For the first time, Moldova can cut an energy link to its breakaway territory. Yet doing so risks Moscow’s threats and a possible humanitarian crisis.
For the first time in three decades, Moldova thinks it finally has the leverage to kick Russia out of the country.
But it comes with a quandary: how to do that without unleashing a humanitarian crisis on its own citizens.
Since gaining independence in the 1990s, Moldova has been locked in a frozen conflict with Moscow over Transnistria, a Kremlin-backed separatist region near Moldova’s eastern border with over a quarter of a million people.
The face-off has been tense, but maintained by a powerful connection: Moldova gets cut-rate Russian energy via Transnistria, which gets hundreds of millions of euros a year in return. The link allowed Russia to preserve control over the strategic strip of land along the Ukrainian border, where its troops are stationed despite Moldova’s objections.
That dynamic is changing, however. Moldova in recent years has integrated with Europe under pro-EU President Maia Sandu. Brussels has offered millions of euros and more links to its energy supplies as part of a yearslong process to get the country, one of Europe’s poorest nations, ready for EU membership.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Brussels has offered millions of euros and more links to its energy supplies as part of a yearslong process to get the country, one of Europe’s poorest nations, ready for EU membership.
Stopping payments to Transnistria would collapse the separatist state’s budget and leave hundreds of thousands of people there without incomes and basic services — a challenge that, for a country Moldova’s size, would be akin to the reunification of Germany following the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In recent years, Brussels has given Moldova tens of millions of euros to build infrastructure and cement its connection to European energy networks, offsetting the costs of buying supplies from elsewhere.
“Solving the energy issue with Transnistria would be a major step forward,” said Viola von Cramon-Taubadel, a German MEP and member of the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee.
In March, its officials called on the Kremlin to “protect it against the pressure of Moldova,” claiming that the country was staging an economic blockade — despite the daily flow of goods and services that pass Russian checkpoints.
And while they sit atop one of Europe’s largest arsenals of weaponry and ammunition at the closely guarded Cobasna depot, it is widely believed to hold little else but decaying WWII-era equipment that hasn’t already been sold off or repurposed by the Russians.
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