UKRAINIAN-ROMANIAN TREATY TALKS DEADLOCKED

. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry’s information department chief said that last week’s "additional" staff-level negotiations with Romania over the draft interstate treaty have failed. The Romanian side refuses to unambiguously recognize existing Romanian-Ukrainian borders, which Kiev wants consecrated in the treaty. Bucharest also insists on a joint repudiation of the consequences of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, through which the USSR annexed territories that were part of Romania in 1940 and are now part of Ukraine. Ukraine regards this, too, as a veiled territorial claim. No further meetings are planned, the Kiev official said. (13)

Romania’s parliament and major political parties are on record as claiming restitution of those territories, not only from Ukraine but also from Moldova, almost all of whose present territory was part of Romania in 1940. Romania’s Foreign Ministry sticks to the same position in its negotiations with Moldova. Both sets of talks have stagnated since 1992. Ukraine is poorly placed to concede, because that would risk reopening the question of the far larger western Ukraine, annexed by the USSR from Poland under the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. However, Poland, unlike Romania, does not aspire to restitution of that territory.

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