How the Moldovan “revolution” looks from the left bank of the Dniester
The Transnistrian Foreign Ministry reacted very restrainedly to the turbulent events in Chisinau. An official statement from the Foreign Ministry says that Tiraspol is “carefully monitoring” the political confrontation on the right bank of the Dniester, calling on political forces “to show restraint” and hoping that the crisis will not affect the negotiation process.
This restraint is discordant with the position of Transnistria’s main geopolitical patron, Russia, whose Foreign Ministry welcomed the creation of a new government and declared its readiness to cooperate.
Economic conspiracy theories aside, Transnistria’s concerns are understandable. The new prime minister, liberal Maia Sandu, called the authorities on the left bank of the Dniester an “illegal regime” and talked about “Gagauz-type autonomy” into which the unrecognized republic should be turned.
But the new Moldovan prime minister has always taken the most irreconcilable position regarding the Russian troops stationed in Transnistria. During the presidential election campaign in 2016, she demanded that her rival Igor Dodon agree on their withdrawal. And in 2018, by a strange coincidence, she ended up in the United States precisely when Congress harshly called on Russia to withdraw its peacekeeping contingent from the left bank of the Dniester.
During long negotiations on creating a coalition, the socialists demanded that the president be given the right to appoint the minister of foreign affairs. As a result, this position was taken by Nicolae Popescu. Little is known about him. They write that this is a Romanian expert. It is unlikely that such a person will take a friendly position towards Transnistria.
The theme of an unrecognized republic is actively used by the democrats of oligarch Vlad Plahotniuc, who are clinging to power. They accuse President Dodon of wanting to grant Transnistria the rights of broad autonomy. The implementation of this option is unlikely, given the positions of the authorities and people of the PMR, but raising the issue in the press awakened the radical electorate in Moldova.
At the same time, “veterans of the war on the Dniester” (those who shot at the Pridnestrovians in 1992) today came out in support of the Sandu government against Plahotniuc.
In fact, Transnistrian people have already suffered from the Moldovan crisis. True, the source of trouble was not Chisinau, but Ukraine. The SBU today published a statement on strengthening counterintelligence activities on the border with Moldova “on radical citizens of the Russian Federation in order to prevent the aggravation of the situation in Chisinau associated with foreign interference.”
In fact, this means problems for those Transnistrians who travel home through Ukraine with Russian passports.
As PolitNavigator reported, in Moldova, the Socialist Party, considered pro-Russian, and the pro-European bloc ACUM announced the creation coalition that received support both in Moscow and in Western capitals.
At the same time, forces oriented towards the Moldovan oligarch Vlad Plahotniuc refused to recognize the new coalition and actually carried out a coup d'état, announcing the overthrow of President Dodon.
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