UKRAINE'S "OTHER" SECURITY THREAT - ROMANIA

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 04 KYIV 000120

SIPDIS

E.O. 12958: DECL: 01/24/2020
TAGS: PREL PBTS EWWT SENV NATO EU UP RO
SUBJECT: UKRAINE'S "OTHER" SECURITY THREAT - ROMANIA

REF: A. 09 KYIV 437

B. 09 USNATO 475

Classified By: Ambassador John F. Tefft for reasons 1.4 (b) and (d).

SUMMARY
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1. (C) From the perspective of Kyiv, the Ukrainian-Romanian
bilateral relationship is surprisingly troubled, with a wide
range of irritants both great and small. The most neuralgic
issues for Ukrainians are linked to concerns about Romanian
irredentism (e.g., issuance of Romanian passports to
Ukrainian citizens). Disputes over the Black Sea continental
shelf and over navigation and the environment in the Danube
Delta add further venom to the mix. The cumulative weight of
these issues has created a largely negative dynamic in the
relationship from Ukraine's perspective. One should not
exaggerate the dangers, but Ukrainian-Romanian tensions do
constitute one bit of unfinished business in the process of
normalizing Ukraine's relations with her western neighbors.
Much of the problem on the Ukrainian side is psychological
and stems from Ukrainians' larger sense of political
insecurity, particularly vis-a-vis Russia. Time should
ameliorate some of the tensions, and the election of a new
Ukrainian president in February might present an opportunity
to put the relationship on a better footing. End summary.

BUCHAREST THE THIRD ROME
--------------


2. (U) "Many know about the idea of Moscow as the 'Third
Rome,' often used in discussions about the nature of Russia's
great power status. Far fewer people in Ukraine know that on
the other side of our country is another state with claims to
be an heir of Rome. ...Romania is our strong, determined
competitor, single-mindedly working against our interests and
taking advantage of our weakness in order to strengthen
itself." -- Serhiy Tihipko, Ukrainian presidential candidate.


3. (SBU) "Unfortunately, after joining the EU and NATO
Romania hasn't stopped pursuing its interest at the expense
of Ukraine. Moreover Bucharest is behaving even more
aggressively." -- Ukrainian MFA non-paper.


4. (C) One of the great successes over the past two decades
in promoting a Euro-Atlantic trajectory for Ukraine has been
the establishment of generally positive relations between
Ukraine and Poland, Slovakia and Hungary. This process has
included coming to terms with some heavy historical baggage,
the creation of reasonably satisfactory conditions for ethnic
minorities on either side of the borders, and the perception
in Ukraine that Poland, Slovakia and Hungary are among
Ukraine's strongest advocates within NATO and the EU.
Bilateral problems no doubt persist, but they are largely off
the radar screen and do not define the relationships.


5. (C) The situation with Romania and Ukraine is altogether
different, with surprising numbers of Ukrainians from
different parts of the political spectrum expressing distrust
of Romania's intentions and policies toward Ukraine. On the
right, Ukrainian nationalists accuse Romania of harboring
ill-concealed designs on Ukrainian territory. From the
political center, former Minister of Economics and
presidential candidate Serhiy Tihipko tried to make Romania a
campaign issue (happily, he got very little traction) by
sounding the alarm about Bucharest's purported machinations
against Ukraine. When we went to discuss Romania with the
MFA, it was telling that the Romania Desk handed us several
off-the-shelf, English-language non-papers critical of
Romania; the EU Commission office here received at least one
of these non-papers in September 2009.

THE BILL OF PARTICULARS
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6. (C) The laundry list of Ukrainian grievances against
Romania spans a range of political and economic issues. The
most insidious problem is Ukrainian suspicion of Romanian
irredentist sentiment, or even strategy, with regard to
Chernivtsi Oblast and the southern portion of Odesa Oblast,
areas that were taken from Romania by the Soviet Union in
1940 and again in 1944. Some thoughtful Ukrainian observers
have told us that Romanian President Basescu had regrettably
pandered to Romanian nationalism during his reelection
campaign in 2009, including vis-a-vis Ukraine. Some
less-thoughtful observers here are inclined to take the
irredentist sloganeering of Romanian fringe groups and
extrapolate them into statements of Romanian intention, or
even policy.


