Ukrainian Communist Party Leader Petro Symonenko Ukrainian Communist Party Leader Petro Symonenko demands the Verkhovna Rada should immediately consider the issue of the personal responsibility of the Ukrainian President Viktor Yuschenko for breaching Ukraine's territorial integrity.

The Communist Party's press service issued a statement in response to the UN International Court of Justice's decision on Serpent Island.

"We also demand that the Prosecutor General's Office immediately open a criminal case based on high treason charges in relation to Ukraine's effective loss of a significant segment of the strategic economic territory and the off-shore area near Serpent Island," Symonenko said.

The ruling of the UN court, "which effectively failed to recognize the coastal water area and the shelf near Serpent as Ukraine's exclusive territory, could entail catastrophic consequences for our country," the Communist Party head said.

"Ukraine has become one of the victims of the third reshaping of the world and some new territorial division in Ukraine," he said.

Ukraine's envoy to the UN International Court of Justice Volodymyr Vasylenko said that both Ukraine and Romania benefited from the settlement of their dispute over the Black Sea's off-shore area. However, the district's maritime segment that was given to Ukraine contains nearly all of the area's oil and gas reserves, he added.

The authorities in Bucharest, for their part, welcomed the Hague-based court's decision on Romania's maritime border with Ukraine in the Black Sea.

"This is a large success of Romanian diplomacy," the country's President Traian Basescu said.