MOSCOW, November 9. /TASS/. Moscow and Washington have reached agreement on establishing special regulations for navigation in the Bering Strait, a body of water that links the Arctic Ocean and the Pacific and separates Russia’s Chukotka Peninsula and Alaska, Vitaly Kliuyev, the director of the navigation policy department at the Russian Transport Ministry said on Thursday.
He also said a special note to the International Maritime Organization [IMO], which is a specialized agency of the UN, had been drafted.
Kliuyev recalled that Russia and the U.S. had an area under joint jurisdiction in the Bering Strait. "Navigation there wasn’t formalized in any way," he said. "We held protracted talks with the Americans and finally we reached an acceptable solution."
"At the technical level, we managed to come to terms and we drafted a joint note to the IMO and it’ll be submitted there in the next few days," he said at a session of the Council for Arctic and Antarctic reporting to the upper house of Russian parliament.
The sides agreed "to establish special regulations for navigation in the Bering Strait."
"We established the travel lines and determined the zones that ships shouldn’t enter for the sake of preserving nature and the animals that live there," Kliuyev said.