Tallinn Summit 2020

The Three Seas Virtual Summit and Web Forum held in Tallinn on 19 October 2020 was the fifth summit in line but the first organised in a unique hybrid format.  President of the Republic of Estonia, Kersti Kaljulaid, hosted president Andrzej Duda of Poland and president Rumen Radev of Bulgaria in Tallinn in person, while the rest of the Heads of State of the Three Seas and partners joined them virtually. 


Along with the heads of state of the participating countries (all together ten), European Commission Executive Vice-President Margrethe Vestager, United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and US Under Secretary for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment Keith Krach attended the high-level meeting.

Joint Statement

The goals for Estonia were to consolidate the initiative and to strengthen the digital pillar of the Three Seas cooperation platform. Estonia and the Tallinn Summit delivered these goals in five key ways:

  1. Tallinn Summit introduced the Smart Connectivity vision for Three Seas – a push to link our energy and transport infrastructure with digital platforms and services. This will support new business models and technologies and help make investments in energy and transport future-proof. It will help the Three Seas region flourish as a global hotspot for smart mobility and energy innovation, which will also help us develop and sell smart solutions around the globe. You can find the Smart Connectivity vision paper here.
  2. Throughout 2020 Estonia oversaw the growth of the Three Seas Initiative Investment Fund. Estonia was the third country to join the fund as a core investor and was followed by six more Three Seas participating countries that took the political decisions to join the fund, taking the total number of Three Seas countries involved in the fund up to nine. At the Tallinn Summit, Poland’s development bank BGK announced an additional investment of 250 million euros to the fund and the first private investor, Amber Infrastructure Group, announced its intention to invest up to 10 million euros. These pledges brought the total value of the fund up to 923 million euros. Furthermore, the United States Under Secretary Keith Krach announced at the summit an investment of $300 million through the US Development Finance Corporation into the Three Seas fund, to be finalised in December 2020. 
  3. Estonia launched an interactive website of the Three Seas Priority Interconnection Projects across energy, transport and digital sectors available for investors to discover online and updated the projects’ status report. 
  4. Estonia increased the practical value of co-operation between the Three Seas governments by hosting the first Three Seas Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in June 2020 and pushed for greater intergovernmental cooperation in the Three Seas to achieve the region’s infrastructure development goals;
  5. Estonia ensured the smooth functioning and continuity of the Three Seas cooperation platform by creating a technical secretariat, developing a permanent visual identity and communication channels, including a logo, new website and social media.

Video overview



In order to introduce the brand new web portal of Three Seas’ Priority Interconnection Projects and boost the development of smart projects, Estonia organised a Three Seas follow-up seminar on 27 October 2020 to dive deeper into the world of infrastructure and connectivity with special emphasis on digital.

The follow-up seminar focused on:
  • New interactive web portal. As the host of the 2020 Three Seas Virtual Summit and Web Forum, Estonia created an interactive web portal for Three Seas’ Priority Interconnection Projects (projects.3seas.eu) to map the key infrastructure investment needs in the region. What it offers and how to use it?
  • Building smart connectivity. Nowadays digital components are becoming an integral part of every infrastructure project. In order declare us a smart region, we need to boost the development of smart projects. What needs to be done?
  • Practical case studies on how to integrate digital into business models, how to build the most sustainable data exchange solutions and get the most out of smart approach.



Photos of the Tallinn Summit 2020 by Annika Haas, Arno Mikkor, Mattias Tammet.