Translated material
Summit understudy
Russia's neighbors have given birth to another unnecessary organization
The Black Sea Forum of Dialogue and Partnership, held yesterday in Bucharest at the initiative of Romania, was conceived as a summit. But there was no real “summit meeting”. Only four Guam presidents came to the Romanian capital - from Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova, plus the head of Armenia Robert Kocharyan, who most likely simply took advantage of the opportunity to continue the difficult dialogue on Nagorno-Karabakh with his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev. Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece were represented by ministers, and Russia was only represented by an ambassador to Romania, and even then in the role of an “observer”.The format of Russian participation, or better yet, non-participation, became the main intrigue of the forum. The Russian Ambassador in Bucharest Alexander Tolkach himself was taciturn and, when asked by a Vremya Novostei correspondent about the role of our country, referred to the official position of the Russian Foreign Ministry. According to its head Sergei Lavrov, “rather abstract forums with a vague agenda, with an attempt to cover the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, and the Baltic Sea on the basis of some unnatural criteria, divorced from reality,” “can only either distract attention from real problems, or politicize real work to solve real problems.” The current forum clearly duplicates the already existing Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC) and the operational naval group BLACKSEAFORE.
To be fair, it should be said that the idea of the forum arose from Romanian President Traian Basescu in December 2005 as an alternative to the Kyiv summit of the Community of Democratic Choice, at which, to the Romanian’s surprise, Russia was absent. Yesterday, Mr Basescu said: “Romania believes that no cooperation process in the Black Sea region can be complete without a significant contribution from Russia, and we expect the Russian Federation to respond to the interest shown by us, bearing in mind the generous resources at its disposal in various areas." At the end of the plenary session, the President of Romania invited the Russian Ambassador to join the participants for a “family photo”. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili also spoke in favor of Russia's participation in the forum and promised Traian Basescu to talk about this with Vladimir Putin during a meeting with him in St. Petersburg on June 13.
Participants in the Bucharest forum emphasized that they consider it, unlike the BSEC, to be a purely political dimension of Black Sea cooperation. President Basescu even voiced the idea of creating a Black Sea Charter, which would set out the main areas of cooperation and interaction between the Black Sea countries.
In the Romanian capital, requests were made to increase the degree of trust between the countries of the region and to facilitate the resolution of “frozen” conflicts in Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh. Another aspect of the activity is pan-European. With the admission of Bulgaria and Romania to the European Union, the latter will reach the shores of the Black Sea, and the problems of the region will become part of the EU agenda. All these, in general, not new ideas were contained in the speeches of both the main participants and representatives of the UN, OSCE, Council of Europe and NATO who arrived in Bucharest.
In the text of the joint declaration (according to the Romanian president, the Russian side also made a “significant contribution” to its preparation “as an observer”) there is not a word about projects for alternative Black Sea routes for pumping energy resources from Central Asia and the Caspian Sea to Europe. This is probably not accidental - so as not to tease Russia. And although the Romanian hosts of the forum - both the president and the minister of foreign affairs - have repeatedly asserted that we are talking only about additional highways for the future that will not harm Russia’s interests, is it not this topic that explains the restraint of Russia’s position regarding the summit.
In the general atmosphere of understatement at the Bucharest event, something very specific was also heard. Deputy National Security Advisor to the US President Dyer Crouch announced that the American financial organization The German Marshall Fund is creating the Black See Trust under the Black Sea Forum (promising to become regular). Through it, it is planned to allocate $40 million a year to finance civil society structures and independent press in the Black Sea region, including through the allocation of grants.