Black Sea Forum for Partnership and Dialogue Black Sea Forum for Partnership and Dialogue The inaugural session of the Black Sea Forum for Partnership and Dialogue (BSF) was held on June 4–6, 2006 in Bucharest. The Forum is a Romanian initiative, initially meant to hold annual presidential-level summits (the venues rotating among participant countries) and thematic or sectoral-cooperation meeting during those annual intervals. The Forum is not meant to create new regional institutions, but rather to turn into a regular consultative process among countries of the extended Black Sea region (defined as including the South Caucasus to the Caspian Sea) and between this group of countries and
Caspian Sea region. There are similar tensions between Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan (the latter claims that the former has pumped more oil than agreed from a field, recognized by both parties as shared). The Caspian littoral states' meeting in 2007 signed an agreement that bars any ship not flying the national flag of a littoral state from entering the sea. Negotiations among the five littoral states have been ongoing, amidst ebbs and flows, for the past 20 years, with some degree of progress being made at the fourth Caspian Summit held in Astrakhan in 2014. The Caspian Summit is a head of state-level