OREANDA-NEWS. The Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine decided to exit the Agreement on the mutual security of interstate secrets in the sphere of the legal protection of inventions which was concluded by the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Therefore Kiev no longer intends to maintain the secrecy of inventions that were recognized as state secrets during the USSR period.

The agreement was approved by the CIS Council of Heads of Government in 1999. In accordance with the document, the states should maintain a regime of secrecy for patents granted for classified inventions made during the existence of the Soviet Union. For declassification of patents, the parties were obliged to apply to The Russian Federal Service for Intellectual Property. Ukraine signed an agreement with reservations.

Nowadays the decision to denounce the agreement was made as a part of the overall strategy of exit from the CIS treaties.

Since 2014, Ukraine, after joining the Crimea to Russia, headed for exit from all structures of the CIS. In 2016, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs raised the issue about full withdrawal of the country from the Commonwealth, although a year earlier such a step was recognized to be untimely by the Ukrainian authorities.

In May 2018, representatives of Ukraine were recalled from the statutory bodies of international organization. President Petro Poroshenko declared that Kiev would exit from the treaties concluded within the CIS, explaining that they did not correspond to national interests. He said that since 1991 Ukraine considered the CIS as an instrument of “civilized divorce from the empire”, but “because of Russia’s fault” it nothing came out of it. After that Kiev started exit from the agreements of the CIS. On December 12, Ukraine began the procedure of exiting the agreement on cooperation between the security agencies and the intelligence services of the CIS. On January 23, it denounced three more agreements on economic cooperation, including the exchange of economic and statistical information.