On 18 September 2013 during the visit to NATO Headquarters, Minister for Ecology and Natural Resources of Ukraine Oleg Proskuryakov signed the Implementing agreement between the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine and NATO Support Organisation on disposal of radioactive waste that resulted from military programmes of the former USSR on the territory of Ukraine.

The Agreement is the result of hard teamwork and commitment of both sides to solve the problem of environmental rehabilitation of Ukrainian sites by eliminating radioactive waste – a legacy of the former Soviet Union – that was left conserved until now.

The projects to be implemented under the Implementation agreement will provide an opportunity to extract radioactive sources out of sub-standard storage containers, to transport them to specialised facilities for disposal and to clean up the sites which were used as a burial ground for radioactive waste.

This will help to reduce the negative impact of radioactive waste on the environment and the population, as well as to improve the level of radiation safety in the country.

All work on the reburial of radioactive waste in Ukraine are planned to be carried out at the expense of the interested NATO Member States and partner countries. To this end, the Trust Fund was established, which will gradually receive contributions. The lead nation of the Trust Fund is Germany and donors today are the US, Luxembourg and Switzerland. Currently the Trust Fund amounts to over 1 million.

Ukraine’s agencies responsible for implementing the Agreement are the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources and the State Agency on Exclusion Zone Management.