7. (C) In the same vein, Ukraine is irritated by the

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Romanian decision several years ago to begin issuing Romanian
passports to Ukrainian citizens in Chernivtsi and Odesa
Oblasts who qualify based on their (or their forebears')
Romanian citizenship prior to 1940. On the most basic level,
the Ukrainians are vexed because Ukraine simply does not
recognize dual citizenship. Moreover, as one EU diplomat
here observed, Romania's practice creates an unhealthy
precedent for Russia to justify issuing its passports in
places like the Crimea -- which, as Abkhazia and South
Ossetia demonstrated, could be the first step toward creeping
annexation. Finally, for those Ukrainians most mistrustful
of Romania, the latter's passportization policy raises fears
that Romania might be laying the groundwork for a little
creeping annexation of its own. The more paranoid
interpretation is fed by the fact that no one seems to have
any hard data about the number of passports Romania has
issued to Ukrainian citizens. Natalya Sirenko, the MFA's
Romania desk officer, believed that the number is only in the
high hundreds or low thousands, but we have heard speculation
in the range of 60,000.


8. (C) A third issue is Ukrainian neuralgia about Romania's
intentions toward Moldova. Any move toward Moldova's
absorption by/reunification with Romania would go down badly
in Kyiv, where it would be seen, inter alia, as whetting
Bucharest's appetite for related territorial claims against
Ukraine. Ukrainian presidential candidate Tihipko averred
during his campaign that "the preservation of Moldova as an
independent state is a strategic interest of Ukraine. No one
is more interested in this than we are." (Note: It is no
accident that Tihipko himself was born and raised in
Moldova.) It is probably not too much of a stretch to
suggest that Ukrainians perceive an analogy between Romania's
attitude toward Moldova, and Russia's attitude toward Ukraine.


9. (C) It is also noteworthy that Ukraine, in its treatment
of its national minorities, maintains a strict distinction
between ethnic "Romanians" (who use the Latin alphabet and
generally live in former Austro-Hungarian districts of
Ukraine) and "Moldovans" (who use the Cyrillic alphabet and
mostly live in the Ukrainian portions of the former Tsarist
Russian province of Bessarabia). The MFA's Sirenko told us
that the GOU rejects Romanian efforts to conflate these
"different" groups or to exercise any droit de regard over
ethnic "Moldovans" in Ukraine, to the apparent consternation
of Bucharest.


10. (C) In February 2009, the UN International Court of
Justice (ICJ) handed down a decision in a case brought by
Bucharest about overlapping Romanian/Ukrainian claims to a
section of the Black Sea continental shelf near Ukraine's
Snake Island (ref A). While the decision was ostensibly a
compromise, it awarded most of the disputed shelf to Romania,
and has generated a backlash here against alleged Ukrainian
diplomatic incompetence and Romanian pefidy. Many Ukrainians
are convinced that the disputed shelf contains important
deposits of hydrocarbons. The area indisputably contains
important deposits of national pride, and even rational
Ukrainian interlocutors have complained to us that a) the GOU
bungled the case, and b) the Romanians have gloated too
publicly over the decision.


11. (C) The other principal economic aggravations involve
navigation, dredging, and pollution in the Danube Delta,
where each side claims that its interests are harmed by the
economic activity of the other. To illustrate how Romania
will stop at nothing to damage Ukraine, one of our more
tendentious interlocutors even alleged that Romanian activity
in the lower Danube is designed to enhance erosion of
Ukrainian territory and decrease the size of the country!


12. (C) Finally, there is a grab-bag of minor irritations.
There are no direct flights between Ukraine and Romania.
Ukrainians complain that ethnic Romanians in Ukraine have far
more schools, broadcasting and publishing in their national
language -- and more state financial support overall -- than
the ethnic Ukrainian minority has in Romania. The two
governments blame one another for the fact that they have not
signed an agreement to facilitate local cross-border
movement. The Romanians say they would need to open an
additional consulate in Zakarpattya Oblast to handle the
additional workload of processing related paperwork, and do
not want to sign the agreement until they can implement it
responsibly. The Ukrainians do not seek any additional
consulates of their own in Romania and insist on strict
reciprocity in the numbers of diplomatic missions in each
country. They accuse Romania of holding up the agreement
over the "unrelated" issue of new consulates. In addition,
there are lingering hard feelings over the cancellation of
President Basescu's planned visit to Ukraine in February
2009, and the tit-for-tat expulsion of diplomats the
following month (ref A).

