Ordinary round of 5+2 format talks to begin in Odessa on May 23
The next ordinary round of 5+2 format negotiations on Transnistrian conflict settlement will take place in Odessa (Ukraine) on May 23-24. The Chisinau delegation to the event will be led by Moldova’s Political Representative at the Transnistria negotiations, Acting Deputy Prime Minister for Reintegration Affairs Eugen Carpov.
The Odessa round will be the second such event in the period of the Ukrainian OSCE presidency. It will involve the representatives of all the seven parties taking place in the negotiating process in the 5+2 negotiating format – Moldova and Transnistria as the conflicting sides, Russia, Ukraine and the OSCE as international mediators and guarantors; and the European Union and the United States as observers.
They are going to discuss questions pertaining to providing the freedom of movement of citizens, in particular will continue the joint drafting of a protocol decision to this effect.
The Transnistrian side, judging by its foreign ministry’s report, is fairly interested in soonest-possible progress in this field because in a time of summer vacations the problem of free movement of the population across the Moldovan border, along with ensuring full-fledged functioning of passenger transportation to Ukraine, is becoming particularly acute.
A separate attention in Odessa will be attached to the situation around the aerial ropeway across the Dniester River between the towns of Rezina (Moldova) and Rybnitsa (Transnistria). Tiraspol hopes for a constructive discussion about dismantling of the object that has been out of use for several decades now, and which only presents a concrete danger to the residential communities located under the ropeway.
The Transnistrian side hopes for a constructive and responsible approach of all the parties concerned, for only such approach is able to prove their readiness to work intensively and efficiently over the solution of existing problems that have a very negative influence on the population’s life quality – “to work without excessive politicization or attempts to invest the 5+2 negotiating format with functions or competences unnatural for it”.
At the end of the round of talks, an enlarged news conference will take place at 17.45 in Odessa that will involve the conflicting sides’ political representatives – Eugen Carpov and Transnistrian foreign minister Nina Shtanski, the OSCE Special Representative for the Protracted Conflicts, Ambassador Andrii Deshchytsia, and Ambassador Jennifer Leigh Brush, Head of the OSCE Mission to Moldova.
Adapted from Infotag