Press remarks by Commissioner Adina Vălean following the Transport Community Ministerial

Today, we adopted a joint statement on the closer involvement of Ukraine, the Republic of Moldova and Georgia in the work of the Transport Community – an international organisation working towards the integration of Western Balkan transport markets into the EU.

This is a watershed moment! It is a first step in a process that will – I believe – lead to the eventual expansion of the Transport Community Treaty to include these three countries as full members.

The European project is all about joint approaches to common challenges. Today, the existing members of the TCT showed true European spirit in opening their arms to their neighbours. This makes me optimistic for the future. We cannot have effective European cooperation without regional cooperation.

In today's challenging geo-political situation, we need stronger transport connectivity with our like-minded partners. Ukraine, the Republic of Moldova, and Georgia are very much like-minded partners. Closer connections will help us pursue common interests and defend our common values.

Today was also an opportunity to review progress within the Western Balkans on their implementation of what we call the ‘transport acquis' – the technical standards, interoperability, safety, security, traffic management, environmental measures etc. that make EU transport what it is. These are important because it is through these acquis that the transport markets of the Western Balkans will be integrated into that of the EU.

I do not see as much progress as I had hoped to see, so we discussed the need for more sustained efforts on all sides. I did however note that most progress has been made on measures for which we have been supporting our regional partners. This underlines the need for further technical support,

We also looked at progress on the extension of the indicative TEN-T network to the Western Balkans. I was pleased to see that clear progress has been made in some areas compared to 2021, although progress remains uneven between transport modes.

Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova will begin a similar journey to that of the Western Balkans following our proposal in July to extend the transport corridors of our Trans-European Transport Network to both countries.