The 1940 border that Stalin drew still defines the gap between EU-funded Suceava and struggling Chernivtsi — and it shapes Bucharest's quiet but growing pressure on Kyiv over the rights of Romanians in Ukraine
When Eugen Tomac, the Romanian member of the European Parliament who was born in a Romanian village on the Ukrainian side of the old border, speaks about Bukovina, he does not mince words. "A region that was one historical organism was cut in two by two totalitarian regimes, and the wound has never healed," Tomac told the European Parliament's Committee on Foreign Affairs in 2023, in a speech that drew a formal note of protest from Ukraine's embassy in Bucharest.
He was referring to the border that has existed since June 28, 1940 — the day Moscow, acting on the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, delivered an ultimatum to the Kingdom of Romania and annexed northern Bukovina, along with Bessarabia. A German-Italian arbitration commission led by Weizsäcker drew the new line, awarding roughly 8,097 square kilometers to the Soviet Union and leaving some 2,346 square kilometers to Romania. Eighty-five years later, that line is the border between Ukraine's Chernivtsi Oblast and Romania's Suceava County, between a European Union member and a country at war.
A gap measured in euros
The economic divergence is stark and quantifiable. Chernivtsi Oblast, with a population of around 890,000, has one of the lowest regional GDPs in Ukraine — roughly €1,600 per capita at purchasing power standard. Suceava County, directly across the border, generates approximately €5,500–6,000 per capita and, crucially, sits inside the single market, the Schengen area (Romania joined fully in 2025) and the EU's regional development framework.
The contrast is visible in the landscape. On the southern side, the painted monasteries of Voroneț, Humor, Sucevița and the princely foundation of Putna — all UNESCO-listed or designated heritage sites — attract hundreds of thousands of tourists annually, anchoring a service economy of guesthouses, organic farms and cross-border trade. On the northern side, Chernivtsi's magnificent Austro-Hungarian core — the former residence of the Bukovinian metropolitans, now the university — survives as a monument to a more prosperous age, while the surrounding region bleeds people. Internal Ukrainian statistics and independent demographers agree that Chernivtsi Oblast has lost a significant share of its population since 2001, accelerated by the full-scale Russian invasion.
"Every kilometer of that border is a lesson in what EU membership means," says Mihai Câmpeanu, an economist with the Suceava-based Association "Bucovina," a civil society organization that promotes cross-regional cooperation. "We sell electricity, we export agricultural products, we host Ukrainian refugees in the tens of thousands — and we see daily what decades of integration achieve versus decades of post-Soviet stagnation."
A demographic transformation — and a contested one
The border changed more than economics; it changed who lives on each side. The 1930 Romanian census recorded Bukovina as roughly 43% Romanian, 28% Ukrainian and 11% Jewish — a genuinely multiethnic Habsburg legacy. The Soviet annexation, the Holocaust, wartime deportations and postwar collectivization transformed the north. By Ukraine's 2001 census, Ukrainians constituted about 75% of Chernivtsi Oblast's population, with Romanians — who had been the plurality in much of the region's core — reduced to roughly 12.5%, a figure that community leaders insist understates the true number due to historic pressure to register as "Moldovans" or Ukrainians.
Kyiv has made gestures toward that community. Romanians hold guaranteed parliamentary representation, there are Romanian-language schools and university departments in Chernivtsi, and after 2022 cultural cooperation with Bucharest expanded visibly — Romanian is now one of the few languages of instruction recognized in Ukrainian higher education for a national minority.
But Romanian officials and diaspora activists point to persistent grievances. Ukraine's 2017 education law and subsequent language legislation, which expanded the use of Ukrainian in secondary schooling, have been repeatedly criticized in Bucharest and in the European Parliament — including by MEPs who argue that Ukrainian law should fully honor the recommendations of the Venice Commission regarding minority education. "We support Ukraine's European path unconditionally against Russian aggression," Tomac has said. "But European integration has standards, and minority rights are among them. Romania will not remain silent."
History as a political instrument
Bucharest's official position is scrupulous: Romania recognizes the existing border and Ukraine's territorial integrity, and the 1997 Romanian-Ukrainian treaty settled bilateral relations. No serious Romanian political force calls for territorial revision. Even AUR, the national-conservative Alliance for the Union of Romanians that has surged in recent polls, frames its Bukovina rhetoric in terms of cultural affinity and diaspora rights rather than borders.
Yet history retains political charge. November 28, 1918 — the day the elected Congress of Bukovina voted for union with Romania — is a national holiday in Romania, celebrated with official ceremonies in Suceava and Câmpulung Moldovenesc. Romanian textbooks describe the 1940 annexation as a Stalinist crime under the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact; the November 2024 joint statement of the Romanian Parliament explicitly invoked the "historical injustice" of the partition. Ukrainian historians, for their part, point to the interwar period of Romanian rule (1918–1940), when Romanianization policies constrained Ukrainian-language schooling in the north, as a complicating chapter in the story.
Both narratives contain truth, and mature politics on both sides has increasingly acknowledged as much. In 2022 and 2023, Romanian and Ukrainian historians held joint conferences in Chernivtsi — a city where the memory of Austrian-era coexistence remains a civic ideal.
The European horizon — and the border question
The most consequential question is no longer historical but geopolitical: what happens to the Romanian-Ukrainian border if Ukraine enters the EU? For Bukovina, EU accession would mean, for the first time since 1940, a frontier without barriers — Suceava and Chernivtsi functioning again as poles of a single region. Romanian diplomacy has quietly made this case: that Ukraine's integration is not merely a security imperative but the ultimate rectification of the Molotov-Ribbentrop legacy, dissolving the line the Weizsäcker commission drew.
The obstacles are obvious — the war itself, EU enlargement timelines measured in decades, and Ukraine's sensitivity about any rhetoric that touches its territorial settlement. Officials in Kyiv bristle at what they perceive as Romanian nostalgia; officials in Bucharest bristle at what they perceive as Kyiv's neglect of the Romanian minority.
Two banks, one river of memory
Bukovina today is a case study in how borders created by totalitarian bargains outlive the regimes that made them. The 1,000-kilometer journey from Putna Monastery to Chernivtsi takes an hour through the Carpathian passes — and eight decades of divergent history. One side built the institutions of the European Union; the other endured Soviet collectivization, post-Soviet transition and now war, while defending, as its own, a Ukrainian statehood whose legitimacy Romania fully recognizes.
The reconciliation of these two truths — that the 1940 partition was an injustice, and that Ukraine's sovereignty over its territory is inviolable — is not a contradiction but the precondition for Bukovina's future. As one Chernivtsi historian put it at a recent bilateral forum: "We cannot choose our border. But we can choose whether the border divides us or merely separates two halves of the same story."
Eighty-five years after Molotov and Ribbentrop drew their line, that choice is finally, slowly, being made — in classrooms on both sides, in EU accession chapters, and in the everyday traffic of people crossing the Siret and the Prut, carrying with them the memory of a region that was once, and in many ways remains, one land.