A plane of low-cost airline Wizz Air takes off from the Schwechat airport in Austria on May 1, 2020. Hungarian low-cost airline Wizz Air and German Lufthansa plan to resume flights from Ukraine in late May or early June, according to the websites of the airlines.
Ukraine’s current economic downturn will peak in the second quarter of this year the National Bank of Ukraine predicted in a statement issued on May 19. The forecast aligns with similar predictions for other countries where regulators, governments and experts have broadly predicted that gradual economic recovery will start in the third and fourth quarter, but will last well into 2021. Ukraine’s gross domestic product is expected to shrink by anywhere between 3-9% this year before starting to bounce back, analysts and officials have predicted.
The NBU noted that the Ukrainian labor market has been hit hard by lockdown measures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The bank said that the economic downturn was being driven by lots of workers being made redundant or placed on unpaid leave while many companies had stopped hiring. The NBU predicted that the level of unemployment should revert to its previous level at some point in 2021.
