On 21 May 2019, the Republic of Bulgaria, Georgia, Moldova, Romania, Russian Federation, Turkey and Ukraine agreed in Bucharest to share the best practices on maritime affairs with similar initiatives around other sea basins and adopted the Common Maritime Agenda for the Black Sea.

Declaration of Common Maritime Agenda for Black Sea

The Common Maritime Agenda aimed on strengthening cooperation and built multilateral interaction mechanism based on the three pillars: healthy marine and coastal ecosystems; a competitive, innovative and sustainable blue economy and fostering investment in the blue economy.

Despite the obvious benefits from such cooperation, there is one point that is more important. In the Black Sea region already exist different instruments for cooperation (BSEC, GUAM, Black Sea commission, IOC UNESCO regional sub commission on the Black Sea) but due to the illegal annexation of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea by Russian Federation, all these instruments are inactive.

The Black Sea remained the only one sea basin in Europe without any fruitful activity. In this situation DG MARE and DG RTD propose an effective instrument for blue goal implementation in the Black Sea. This action allows Ukraine actively include into capacity building process compliance with state interests and on other hand, Ukraine was pushed to reunify its potential in marine sector.

On 2014, as a result of the illegal annexation of Crimea Ukraine lost more than 70 percent of marine potential. Therefore, Ukraine faced a necessity of marine potential rebuilding but all efforts of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine to adopt the state target programme of maritime infrastructure rebuilding were unsuccessful. The Common Maritime Agenda became external engine for internal consolidation movements: Ukraine formed national team, nominated national experts within the framework of Assistance mechanism, apply for Young Ambassadors programme, participate in every framework meeting in regular basis and even combine all national stakeholders within regional workshops.

Source: Ukrainian National Hub within Black Sea Assistance Mechanism