President Klaus Iohannis announced on Monday that after the Summit of the Three Seas Initiative (I3M) he will have a meeting with Prime Minister Nicolae Ciucă and, probably, with the relevant ministers to see how Romania can accelerate the implementation of the Initiative’s interconnection projects.
“There has been no discussion about acceleration, but we need to understand how these projects are carried out. They are infrastructure projects involving several partners. It is not a national project. In the case of Romania, for example, we have the two major projects that interest us in particular, Poland and other partners are interested in the same projects – Via Carpathia and Rail2Sea. We must not imagine that we will make a new highway from the Baltic to the Black Sea. This link will contain parts of the highway and express roads that already exist, the idea is to connect them in such a way that we have a fluid connection. The same goes for the rail link. The Ministries of Transport in our states have been negotiating these issues for years, and as we do every year sections of the highway and modernized sections of the railway, the same thing is happening in Poland, in Latvia and everywhere, but to have connection completed obviously takes longer. Acceleration can happen nationally. For example, after we finish this summit here, I will have a meeting with the Prime Minister and, probably, with the relevant ministers to see how Romania can accelerate the implementation of these projects. In parallel, we will start contacts with Ukraine to see which of these existing projects – you probably remember that in 2018, in Bucharest, we started a list of priority investment projects that are suitable to be connected to Ukraine as well,” said Iohannis, according to Agerpres, in a joint press conference with counterparts from Latvia, Egils Levits, and Poland, Andrzej Duda.
He said he was confident that there would be more data at the I3M Summit to be held in Bucharest next year, and that new interconnection projects could be developed and accelerated.
On Monday, President Klaus Iohannis attended the seventh edition of the Three Seas Initiative Summit (I3M) and the fourth edition of the I3M Business Forum, organized by Latvia in Riga. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken delivered messages at the summit.