The Ukrainian Ministry of Infrastructure is preparing a state leasing program for the public and private sectors, which will facilitate the growth of the Ukrainian shipbuilding industry.

Ukraine’s Minister of Infrastructure Oleksandr Kubrakov announced this at a meeting of the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities, which was chaired by the president of Ukraine, the CFTS portal reports, citing the Ukrinform news agency.

"The state leasing program will be quite attractive to both the private and public sectors. We have already made provisions for the launch of this program in the state budget for 2022. Our plan is for the shipbuilding industry’s turnover to increase from UAH 2.7 billion in 2019 to UAH 22 billion in 2025," Kubrakov said.

According to the minister, this program is expected to increase the number of jobs in the shipbuilding industry from 6,800 to 56,000.

The share of the shipbuilding industry is also expected to increase from UAH 1.1 billion in 2019 to UAH 8.8 billion in 2025.

According to Kubrakov, in addition to this, the Ministry of Infrastructure’s program for supporting the shipbuilding will facilitate an increase in state and local budget revenues from enterprises in the industry from UAH 0.3 billion in 2019 to UAH 2.5 billion in 2025.

In addition, according to the minister of infrastructure, negotiations are currently being held with potential international partners. "In particular, the Ukrainian-Danish MPV80 multipurpose vessel project is being developed. The first vessel is planned to be built at a Ukrainian shipyard by 2024. Localization of production is a prerequisite," he said.

As the CFTS reported earlier, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyi has ordered the drafting of a program for revival of the Ukrainian fleet of research vessels with the aim of achieving the goal of reviving the fleet within 10 years. Zelenskyi said that Ukraine should build its own vessels or buy them, as it bought the James Clark Ross icebreaker.