Today Ukraine. Tomorrow Moldova:
Could another war be beginning in Europe? The past few weeks in Transnistria are worrying, not least because they are so familiar. The separatist government there is agitating against Moldova, accusing it of destroying the economy, and violating Transnistrian human rights and freedoms. If this is not a new war, it certainly suggests a widening of the existing one.
It all kicked off last week, when Transnistria adopted a resolution condemning Moldova for the “economic and political blockade” of the region. It then called on Russia, the UN, the OSCE and the EU to intervene and protect the rights of its people — around 460,000 Russians and Ukrainians and a sizable ethnic Moldovan minority.
Transnistria, the narrow strip of land running between Moldova’s eastern border with Ukraine, illegally broke away from Moldova in 1990 and is unrecognised as independent by almost all the world, including the UN. But not Russia, of course, which maintains two motorised rifle battalions there. And as Russia performatively heeds the breakaway republic’s “call”, memories of eastern Ukraine in 2014 are inescapable.
Aside from restoring the glories of the Soviet (and before that, Russian) empire, what does Putin want with a backwater like Moldova?
It’s not so much that he wants it, so much what he doesn’t want Moldova to do:
…And just like Crimea and the Donbas were never about just those regions, but the whole of Ukraine, this is also an operation directed against Moldova. It is the type of state that is in many ways guaranteed to give Putin a conniption: a former Soviet state that is also now a candidate for EU accession.
Moldova was granted status as candidate nation in June 2022 with the view to being a member nation by 2030. For the Kremlin, the prospect of Moldova joining the EU is almost as geopolitically and ideologically unacceptable as it was and is for Ukraine. What is happening now is merely the fruition of years (if not decades) of information and political subversion there (as across eastern Europe).
[…]
The Transnistrians are calling for Mother Russia. It will heed their call. This is how it begins. This is how it began in Ukraine. Moscow already has troops in the region, and sources tell me that the Russians have been sneaking what they call “saboteurs” into the region on flights.
But in the end, Transnistria as a region is of little importance to Russia beyond its ability to act as a garrison station on Ukraine’s southern border. But preventing Moldova from ever joining the EU and bringing it back into a new enlarged Russia are what most counts.
To paraphrase Ann Coulter,1 Putin loves the old Soviet republics like O.J. loved Nicole.
Also, I think the old debate about whether Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia should have been allowed to join NATO can now be considered settled. It wouldn’t be about going to war over these small Baltic Republics, so much as going to war over what Russia would do next.
Uncompromising journalismᵀᴹ in 2024:
I haven’t yet read the piece which so offended the editorial staff for this purportedly prestigious journal - I’m sure I’ll get around to it once I’ve cleared out the backlog of longreads in my Pocket app, and they finally get around to adding that long-promised 25th hour to the day - but from the staff reaction you’d think its author advocated nuking Gaza and then Mecca just to prove a point.
Instead, according to Scott Greenfield (how he found time to read it while maintaining a law practice, I have no idea) it’s a challenging piece about the dilemma faced by liberal, pro-peace Israelis in the wake of the October 7 pogrom:
It wasn’t that Chen’s post was pro-Israel or anti-Palestine, but that it wasn’t anti-Israel or Pro-Palestine. And that was the only perspective the staff of Guernica could, would tolerate. Chen’s post was unpublished.
Of course you see the problem here. It suggests that Israelis might not be one-dimensional villains who want to murder Palestinians so much they staged a false flag attack against themselves (which, don’t get me wrong, they thoroughly deserved, even though it didn’t happen, now shut up).
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