Meeting between EU and countries of the Black Sea region - Foreign Ministers in Kyiv, the EU will finally kick off its new Black Sea policy.

Resulting of the 2007 expansion of the EU to Bulgaria and Romania, and after some ten years since the European Commission's only communication on Black Sea cooperation, the launch of the Black Sea Synergy last spring was a long-awaited and welcome step.

Now the time to deliver came, which is where things could begin to look difficult. The are intensions to draw the EU closer to the existing regional organizations, primarily the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC) organization. And it has the purpose to correlate region-wide developments with the resolution of the 'frozen conflicts' in Georgia, Moldova and between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

All this is not endowed with new financial aims, but will draw on existing resources, as well as on mechanisms for joint financing with other international actors operating in the region. First, there is the sector-specific focus of the initiative. The commission places a strong emphasis on sectors such as the environment, energy and transport, where EU programs and initiatives are already up and running. This is understandable. EU-sponsored mechanisms in these fields deserve a new boost, particularly the case of energy, where enhanced Black Sea cooperation could play a key role in the EU's fledging goal of supply diversification.

These indexes appear sensible and successive, but they also raise a number of important questions that the Black Sea countries and the commission will have to address if the proposed policy is to be effective and sustainable.

The introduction in the Synergy of issues such as democracy and internal security is also noteworthy. Regional collaboration and exchange of best practices in these fields could potentially have a major impact on the fragile governance structures of most former Soviet countries.

But EU initiatives when it comes to the promotion of democracy could have particular advantage of the interest shown for the Synergy by local and regional authorities, as well as non-governmental actors in the region.

Hence, in general, the list of priorities is a bit on the long side: issues such as employment, science and technology have little regional features and could in the long run dilute the effectiveness of the new initiative.