Kharkiv Pact
Kharkiv Pact (Харківські угоди; Kharkivski uhody). An agreement between Ukraine and the Russian Federation concerning an extension of the latter’s lease of maritime facilities for the Russian Black Sea Fleet in the Crimea in exchange for a discounted price on Russian gas supplied to Ukraine. Signed in Kharkiv on 21 April 2010 by Presidents Viktor Yanukovych and Dmitri Medvedev, respectively, the agreement replaced the May 1997 treaty on the division of the Black Sea Fleet (BSF) as well as annulled the gas accord reached by Prime Ministers Yuliia Tymoshenko and Vladimir Putin in 2009. It extended the Russian Federation’s lease of naval facilities in Sevastopol for the BSF from 2017 to 2042, with the option of an additional five-year renewal (to 2047). In return, the Russian Federation agreed to provide gas to Ukraine at a discount equivalent to the $97 million yearly rent to be paid for the use of the naval facilities.
The agreement was hastily ratified by both national assemblies (unanimously in the Russian State Duma) on 27 April 2010. In Ukraine, ratification was approved by the Supreme Council of Ukraine (dominated by Yanukovych’s Party of Regions) with 236 votes out of 450, but was accompanied by protests outside and irregularities inside. The main objection to the agreement within Ukraine was that it violated the country’s constitutional ban on foreign military bases on its territory.
Crucially for Ukraine, the 30 percent discount on its import of natural gas from the Russian Federaton was relative to a moving benchmark, not absolute or permanent. Consequently, the price actually rose from $234 per thousand cubic meters in June 2010 to $430 in January 2013. In addition, the cost to consumers increased by 50 percent in mid-2010 as required by the International Monetary Fund as a condition of its $15 billion loan to Ukraine.
Following its March 2014 annexation of the Crimea, the Russian Federation renounced the agreement. At the time, Ukraine’s three former presidents—Leonid Kravchuk, Leonid Kuchma, and Viktor Yushchenko—called on their own government to denounce the Kharkiv Pact. Their plea went unheeded. Belatedly, in May 2022, a Ukrainian court ordered the arrest in absentia of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych on a charge of treason in connection with his signing of the Kharkiv Pact. The trial has not yet occurred. Then in response to an appeal from 49 parliamentarians the Constitutional Court of Ukraine initiated in March 2023 a review of the constitutionality of the Kharkiv Pact. In September 2023, the State Bureau of Investigation of Ukraine (DBR) issued an indictment against Yanukovych and his Prime Minister, Mykola Azarov, charging them with treason insofar as they had collaborated in the Russian Federation’s subversive activities in advance of the 2010 agreement.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Sherr, James. ‘The Mortgaging of Ukraine’s Independence,’ Chatham House Briefing Paper, REP BP 2010/01 (August 2010)
Bohdan Harasymiw
[This article was written in 2025.]