I would have expected to hear the hymn of the USSR, the 'host' of the Socialist Soviet Republic of Ukraine, played in Cotroceni Palace when the President in Kiev said goodbye to the Romanian President. Viktor Andriiovici Yushchenko's daring approach to Romania, while in Romania, reminds about his predecessors like Kucima and Stalin. The explanations that followed from Cotroceni Palance presently are unsatisfying and they once again prove that there are no professionals for replying, documenting or preventing foreign and domestic attacks against the national Romanian state's sovereignty. While President Traian Basescu was there on his left, Vladimir Putin's colleague in the Independent State Community assailed Romania without a blink. The Bastroe canal was the first point. The key sentence? "We must start from the fact that this is sovereign national territory". Leonid Danilovici Kucima was saying the same, when they opened the Bastroe canal in 2004. After this there followed pressure from the press and some civil organizations dealing with the protection of national dignity so that Romania would make foreign governments and institutions aware. And they responded that the debate on "some economic activities" and "some other kind of activities" on the Bastroe canal of the Danube Delta could not start from "the fact that this is sovereign national territory". In 2004 the US State Department informed Kucima that the Bastroe area was part of the Danube Delta Biosphere protected by both the UN and the UNESCO, as well as by international agreements. One of the latter is the Ramsar Convention on the protection of the world's humid areas, which Ukraine must obey. The US government was asking Ukraine to meet its international commitments and choose a different route for "economic activities" and not jeopardize the Danube Delta ecosystem. Here is the premise they should have started from: the Danube Delta is first of all a region under international protection. It has belonged to Ukraine for 16 years now, but it has been a Romanian territory for about 2,000 years. Things are not the other way around. We would have been glad, had the President known it and explained it there in front of the Romanian nation, of Ukrainians and their two-faced (one Slavic and one American) President. But the offense was actually greater. In his second complex sentence Yushchenko explained that, although the talk about Bastroe had taken the longest time, this was the view he informed the Romanian side about that day: Ukraine's sovereignty. But even if Ukraine manages to fool NATO and the especially the US, as the latter hopes to grab one more bite of the Russian empire, Romania should have managed to explain to North-Atlantic structures that Ukraine's mouth to the Black Sea was a means to avoid the very normal control by the European community at its border. Since Ukraine knows how to protect its national sovereignty, how comes Romania gets kicked all the time on behalf of the "new North-Atlantic Alliance"? In 1997, Romania was fooled with the NATO membership and, with the hands of Constantinescu and Kucima, it signed the agreement between Hitler and Stalin to let go of Romania's Eastern side and nation, including that piece of land which the Hague Court is now analyzing: Insula Serpilor (Snakes Island). The USSR grabbed it by a written statement in 1948, although the Romanian state, even if Communist, had never actually let go of it till the Treaty with Ukraine in 1997. Why doesn't Romania denounce the villainous Treaty with Ukraine, on behalf of the historical truth and right and on behalf of Romanian sovereignty? As a Romanian, I would never acknowledge that treaty. It is a document by a president who didn't master power, therefore one who didn't exist, as he himself said. But what is most painful is the fate of the Romanian community in southern Basarabia, northern Bucovina and the Hertza County, traumatized worse than when the USSR existed. In order to enter their native country, the Romanians there need more documents, money and proves than they need to travel to the US. I have heard no official statement to criticize or just to reflect the severe breaks of the human rights belonging to the minorities in the ex USSR. They are Romanians Romania has forgotten about. Therefore Romania is offended from Romania. What is next?

Victor RONCEA