Really good piece. Moldova has recently been trying to tie itself to the West through measures related to financial infrastructure: USAID is very active in the country, and the central bank is working really hard to restore investor confidence in the country. They are trying to overcome what can only be described as a disaster: in 2014, one eighth of the country's annual GDP was stolen overnight. The guy who perpetrated it later got elected to various political positions. Ilan Shor - worth looking up.
It’s a good article overall, but (very) minimal intro.
After the Moldovan independence in 1991, there was a war that finished with Soviet 14th Army permanently settling in Transdnestria - the eastern part of former soviet moldovan republic. The troops evolved into a local militia.
I would underscore that Moldova’s trade is today essentially oriented towards the EU and without a coup de force it is difficult to turn back the Republic to the Russian sphere of influence.
Russia’s main concern is that Transdnestria will be occupied either by Ukraine or by central moldovan government and that they injected so much money to the Transdnestrian separatists for nothing. This would be Moscow’s main objective: to secure what they already have in the region and then, in possible, to do a regime change in Moldova.
Also R. of Moldova’s Parliament might decide to re-unite with Romania and be protected under NATO article 5.
There is a big error in the article : Moldovan language is not a dialect of Romanian. Official language of the Republic of Moldova is Romanian.
Also, Plahotniuc is a politician that surely received money from Moscow but now he is blacklisted by Russia and hiding somewhere else (Turkey, Switzerland, Israel?). He also posed as pro-European while Prime-Minister.
First rate ! My paternal grandparents came to America from a small shtetl in northwestern Moldova shortly after 1900 .. in 1978 I visited an identical shtetl 50 km to the west with the chief rabbi of Romania, Moses Rosen whose father had often visited that shtetl before it became the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic !!
An excerpt of my memoir dealing with this will be coming here :
Really good piece. Moldova has recently been trying to tie itself to the West through measures related to financial infrastructure: USAID is very active in the country, and the central bank is working really hard to restore investor confidence in the country. They are trying to overcome what can only be described as a disaster: in 2014, one eighth of the country's annual GDP was stolen overnight. The guy who perpetrated it later got elected to various political positions. Ilan Shor - worth looking up.
It’s a good article overall, but (very) minimal intro.
After the Moldovan independence in 1991, there was a war that finished with Soviet 14th Army permanently settling in Transdnestria - the eastern part of former soviet moldovan republic. The troops evolved into a local militia.
I would underscore that Moldova’s trade is today essentially oriented towards the EU and without a coup de force it is difficult to turn back the Republic to the Russian sphere of influence.
Russia’s main concern is that Transdnestria will be occupied either by Ukraine or by central moldovan government and that they injected so much money to the Transdnestrian separatists for nothing. This would be Moscow’s main objective: to secure what they already have in the region and then, in possible, to do a regime change in Moldova.
Also R. of Moldova’s Parliament might decide to re-unite with Romania and be protected under NATO article 5.
There is a big error in the article : Moldovan language is not a dialect of Romanian. Official language of the Republic of Moldova is Romanian.
Also, Plahotniuc is a politician that surely received money from Moscow but now he is blacklisted by Russia and hiding somewhere else (Turkey, Switzerland, Israel?). He also posed as pro-European while Prime-Minister.
Thanks George and very good point on language. We should have made that clearer.
First rate ! My paternal grandparents came to America from a small shtetl in northwestern Moldova shortly after 1900 .. in 1978 I visited an identical shtetl 50 km to the west with the chief rabbi of Romania, Moses Rosen whose father had often visited that shtetl before it became the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic !!
An excerpt of my memoir dealing with this will be coming here :
aandelman.substack.com