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Revision as of 21:06, 13 January 2006 by 205.191.194.212 (talk) (User:irpen is Anti-Romanian)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)- This article is about the territorial controversy over the region of Hertsa (Herţa). See Hertza Raion for administrative district in Ukraine.
Hertza region (Romanian: Ţinutul Herţa) is the territory of an administrative district (raion) of Hertsa (Herţa) in the southern part of Chernivtsi Oblast in south-western Ukraine, on the Romanian border. The population in 2001 was about 32,300 people, 93% of which are ethnic-Romanians.
The territory was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940 following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and was attached to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. It was recaptured by Romania for 1941 - 1944 in the course of Axis attack on the Soviet Union in the Second World War but in 1944 the Soviet Army recaptured it. The status of the territory was formalized by the Paris Peace Treaties in 1947.
The annexation of the Hertza region is controversial because the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had not included the area (or the adjacent territory of Northern Bukovina) as part of Soviet claims on Romanian territory and the June 1940 Soviet Ultimatum demanding the transfer of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina did not mention Hertza. Furthermore, unlike Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, the region had not been a part of Imperial Russia or Austria-Hungary before World War I, but had been a part of Romania and one of its predecessor states, Moldavia, before that.
Although Romania and Ukraine have signed and ratified the border agreement and are signatories of international treaties and alliances that denounce any territorial claims, in Romania there are still some sentiments about the jurisdiction over the territory, largely considered to be historically Romanian and detached from it by the Soviet Union in 1940 in defiance of the international law. On the other hand, in Ukraine there are still some sentiments about the perfidious attack by Nazi Germany and Romania on the Soviet Union in the World War II.