PM reconfirms EU officials' support for Moldova’s integration path

Moldova continues to be the champion of the Eastern Partnership countries as regards the reform promotion, Prime Minister Iurie Leanca said. Leanca made statements to this effect in a news conference today, after coming back from its first visit to Brussels (Belgium) as head of government.

Leanca said that the European high-ranking officials had reconfirmed their support for Moldova’s European integration agenda, ”even if there existed some questions referring to the sustainability of the reform process”. Leanca emphasised that the solving of the recent political crisis, occurred in Moldova, was carried out in an European manner, ”thing that shows the political establishment’s maturity”.

Referring to the tensioning of the relations with the Transnistrian authorities, after the region’s leader, Yvgeny Shevcuk, has promulgated a supposed law on the Transnistria’s borders, Leanca said that the European officials shared the idea that the issue should be solved by involving the existent mechanism. He meant the guarantees of the five-plus-two negotiations.

Leanca also said that a range of joint events were to be organised by the Moldovan and European authorities until November 2013, when it is scheduled the initialling of a Moldova-European Union association agreement. Thus, Moldovan authorities and European officials are going to welcome, on 25 June 2013, the completion of the talks on the draft of the association agreement and of the free trade agreement. On 27 August 2013, it will be launched the construction of the Iasi (Romania)-Ungheni (Moldova) gas pipeline.

The sides' cooperation in the agriculture area will be discussed in Chisinau, in autumn, afterwards being scheduled an Eastern Partnership Summit, before the one due in Vilnius, in November.

At the NATO headquarters in Brussels, Leanca proposed that Moldova to send peacekeepers in Kosovo and approached the issue on the destruction of the soviet pesticides of its territory with the NATO’s support.

Adapted from MOLDPRES