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WITH FRIENDS LIKE THIS...
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13. (C) Romanian diplomats here insist that it remains in
their country's fundamental national interest to lobby for
Ukraine's membership in NATO and the EU. Unfortunately, the
cumulative weight of bilateral problems has led many
Ukrainians to dismiss Romania's efforts, and even its
utility, as a mentor for Ukraine in Euro-Atlantic
organizations. Ukrainian Deputy FM Yeliseyev did not shy away
from using NATO v~aXin NATO on Ukraine's behalf (based on the reporting the
MFA receives from the Ukrainian mission at NATO),but
believes Romania has leveraged its EU membership not to help
Ukraine, but to advance its own economic interests vis-a-vis
Ukraine.

COMMENT
--------------


14. (C) One should not exaggerate the degree of Ukrainian
concern about Romania. Former Deputy Minister of Defense
Leonid Polyakov told us that there is no trust among
Ukrainians toward Romania -- but no real fear either. Even
anti-Romanian gadfly Tihipko admitted that "this (Romanian
activism contrary to Ukrainian interests) does not mean that
the Romanians are enemies with whom we cannot cooperate."
Nevertheless, Ukrainian-Romanian tensions constitute a piece
of unfinished business in the process of reconciling Ukraine
and her western neighbors, and serve as an actual or
potential drag on Ukraine's Euro-Atlantic integration.


15. (C) A large part of the problem on the Ukrainian side is
psychological. Ukrainians' short history of statehood and
weak sense of national identity give them a greater sense of
vulnerability in general -- even to a country half Ukraine's
size. As one analyst wrote in the Ukrainian weekly "Dzerkalo
tyzhnia," "The problem lies in the fact that Kyiv projects
onto relations with Romania its fears about the potential
Russian threat to Ukraine's territorial integrity in the
Crimea. Ukraine's heightened sense of the security deficit
in its relations with Russia ... makes it hypersensitive to
other foreign-policy irritants as well." In the context of
this wider insecurity, lesser problems take on deeper
significance, and suspicion hardens into conspiracy theory.
Rather than viewing the ICJ case as a normal, civilized way
to resolve a territorial dispute, Ukrainians perceive it as
an underhanded Romanian ploy, with many Ukrainians convinced
that Bucharest somehow pulled a few strings in Brussels in
order to ensure a favorable outcome in The Hague. One can
understand Romania's denunciation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop
Pact as a rejection of historic aggression against Romania,
of secret treaties, or of great powers unilaterally deciding
the fate of small nations. In Ukraine, unfortunately, there
is a tendency to view it as an implicit rejection of the
current Romanian-Ukrainian borders, which were essentially
established by that Pact.



16. (C) There is no easy, quick-fix solution to the problem
of Ukrainian distrust toward Romania. We can probably expect
more unhelpful Ukrainian rhetoric like Yeliseyev's diatribe
at NATO; at such times, basic damage-control will be the best
we can manage. Nevertheless, some irritants might be
ameliorated by time. Romania is not going to change its
citizenship law or revoke the passports it has issued to
Ukrainian citizens, but Ukrainian anxiety should recede as it
becomes apparent that a) the number of such passports will be
small; and b) Romania will not try to do in Bukovina what
Russia has done in Abkhazia. Time should also soothe
Ukrainian ire and disappointment over the ICJ decision and
events like last year's canceled presidential visit and
diplomatic expulsions. Finally, renewed high-level contacts
between Romania and the new Ukrainian administration
following Ukraine's February 7 presidential runoff election
could present an opportunity to introduce a more positive
dynamic into the relationship. Asked whether there is any
hope of a Romanian/Ukrainian "reset," Romanian Ambassador
Hristea (protect) told us that his embassy has been in touch
with the teams of both runoff candidates, Yanukovych and
Tymoshenko. Both camps had expressed some interest in
improving bilateral relations, he said, but the real extent
of that interest would only become clear once a new GOU is
assembled. Nothwithstanding his own "emotional preference"
for the Ukrainian presidency, Hristea thought that a

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Yanukovych victory presented the best prospect for
Romanian-Ukrainian rapprochement.
TEFFT