As Russia’s war in Ukraine nears its first year, residents of neighboring Moldova worry even more than errant missiles that entered their territory from the nearby battlefield.
Alarm bells are ringing in the capital of Chișinău and across the West that Russian President Vladimir Putin may seek to destabilize the Moldovan government.
Last month, the head of Moldova’s security services warned that there is a “very high” risk that Russia will launch a new offensive in the east of the country in 2023.
On Monday, Moldovan President Maia Sandu warned of an alleged Russian plot to destabilize her government. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken expressed his “deep concern” on Friday at the prospect of interference from Moscow in the small country.
And on Sunday, Poland’s prime minister became the latest prominent leader to stress the need to protect Moldovans, saying Russia’s “fingerprints” are all over the tiny nation and that NATO allies “must all help them” for stability reasons. in Europe.
The Russian Foreign Ministry dismissed the charges as “baseless and groundless”.
Why Moldova matters: Moldova is located south of Ukraine, relatively close to the Russian front lines along the Black Sea coast. Importantly, it separates southern Ukraine from Romania, a member of NATO and the European Union, to the west.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, a handful of “frozen conflict” areas in Eastern Europe emerged, including a strip of land along the border between Moldova and Ukraine known as the name of Transnistria.
The territory declared itself a Soviet republic in 1990, opposing any attempt by Moldova to become an independent state or merge with Romania. When Moldova became independent the following year, Russia quickly inserted a so-called “peacekeeping force” into Transnistria, sending troops to support pro-Moscow separatists.
This so-called “peacekeeping” presence mirrored Moscow’s pretense for invasions in Georgia and Ukraine.
And concerns have only grown since the Kremlin began claiming that the rights of ethnic Russians are being violated in Transnistria – another argument used by Putin to justify his February 2022 invasion of Luhansk and Donetsk regions in eastern Ukraine, which contained two Russian-backed breakaway states. .
CNN’s Elise Hammond, Uliana Pavlova and Michael Conte contributed to this report.
cnn
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