Why does Ukraine have to open its land market to EU vompanies and what can be done about it?

A model is in place under which agricultural land may be owned only by Ukrainian citizens and companies with no foreign capital or foreign control whatsoever. These rules are incompatible with EU membership and will certainly have to change.

Read more abour what Ukraine should take into account, and what should it demand from the European Union regarding the land market during accession negotiations in the article by Professor Andrii Martyn: Land is not just for Ukrainians: how the land market should change with EU accession and how to retain control.

Since 1 July 2021, Ukrainians have had the right to freely buy and sell agricultural land. Since 1 January 2024, Ukrainian legal entities established by Ukrainian citizens have also been allowed to enter the market. By mid-2026, more than one million hectares had already changed hands through the market.

Opening the market to legal entities did not trigger any abnormal surge in demand.

The first detailed analysis of corporate buyers revealed a rather ordinary picture: more than 80% of them are agricultural producers.

In other words, instead of a mass sell-off, we have seen the emergence of a relatively conservative land market. Moreover, despite tenants’ pre-emptive rights, fairly complex buyer verification procedures and significant regulatory restrictions, Ukraine has effectively developed a "seller’s market".

The final say remains with the owner of the land plot.

Over the past few years, Ukraine has built a genuinely robust system for monitoring land transactions.

The owner decides whether to sell the land at all, when to do so, and at what price. The old paternalistic scare story about the "naive rural landowner whom everyone will cheat" has not come true. Owners of land shares have proved far more rational than some politicians tend to assume.

Now comes the much more interesting part of this story.

On 13 October, Ukraine officially opened negotiations with the EU under Cluster 2, "Internal Market" .Among other things, this cluster includes Chapter 4, on the free movement of capital, and Chapter 6, on company law. Cluster 5, "Resources, Agriculture and Cohesion Policy", is still to come.

The question of who will be able to buy Ukrainian agricultural land after Ukraine joins the EU, and under what conditions, is therefore no longer an abstract discussion about the distant future. It is gradually becoming a subject of concrete negotiations.

When it comes to EU citizens, the rules on control are relatively clear. The situation is much more complicated when it comes to legal entities.

Imagine that a company registered, say, in Cyprus or Belgium purchases Ukrainian agricultural land. At the time of purchase, we can verify the company and identify its owners. But the very next day, those owners could sell not the land itself, but the company that owns it.

This, accordingly, should become one of the key issues in Ukraine’s negotiating position.

We need to insist on the right to identify the land’s actual owner for as long as that person or entity owns it.

Without this, Ukraine would objectively be unable to enforce its own anti-concentration rules.

Essentially, we need a kind of "digital passport" for corporate landowners originating from EU countries. This is something that needs to be discussed now.

Ukraine should also negotiate an adequate transitional period before fully liberalising its agricultural land market.

During this period, we need to restore normal lending to the agricultural sector, narrow the enormous gap in the cost of capital between Ukrainian and European farmers, and, most importantly, build that very digital mechanism for monitoring corporate landowners.