If the West did not have a consistent strategy regarding the Black Sea, then Russia always had one – an aggressive one in response, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on Thursday.

Dmytro KulebaPhoto: Francisco Seco / AFP / Profimedia

He stated this in an online speech at the Conference on the Security of the Black Sea Region, which is being held in Bucharest under the auspices of the Crimean International Platform.

  • “Every time we hear that anywhere in the world someone says that Crimea is something special and should not return to Ukraine again, we must say that Ukraine categorically rejects this.
  • There is no difference between Simferopol, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson or any other Ukrainian city. We should be and will be the whole of Ukraine again,” said the head of Kyiv’s diplomacy.

He noted that “many of us believed that the 21st century would be a century of peace, development and cooperation.”

  • “Unfortunately, Russia went in the opposite direction, in the 19th century, of colonial competition,” Kuleba added, according to Agerpres.

He also said that the Black Sea is “necessary for all of Europe to be a place of peace.”

The issue of security in the Black Sea is not only a regional problem

At the same conference, organized in Bucharest by Romanian Foreign Minister Bohdan Aurescu, Deputy Foreign Minister of Ukraine Emine Japarova stated that security problems in the Black Sea are not only a regional problem, but have a global aspect.

The Ukrainian official added that it is expected that not only the countries of the Black Sea region will participate in the negotiations, which are “naturally concerned about the security challenges facing us.”

  • “We believe that the issue of security in the Black Sea is not only a regional problem, but has a global aspect. And there is a lesson learned from the case of Crimea, which led to a bigger war, on February 24 (not in 2022): when evil cannot be stopped, it intensifies,” Dzaparova also said, quoted by Agerpres.

The Ukrainian authorities, she emphasized, sounded the alarm “in 2014, when Crimea became a Russian military base and when the Black and Azov Seas practically became lakes of the Russian Federation, when Russia began to block commercial vessels entering from Ukrainian ports in 2017.”