EU/EAST EUROPE: EU PLANS AND PROGRAMMES FOR CEEC/NIS AID AND ASSISTANCE.

Summary: The European Union is continuing to provide aid and assistance across a wide range of projects and programmes in Central and Eastern Europe and the New Independent States of the former Soviet Union. European Report provides here a summary of some of the recent decisions and plans.

Albania. The European Commission is planning to provide aid to the tune of ECU 7.650 million to continue humanitarian aid for Albania from December 1998 to May 1999. Aid will be assigned primarily to the health sector, as well as to certain particularly vulnerable social groups. An overall Plan of humanitarian assistance of ECU 10 million was approved a year ago and was implemented from January to October 1998. In addition to the distribution of food, medicines and medical equipment, it allowed for minimal emergency rehabilitation of social and health infrastructure, as well as for water treatment and distribution. Ukraine. The EU is allocating USD760 million and ECU 50 million until the end of December 2005 for the Chernobyl Shelter Fund, constituted at the end of 1997 under the management of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in order to implement a project to transform the existing concrete sarcophagus around the Chernobyl power station's reactor unit 4 damaged in the April 1986 explosion into a safe and environmentally-stable system. The Commission now has to approve a Contribution Agreement with the EBRD, through an exchange of letters between Commissioner van den Broek and the President of the EBRD, and the payment of...