ze'ev Jabotinsky. So in many ways as I mentioned in our meeting I have a certain connection, a personal connection, to the Ukraine because my father was the editor, at a very young age, was the editor of Tchernichovsky, one of our two great poets and my father also worked with Ze'ev Jabotinsky who inspired many in the national movement and was the father of the party that I lead today. 

 

In fact, many of our nation's leaders, prime ministers and presidents, came from Ukraine. So Ukrainian Jews, both in history and in the present, are a significant part and an integral part of modern Israeli society. And the Ukrainian Jewish community I think is the fourth largest in Europe. Today, this community serves as a human bridge between our countries and it offers I think immense opportunities to help us develop our ties. I think that those ties can be advanced through a number of means. I want to thank you for your decision to ratify in the upcoming parliament to work towards the ratification of the pensions agreement that we signed for these people. You asked that we pass on to you updated information for this purpose. I will definitely do that.

 

I believe that we have opportunities that come from the fact that we are living in revolutionary times, positive revolutionary times. The world economy is changing more rapidly than ever before offering challenges and opportunities that we could only have dreamed of in previous centuries, even in previous decades. I think the future belongs to those that innovate. Israel is the quintessential innovation nation. Ukraine has enormous talents and capacities. We've discovered this because Israeli companies are here. We engage with tens of thousands, some say as many as 50,000, talented Ukrainians in the fields of mathematics, computer engineering and every conceivable field of modern technology. We see the talent. We both see the opportunity. We want to seize the future.

 

We've made two decisions in this visit that I think can accelerate the seizing of these opportunities. The first is to immediately start working on the free trade agreement, which will be ratified right after our elections in our parliament, but to expand it to include investments. That means investments and services. There's another word for that, hi-tech.

 

The second is to open both in Kiev and in Jerusalem hi-tech development offices. What we would like to see is not merely the exchange of technology and the involvement of Ukrainians in our hi-tech industries. We'd like to see Israeli hi-tech investments, joint mutual investments here in Ukraine. Not only do we not mind this, we encourage this. 

 

These two measures of the expanded free trade agreement and the opening of these offices in our respective capitals, I think will advance that very, very quickly.

 

We have great confidence as you do that small and middle-sized nations can become very big nations by using the conceptual products of a talented citizenry. We have immensely talented people in both countries. We can seize the future separately, but if there is one message that I would like to deliver from this visit and from our exceptional discussions today I would say this: We can seize the future separately, but we can do it better together. This is what will come out of this meeting.

Thank you very much Mr. President for welcoming me and my colleagues to Kiev and to Ukraine."