A delegation from the Ungheni District Council took part on Sunday, 28 June 2026, in the city festival of Molėtai, Lithuania — «Among the Lakes and Stars». According to the district’s communiqué, the delegation comprised Corina Slupetcaia, the district’s vice-president, Eugenia Savin, chief specialist at the Centre for Resources and Investment Attraction, and Sergiu Mutu, head of the Land and Cadastre Service. They stood alongside Molėtai district’s other partner delegations — from Germany, Poland, Ukraine and Latvia — and were greeted, in the City Hall Square, by the mayor of Molėtai district, Saulius Jauneika.
Beyond the craft fair, the concert and the opening ceremony, the visit has an explanation that does not show in the festival photos: between Ungheni district and Molėtai district there is a partnership agreement dating from 2012, which the district administration brought back into focus this year.
Two Lithuanian bridges, easy to confuse
The first necessary clarification is that «Ungheni» in fact has two different links with Lithuania, at distinct administrative levels.
One belongs to the municipality of Ungheni (the city hall): the official list of towns twinned with the municipality includes the Lithuanian town of Joniškis, alongside Dobele (Latvia), Konin (Poland) and others. The other belongs to the district (the district council), and its partner is Molėtai district — which does not appear on the municipality’s list. These are two separate relationships, with different institutions and towns; the 28 June visit belongs to the second.
What Molėtai is
Molėtai is a district in north-eastern Lithuania, known as a «land of lakes»: it has around 300 lakes over an area of almost 1,400 square kilometres and a population of roughly 16,000. Its profile is mainly tourism and recreation — it draws around 150,000 visitors a year, has little industry, and one of its landmarks is the Lithuanian Museum of Ethnocosmology, the source of the «stars» in the festival’s name.
On Molėtai district’s list of international partners, Ungheni appears with the year 2012 — the same year the Ungheni administration gives for the signing of the agreement. For a district in Moldova, a partner that is at once a European Union member state and a territory with an economy built on tourism and services can serve as a model to learn from — from managing tourist destinations to digitising public services.
Why a delegation from investment and cadastre
This year’s delegation make-up says something about the direction the district wants to give the relationship. Besides the district’s vice-president, those who travelled to Molėtai were a specialist from the Centre for Resources and Investment Attraction and the head of the Land and Cadastre Service — that is, people from the economic and administrative side, not only the cultural one.
The official communiqué does not spell out a working agenda on investment or cadastre on the margins of the festival, so any concrete negotiation remains, for now, an assumption based on the delegation’s profile rather than a confirmed fact. The direction is plausible, though: Lithuania has a registry and cadastre system that is digitised to one of the highest levels in the EU — precisely the field in which a district in Moldova would gain from a transfer of know-how.
What the link has produced so far
This is where the less spectacular part begins. The 2012 agreement was visibly revived in 2026: in January, the two administrations held an online working meeting «dedicated to strengthening bilateral cooperation», attended by district president Dionisie Ternovschi, where «possible directions of cooperation for 2026» were discussed; in June came the trip to the city festival.
Beyond these two moments, from the public information available at the time of this article we have not identified any concrete joint projects, European funding, exchanges of pupils or officials, or investments resulting from the more-than-a-decade-old partnership. That does not mean none exist — part of the Lithuanian side’s documentation could not be consulted — but it does mean that, at the level of official communication so far, the Ungheni–Molėtai link remains a relationship of protocol and intentions rather than one with measurable results shown publicly.
An active external policy
Molėtai is only one of the district’s external bridges. Ungheni’s flagship link remains its twinning with Arad County, marked at 15 years this summer, to which contacts with Hungary and Serbia and trips to Cluj-Napoca and Buzău on European funding have recently been added. Against this background, the partnership with Molėtai is one of the district’s oldest yet quietest links — a relationship capital that has existed on paper since 2012 and that only now appears to be being tested for results.
The make-up of the delegation, the programme of the 28 June 2026 visit and the existence of the 2012 partnership agreement come from the official communiqués of the Ungheni District Council. The distinction between the municipality’s twinning with Joniškis and the district’s partnership with Molėtai is confirmed by the list of twin towns published by Ungheni City Hall. The data on Molėtai district (population, area, number of lakes, tourism profile, the 2012 partnership year) come from the free encyclopaedia in Lithuanian. The absence of publicly documented concrete projects or results is a finding as of publication, based on the accessible sources; part of the Lithuanian side’s documentation could not be consulted.