74 - Putin Puts Moldova Next: Aggression Runs Amok
Russia controls Luhansk despite doughty resistance by Ukraine. Adjacent Donetsk is the next part of Ukraine that Putin seeks to annex, and will bomb apartment blocs, schools, hospitals, and anything that still stands to continue his military march of devastation across the Donbas. But distant Moldova is now a target, too. Putin wants to annex all of southern Ukraine so that he can bar Ukraine’s access to the Black Sea and so that Russia can establish a land corridor to its existing satellite operation in eastern Moldova.
That sometime Soviet province has been independent since 1991, when the Soviet Union imploded. Its 4 million people speak Romanian; the virtually land-locked country borders both Romania and Ukraine. (The population of Ukraine was 44 million before Putin invaded.) Moldova is about the same size as Maryland, and poor, with a 2021 per capita GDP of $3600. Life expectancy is 72 and annual maternal mortality per 100,000 births is at 19, both favorable results for a small country outside the European mainstream. Moldova exports sunflower seeds and oil, wine, and manufactures and sells insulated wire and barber and dentist chairs.
Last month the European Commission recommended that Ukraine and Moldova (but not Georgia) should become candidates for membership in the European Union (EU). Even for Ukraine, exchanging candidacy for full membership, and enlarging the EU from its current twenty-seven members to twenty-eight and twenty-nine with Moldova, could take years, with Moldova lagging Ukraine.
For both countries, the European Commission will insist on strengthened rule of law regimes, vigorous efforts to stamp out corruption (a continuing problem even in EU members Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary), the modernization of judicial processes (buttressing the independence of judges), and the grooming of financial sectors so that both economies can truly be integrated into the EU common market.
That will be a big stretch at the best of times. All-out war with Russia hardly makes modernizing Ukraine at all easy, and – if and when the war ends, and if Ukraine is still whole – reconstruction must take priority over meeting the requirements of EU membership.
If Russia attacks Moldova, that will only add to Europe’s concerns. Now that Moldova and Ukraine are “candidates,” the protective umbrella of Europe shades them somewhat, and for tiny Moldova that is a particularly positive outcome of Ukraine’s travails and the EU’s generous acceptance of a broad-based responsibility to oppose Putin and assist the nations that Putin threatens and maims.
Moldova already has a Russian fifth-column along its western border. In 1992, a year after its independence, a Mafia of Russian-backed, Russian-speaking, separatists fought a short war to stay out of the new Moldova. Ever since, with steady support from Russia, a slim (1,607 sq mile) area to the east of the Dniester River – between the river and the Ukrainian border – has ruled itself as an unrecognized (not even by Russia) Trans-Dniester Republic. About 469,000 people reside within its borders. About 30 percent are Russians and 30 percent Moldovans. The others are Ukrainians, Romanians, and Bulgarians.
In 2006, the people of Trans-Dniester voted to join Russia, but nothing happened. The breakaway region’s autocratic current government still wants to integrate with Russia (and Putin will tap into that desire) and not to re-join Moldova. The local media is tightly controlled, as is free expression by citizens. A Russian detachment of 1,200 troops has long been stationed inside the region.
Moldova itself was once run by heavy-handed governments that favored Russia. But since 2021, Moldova has been a parliamentary democratic republic, with an elected woman president, Maia Sandu. Another woman, Natalia Gavrilita, is prime minister and head of government, her Party of Action and Solidarity having won 52 percent of the parliamentary vote in 2021.
Moldova has fully supported Ukraine against the Russian invasion without, at the same time, drawing Putin’s ire against its defenseless self. It has welcomed comparatively large numbers of refugees fleeing the war, and allowed Western and Romanian war materiel to pass through its territory to assist the Ukrainian struggle.
Chisinau, the capital of Moldova, is only 100 miles from Odesa, now a Russian target after gaining all of the Luhansk. Closer still is Tiraspol, the capital of the Trans-Dniester enclave, only 60 miles from Odesa, the largest Ukrainian city before the border with Moldova. The southwestern corner of Ukraine also slips geographically under Moldova, so – in theory – an invading Putin force could drive through Odesa both to the border of Romania (a NAT0 country) and to encompass all of Moldova. Putin’s troops would then impede what remained of free Ukraine, and sit hard on its border.
These are hardly happy times in Eastern Europe. Ukraine is defending itself valiantly, but – as the loss of Luhansk demonstrated – Russia has fifty times the ammunition supplies of Ukraine, and can pound away relentlessly at urban targets. Ukraine’s forte is combat against the Russians within cities and across rural regions, but it has too few long-range guns (and too little ammunition) successfully to slug it out with the Russians.
Unless Russia’s drive into Donetsk and then toward Odesa can be halted with Western assistance, Moldova could be next. And then Putin’s ambitions would know no limit. The future of the free world is at risk, no matter how bravely Ukraine fights. The West must hold the line now by doing even more than ever to back Ukraine with fighting equipment. Washington should also start working closely with Moldova.