OREANDA-NEWS. On July 01, 2008 Head of the Finnish OSCE Chairmanship Task Force, Ambassador Aleksi Harkonen thanked the Ukrainian government for ensuring the safety of navigation and ecology in the Black Sea during a concluding session of an International Expert Conference on "The Safety of Navigation and Environmental Security in a Transboundary Context in the Black Sea Basin" in Odesa, according to the press service of the Ukrainian Transport and Communications Ministry.

Deputy Director of the State Department for Maritime and River Transport Viktor Sudariov, in turn, said that the ecology of the Danube estuary had struck participants in the conference, because human influence on the environment of this region is insignificant.