Ukraine/Romania – Around one week after Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Klaus Iohannis launched a strategic partnership between Ukraine and Romania, on 10 October in Bucharest, the governments of both countries held their first joint meeting in Kyiv on 18 October.

The first-ever Ukraino-Romanian joint government meeting

According to the statement of the Ukrainian Head of State on X (former Twitter), “the governments of Ukraine and Romania held their first-ever joint meeting in Kyiv, marking an important new step toward strategic partnership. We discussed further defence cooperation to better protect Ukraine’s south, particularly Danube ports, as well as ways to broaden new food export routes.” Further Zelenskyy also “thanked Romania for its assistance in evacuating Ukrainians from Israel.”

Zelenskyy thanked Romania for the military assistance

Furthermore, the Ukrainian president thanked the Romanian Prime minister Marcel Ciolacu “for supporting Ukraine, the Ukrainian people, as well as for the military assistance packages that strengthened us on the battlefield” and emphasised the importance of this first government summit: “This is a great achievement after our agreements at the presidential level to build a strategic partnership between the countries. Today we see the development of these agreements.”

Agreements in the domains of agriculture and energy

This meeting was also the occasion for the signature of a “Joint Statement on deepening cooperation in various sectors.” As the Ukrainian Prime minister Denys Shmyhal stated, both countries “agreed to increase the transit potential for exports of Ukrainian agricultural products by fully utilising the EU’s solidarity pathways, [and] to improve the operation of checkpoints on the Ukrainian-Romanian border.”: “In addition to the development of solidarity routes, the potential for implementing grain storage projects is also important for Ukrainian food.”

In the domain of energy, Ukraine and Romania “want to develop [their] export and import capacities with the European energy space. In particular, [they] are interested in restoring the interstate air line between the South Ukrainian NPP and the Romanian Isaccea substation,”Shmyhal said.

Ukraine and Romania also signed a “memorandum on building up defence capabilities” in order to increase “production capacity”, “an agreement on the construction of a road border bridge across the Tisza River between Bila Tserkva [Ukraine] and Sighetu Marmatiei [Romania]”

Concessions in favour of the Romanian language
Furthermore, as Zelenskyy also said, some concessions seem to have been made in favour of the Romanian minority in Northern Bukovina: “Today, the strategic decision we have been talking about regarding the Romanian language has been made. I think this is the answer to how we will and want to work together,” so Zelenskyy.