“A certain flexibility has appeared in Romania’s position on delimiting its border with Ukraine,” Ukrainian Foreign Ministry Deputy State Secretary Oleksandr Motsyk told The Day on returning from Bucharest after completing the fourteenth round of negotiations on preparing the Treaty on the State Border Regime and Agreement on Delimiting the Continental Shelf and Exclusive Economic Zone for signing.
Negotiations with this neighboring country on the border issue have been held for over four years. However, there has been no real progress. Romania has insisted upon revising the border existing from Soviet times. Ukrainians, on the contrary, proceeding from international law, insist upon its immutability. Bucharest’s flexibility during the last meeting was demonstrated in that for the first time the Romanian delegation confirmed the border in from its conjunction with the Hungarian border to the Moldovan one and further to the so-called 1439 marker in the Black Sea. The Ukrainian diplomat expressed his “cautious optimism,” noting that such a Romanian decision allows to speak about “certain progress” in the negotiation process.
However, the diplomat’s optimism is not necessarily shared by all, because any change in Romania’s stand still involves risks, the more so because they again raised the question of Zmiyiny Island. In the early 1990s Bucharest claimed that it should belong to Romania. When it became obvious this has no chance to happen, Romanian diplomats took another position. In part, Bucharest insists that Zmiyiny is not an island but a rock. Such a pace would completely change the process of negotiations in the stage when territorial waters and exclusive zone are distributed. According to international law, an island has both, while a rock does not. What does losing some maritime territory mean? First, the Black Sea shelf could contain oil and gas supplies, and second, this territory is useful in terms of fishing. Incidentally, Romania’s stand on Zmiyiny is beneath all criticism even if only because early bilateral documents refer to it as an island. Bucharest insisted upon demilitarization of the Zmiyiny Island, reads an exchange letter of the two countries’ foreign ministers dated from 1997. Kyiv has observed its obligations here.
