153 - Putin Bullies Little Moldova, on Ukraine's Flank
Failing in Ukraine, Putin is threatening Moldova. Located just west and north of Odesa, this small landlocked country the size of Maryland and Belgium was once a sleepy Soviet satellite. It has few resources, little wealth, and is not Slavic in origin or language. Most of its 3.2 million people speak Moldovan, a Romanian-related language, not Russian or Ukrainian. But it has achieved candidate status to join the European Union, which annoys Putin.
President Volodymyr Zelensky warned recently that Ukrainian intelligence had intercepted a Russian plan to destabilize Moldova. Politics there has long been volatile, its relatively recent turn to democracy having steadily been attacked by oligarchs and mobs in Russia’s pay. Russian bankrolled political provocateurs have for years fomented political opposition and sponsored protests in Chisinau, the capital. Last month, there were repeated outbreaks of Russian-orchestrated mob hostility.
Last month, too, Putin ominously revoked a 2012 decree that recognized Moldova’s independence. Naturally, he has designs on Moldova, a weak state which, if conquered or run by proxies, could launch Russia into the midst of eastern Europe.
Moldova is the poorest country in Europe after Ukraine ($5,529 per capita in 2022). It grows sunflower seeds for oil, walnuts, and apples, and produces wine. The war has reduced its annual growth rates from 14 percent in 2021 to 0 percent last year, brought annual inflation rates to more than 30 percent, and (because of Russian natural gas cutoffs) often plunged much of Moldova into darkness. Nevertheless, Moldova has welcomed more than 100,000 refugees from Ukraine.
Unfortunately, Moldova harbors a Putinesque Fifth Column within its midst. Transnistria, as the sliver of land along Moldova’s eastern border is called because of the Dniester River that runs through it, includes 465,000 people, 40 percent of whom speak Moldovan as a first language. But this satrapy along the border with Ukraine has been run since 1990, even before Moldova’s 1991independence from the Soviet Union, by criminalized Russian-speaking separatists backed by an expeditionary force of about 1,500 Russian soldiers rotated in and out and supplied from Russia.
Before the invasion of Ukraine, Transnistria successfully often compromised Moldova’s independence and cooperated with many of its then Russian-friendly governments. Now, after a year of hard-hitting combat between Russians and Ukrainians not very far from the Russian garrisons in Transnistria, Ukraine looks warily at its Russian-infiltrated neighbor. Putin has falsely accused Ukraine of preparing to attack the Russians in Transnistria, looking for another pretext to justify an assault on Ukraine.
Likewise, the whole of Moldova, with a tiny defense force, worries daily that the subversive Transnistria Fifth Column in its midst will prove a convenient excuse for Putin and real Russian legions to meddle in mainstream Moldova, with its now Europe-leaning president and government. Before the invasion of Ukraine, Moldova was completely dependent for energy upon Russia supplied natural gas; 70 percent of the country’s power is generated by a natural gas-powered plant located in Transnistria and still supplied via pipeline from Russia. Romania and Poland have now shifted gas to Moldova, but it still remains vulnerable to potential Russian denial, sabotage, and bombing.
Run by minor despots loyal to Russia in the early years after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Moldova (minus Transnistria) has become a thoroughgoing democracy, in recent years run by a woman president and (until a few weeks ago) by a woman prime minister at the head of a parliamentary government. President Biden met with Moldovan President Maia Sandhu when he was in Warsaw.
Corruption was rife for many years; Moldova still harbors that scourge, but the state is demonstrably less kleptocratic than it was, except for Transnistria. Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index rates Moldova as less corrupt than Russia (137th) and Ukraine (116th), but at 91st place (of 180 countries) it is still seriously afflicted. Russian money has always been spent for infamous and subversive purposes.
Moldova in so many palpable ways sits daily on the cusp of battle. Already, on several occasions during the Ukrainian tumult, Russia has fired missiles over Moldova – violating its airspace – toward Ukraine. A few have landed in Moldova itself. Moldova hardly wants to invite Putin’s ire, but it backs Ukraine and provides a corridor for weapons transfers from Bulgaria and Romania to western Ukraine.
Chisinau, in the central sector of the small state, lies a mere 121 miles from Odesa. Tiraspol, the capital of Transnistria, is even closer, only 74 miles from Odesa. One of Putin’s objectives of his attack on Ukraine has been to capture Odesa, the major Black Sea port that was established in 1794 by Catherine the Great when she took the area from the Ottoman Empire. If Odesa fell to Russian forces, Ukraine would be landlocked and largely subject to Russian hegemonic dominance.
Putin’s imperialistic designs are also driven by his narcissistic emulation of such Russian czars as Alexander I. He snatched Moldova, then known as Bessarabia, from the Ottoman Empire in 1812. That strengthened Alexander’s empire in the Balkans. Russia proceeded to rule Moldova thereafter for all but twenty of the next 180 years. It is no wonder a compulsive conqueror like Putin covets Moldova and seeks, if strategic positioning and armed power permitted, to annex Moldova along with Ukraine.
The West, and NATO, must never let Moldova’s independence be compromised.