[1] Romania and Ukraine had been negotiating a broad treaty of friendship and cooperation for several years, but disagreement over ownership of the Snake Island and more importantly the oil and gas reserves that are thought to lie beneath its area of the Black Sea, as well as the northern border of Romania with Ukraine, had kept the sides apart.

In June 1997, Romania signed a bilateral treaty with Ukraine that, among other concerned, resolved territorial and minority issues that had impeded the development of improved relations between the two countries: On 5 September 2020, the Minister of National Defense of Romania Nicolae Ciucă and the Minister of Defense of Ukraine Andriy Taran signed an agreement for technical and military cooperation between the two countries.

[9] The Ministry of Defense developed the draft decree which states that the reason behind this decision is Russia's aggression against Ukraine.

[12] On 16 September 2004 the Romanian side brought a case against Ukraine to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in a dispute concerning the maritime boundary between the two States in the Black Sea.

The Court invoked the disproportionality test in adjudicating the dispute, noting that the ICJ, "as its jurisprudence has indicated, it may on occasion decide not to take account of very small islands or decide not to give them their full potential entitlement to maritime zones, should such an approach have a disproportionate effect on the delimitation line under consideration" and owing to a previous agreement between Ukraine and Romania, the island "should have no effect on the delimitation in this case, other than that stemming from the role of the 12-nautical-mile arc of its territorial sea" previously agreed between the parties.