UKRAINE, ROMANIA INITIAL LONG-OVERDUE INTERSTATE TREATY.

Foreign Ministers Hennady Udovenko and Adrian Severin initialed on May 3 in Kiev the text of the Ukrainian-Romanian treaty on good-neighborly relations ("framework treaty"), which had been held up for several years by oblique Romanian territorial claims on Ukraine. Finalized in last-minute negotiations on the day of the initialing ceremony, the text confirms the existing Romanian-Ukrainian border as inviolable and commits the sides to renouncing territorial claims. Both sides condemn the "actions by totalitarian regimes and military dictatorships" directed against Romania or Ukraine in the past — a double allusion to the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact which resulted in the Soviet annexation of territories from Romania and to a Romanian-German pact which placed southwestern Ukraine under Romanian military administration in 1941-44. The document also recognizes Ukrainian sovereignty over Serpents’ Island, while Ukraine undertakes to refrain from placing offensive weapons on the island. The sides will negotiate the maritime border and delimitation of the Black Sea continental shelf around Serpents’ Island; will submit the issue to the International Court of Justice if they fail to reach agreement within two years; and will refrain from unilateral economic activities in the disputed zone around the island for the duration of the negotiations.

Ukraine and Romania further agree to create two cross-border "Euroregions" to facilitate economic cooperation: one in Bukovina with Polish participation and one in the Danube estuary with Moldovan participation. The treaty must be signed by the presidents of the two countries and is subject to parliamentary ratification. (Interfax-Ukraine, Western agencies, May 3-4)

Recently elected Romanian president Emil Constantinescu worked hard to persuade his own Democratic Convention and Foreign Ministry to renounce direct or indirect territorial claims to southern Bessarabia, northern Bukovina, Serpents’ Island, and two smaller areas in Ukraine, all of which were part of interwar Romania (the island from 1878 to 1949). Recognition of the Romanian-Ukrainian border by treaty is one of the prerequisites to Romania’s admission to NATO — a top priority of the Constantinescu administration. However, influential elements in the Western-oriented governing coalition are reluctant to pay that price, have vocally campaigned against the treaty, and may yet team up with neo-Communist forces under former president Ion Iliescu to oppose the treaty’s parliamentary ratification.

The IMF in Kazakstan and Uzbekistan.