Chișinău, Moldova
There’s a joke in Moldova that the country could defend itself against a Russian invasion for two hours, that being the length of time it would take a tank to drive into the capital Chișinău from the Russian-backed breakaway region of Transnistria. Chișinău’s broad central Stefan cel Mare boulevard is a showpiece of the kind of Stalinist urban planning designed to allow tanks to travel unimpeded into a city’s urban core: the hope here is that this will not be put to the test.
Moldova’s army, less than 5,000-strong, is entirely unprepared for war, but war has now come to Moldova’s borders. The Ukrainian port city of Odessa, the seizure of which is an open Russian aspiration, is only 150 miles away, and tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees have swollen Moldova’s tiny population. At the same time, a series of mysterious bombings and grenade attacks in Transnistria, blamed by Russia on Ukraine and by Ukraine on Russia, have further heightened anxieties that something bad is in the offing.
“Russian intelligence operations could have been behind the explosions, not particularly to push the region into war in Ukraine,” Denis Cenusa, a Moldovan security analyst, told me, “but rather to ‘test’ the reaction of decision-makers in Kyiv, Chișinău and the West. That explains why the explosions have so far been well-choreographed, with no casualties and minimal damage. They may also be an attempt by local actors in the breakaway region to extort concessions from Chișinău.”
Part of the Soviet Union until 1992, Moldova’s existence as a fully independent state has never quite seemed permanent, with its political life centred around the binary choice of on the one hand a closer relationship with Russia, and on the other EU membership and closer links — perhaps even unification — with Romania. Since Russia’s war in Ukraine intensified in February, Moldova’s West-leaning government under President Maia Sandu and Prime Minister Natalia Gavrilița has applied for EU membership, and the President of the European Council, Charles Michel, has promised enhanced European security assistance. Yet despite its mostly Romanian-speaking population, with its gold-domed churches and stuccoed Tsarist-era townhouses, Red Army memorials and space-age Soviet Modernist government buildings, Moldova’s capital Chișinău still has something of the air of a provincial Russian city, with Russian-speaking families strolling beneath the chestnut trees of its central Pushkin Street.
Historically part of the Romanian lands, the territory of what would become Moldova was carved from the Ottoman Empire by Russia in the early 19th century, as part of Moscow’s attempted expansion towards the Balkans. Granted to Romania after the First World War, it was then annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, coming back under German-allied Romanian occupation before falling to the advancing Red Army in 1944. This year, in the run up to the annual Victory Day Parade yesterday, the politics of wartime memory were more contested.
Since the beginning of his war with Ukraine in 2014, Putin has made the symbolism of the Red Army’s victory against Nazism a difficult one for his neighbours to manage, especially now that Russian troops are raising the Soviet Victory Banner over conquered Ukrainian cities. Putin’s elevation of the St George’s Ribbon to a symbol of revanchist Russian nationalism has led Moldova’s liberal government to ban it. In return, Moldova’s Russia-leaning, socially conservative opposition Socialist party vowed to defy the ban and display the Ribbon at the Victory Day march. A recent RUSI report, citing Ukrainian intelligence sources, claims that this Victory Day protest was incited by Russia’s FSB to provoke a police clampdown and destabilise Moldova.
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SubscribeIt seems that every country in eastern Europe with a Russian minority gets destabilised by them.
I mean the Soviet Union put them there for a reason.
And yet if we go by Putin’s own logic Romania should have the right to annex them.
You could also use his “this isn’t a real country” argument here. I’m struggling to understand why Moldova is a separate country from Romania – other than because the Russians – in typical trouble-maker mode – decided to invent Moldova in 1945.
Let’s call a spade and spade here. Most of the problems we’re dealing with here are the legacy of Russian colonialism. Pretty much everyone else decolonised decades ago. And the colonists who didn’t like it moved back to their own country. I know Russian likes to think it’s “special”. It really isn’t.
““I am sure that a lot of people in Ukraine even think that’s a good idea.”
Because it is a good idea. Blow the hell out of the small Russian force, then withdraw back to Ukraine so even the ramshackle Moldovan army just has to drive in and and repossess Transnistria without having to actually go to war with Russia
Don’t forget, Russia has nukes – thousands of them.
And, don’t assume that Russians will just lose graciously and withdraw