Ukraine should not lose faith in Crimea’s return and should look for pragmatic ways to do this - Viktor Pinchuk

Ukraine should not lose faith that it will restore its territorial integrity in full and should continue to look for pragmatic ways to do this, Victor Pinchuk, the founder of the YES Forum, the Victor Pinchuk Foundation and EastOne Group, has said in his welcome speech to the 14th Yalta European Strategy Annual Meeting.

“At the end of the main Jewish holiday, Jews say: ‘Next year in Jerusalem.’ This tradition comes from the time when Jews did not have their own state and they did not know when they would return to Jerusalem but they never lost their belief. I have a suggestion. Let us establish our tradition to say at the end of the conference: ‘Next year in Yalta.’ And, meanwhile, let us try to find a pragmatic way of how to get there,” he said.

President Petro Poroshenko, for his part, suggested that the unity and solidarity of Europe and the USA with Ukraine will ensure that the return to Yalta takes less time than it took for the Jewish people to return to Jerusalem.

The online stream of the Yalta European Strategy (YES) 14^th Annual Meeting will be available online at yes-ukraine.org as well as on the websites of our media partners, in both English and Ukrainian.

The official Twitter of the 14^th YES Annual Meeting is @yes_ukraine, and participants and followers can include the hash tag: #YESUkraine2017