Kiel University strengthens ties with Ukraine’s Kherson region

A high-ranking delegation from Cherson, Schleswig-Holstein's partner region in Ukraine, led by Governor Oleksandr Prokudin, visited Kiel on Thursday, 28 November. Minister-President Daniel Günther and several members of the cabinet received the delegation for talks. Afterwards, they visited the University Medical Center Schleswig-Holstein, held talks with representatives of the City of Kiel and also made a stop at Kiel University (CAU).

In addition to Governor Oleksandr Prokudin, the delegation members Mariia Bohodukhova (Head of the Regional Administration's Investment and Export Development Office), Dmytro Yunusov (Director of the Office for Agricultural Development and Irrigation) and Oleksandr Tolokonnikov (Head of the Office for Internal Affairs and Information Policy) were guests at CAU.

Exchange with Kiel University

Vice-President Professor Markus Hundt welcomed the guests from Cherson: ‘It is a great pleasure and honour for us to welcome you here today. Our still young cooperation agreement has developed strongly under very difficult conditions. We look forward to deepening our existing cooperation with Cherson in today's talks and to exploring new areas of cooperation together.’

At the joint meeting, the members of the delegation, representatives of Kiel University, the Cherson State Agrarian and Economic University (KSAEU) and Minister of Science Karin Prien discussed the successful cooperation between Kiel and Cherson to date, as well as research areas that offer potential for new cooperation. The focus was on the common desire for cooperation in the field of agricultural sciences.

The Dean of the Faculty of Agricultural and Nutritional Sciences, Professor Tim Diekötter, introduced the delegation to the focus areas of his faculty. These included application-oriented research and teaching at the CAU’s experimental stations and a focus on resource conservation and sustainability. The delegation was also interested in the great expertise in Kiel in the field of animal and plant production, the crop rotation moedlling and irrigation systems. ‘We have a lot in common,’ said Professor Diekötter. “These include our degree programmes, which are also of interest to students from Cherson through exchange programmes. In addition, Germany and Ukraine have major similarities in the main crops, which is why research cooperation is a good idea.” The cooperation is to be continued in further talks and with a visit by a delegation of Ukrainian specialists and researchers to the experimental farms in Schleswig-Holstein.

Teaching cooperation between Kiel and Cherson

Economist Professor Kai Carstensen reported on the academic cooperation between the KSAEU and Kiel University: Since 2022, the CAU has been supporting its partner university in south-eastern Ukraine in digital teaching under the difficult conditions of the Russian war of aggression. The cooperation began with a scholarship from the Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences for a refugee professor from the KSAEU.

The Institute of Statistics and Econometrics at Kiel University sent the Ukrainian university notebooks financed by the DAAD, as well as working documents and videos for teaching. More than 130 students from Cherson received scholarships through the initiative to enable them to continue their studies during the ongoing war in the region, some of them travel and residence scholarships for Kiel.

In autumn 2023, the joint digital course ‘Certificate in Quantitative Analysis for Business, Economics and Public Administration’ was launched. Another joint course format enabled six students from Cherson to study at CAU this summer and network with students from Kiel.

Professor Carstensen, the initiator of the cooperation, explained: ‘Our vision is to create an international campus where students and teachers from our two universities – and later perhaps other universities in the SEA-EU alliance – can work, learn and exchange ideas together.’