Image credit: A Pantelia.
On 5 October, Ukraine became an associate Member State of CERN, following official notification to CERN that Ukraine’s parliament has ratified an agreement signed with CERN in October 2013. “Our hard and consistent work over the past two decades has been crowned today by a remarkable event – granting Ukraine the status of CERN associate member,” says Yurii Klymenko, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva. “It is an extremely important step on the way of Ukraine’s European integration.”
Ukraine has been a long-time contributor to the ALICE, CMS and LHCb experiments at the LHC and to R&D in accelerator technology. Ukraine also operates a Tier-2 computing centre in the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid.
Ukraine and CERN first signed a co-operation agreement in 1993, followed by a joint declaration in 2011, but Ukraine’s relationship with CERN dates back much further through the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, Russia, of which Ukraine is a member. CERN-JINR co-operation in the field of high-energy accelerators started in the early 1960s, and ever since, the two institutions have formed a bridge between East and West that has made important contributions to the development of global, peaceful scientific co-operation.
Associate membership will open a new era of co-operation that will strengthen the long-term partnership between CERN and the Ukrainian scientific community. It will allow Ukraine to participate in the governance of CERN, in addition to allowing Ukrainian scientists to become CERN staff and to participate in CERN’s training and career-development programmes. Finally, it will allow Ukrainian industry to bid for CERN contracts, thus opening up opportunities for industrial collaboration in areas of advanced technology.
“It is a great pleasure to warmly welcome Ukraine into the CERN family,” says CERN Director-General Fabiola Gianotti.
