Several of my comrades have commented to me about the rather...er...esoteric nature of my posts on Moldovan/Russian/Romanian relations. I took an interest in the matter first when I was in Romania in March of 2002, and there were lots of perplexing manifestations going on in the capital. After doing a little digging (and learning a few Romanian words), I figured out what it was that they were protesting -- the Russian military presence in a tiny slice of neighbor Moldova. The tiny slice was called Transnistria, and in 2002 it still housed the Soviet 14th army. And it still does to this day. That's part of the reason why Iuri Rosca and his Christian Democrats have been protesting outside of the Russian embassy in Moldova.
Well, the Russians don't much like that. So they've leaned on their man in Chisinau, Moldova's Communist President (and ethnic Russian) Vladimir Voronin, to put a stop to it. And he's obliging. The first sad thing about the entire situation was the puny size of the protests. When I was in Romania, there were thousands and thousands of students marching, so many that it looked like either the protests were going to work or else end up another Tiananmen Square. This time, extremely charitable estimates put the total size of the protests at around 2,000 people.
The most outrageous thing about this new series of protests, though, is the fact that the Russian First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs had this to say about setting up a new timeframe for pulling out the illegal Russian military presence in Transnistria:
"...no concrete timing should be imposed, because when we have one, opposing forces [in Transnistria] have a good possibility to strongly press on Russia, to procrastinate that process, and thus make us late. So, my personal opinion is that no deadlines should be set." (full article here)
No deadlines should be set. So the Russian line is now: "Hey, we don't want to tick off the separatist regime in Transnistria (that only exists because we say it can) by trying to pull out our troops by a discrete time (which we've already said we'd do, and failed to), so we're just going to leave them there until we can get them out without aggravating anybody. We have no idea when that will be."
If there was ever any doubt about President Putin's desire to reinstitute a Russian sphere of influence in his neighborhood, there shouldn't be anymore. Imagine the Transnistrian problem thus: If Presidents Bush and Putin were both ethnically Chechen (stay with me, here), and Bush continually supports the Chechens and the policies that benefit them. Because of the huge power discrepancy, Putin can't really stand up to Bush (and he doesn't really want to, anyway). Putin also wants to benefit the Chechens, but realizes that it's political suicide to come out publicly on their behalf. So the OSCE comes up with a harebrained scheme to "federalize" Russia, with Chechnya being a largely autonomous body with voting rights in the Duma and home rule. Chechnya arose because of, and is protected by, an illegal American army that occupies it. Now make Bush into Putin, Putin into Voronin, Chechnya into the ethnic Russian minority in Moldova, and leave the OSCE as is, and you've got a reasonable (but grossly oversimplified) analogy for the current state of things in Moldova. Simple, huh?
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