Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday that the US has “deep concern” about Russia’s efforts to destabilize the government of Moldova.
This comes as Moldova President Maia Sandu said earlier this week that Russia was plotting a coup in Moldova.
“We have deep concern about some of the plotting that we’ve seen coming from Russia to try to destabilize the government,” Blinken said at a meeting with Sandu in Germany on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference. “We stand strongly with Moldova in support of its security, its independence, its territorial integrity, the very important reform efforts that the president and the government are making.”
Sandu described 2022 as an “incredibly difficult year for Moldova” and thanked the US for its support with its myriad challenges, including with energy, the economy and security.
Why Moldova is important: Moldova, situated between Ukraine and Romania, was previously part of the Soviet Union at the end of World War II. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, a handful of “frozen conflict” zones in eastern Europe emerged, including a slither of land along Moldova’s border with Ukraine known as Transnistria.
The territory declared itself a Soviet republic in 1990, opposing any attempt by Moldova to become an independent state or to merge with Romania. When Moldova became independent the following year, Russia quickly inserted itself as a so-called “peacekeeping force” in Transnistria, sending troops in to back pro-Moscow separatists there.
This supposed “peacekeeping” presence, which has in practice seen the Kremlin prop up a puppet state that seeks to undermine Moldova’s sovereignty, has also mirrored Moscow’s pretext for invasions in Georgia and Ukraine.
Alarm bells in Moldova and the West grew louder following familiar refrains from the Kremlin that the rights of ethnic Russians were being violated in Transnistria – another argument used by Putin to justify his February 2022 invasion of Luhansk and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, which contained two breakaway Russian-backed statelets.
In the context of the war today, the Russian-backed separatist enclave at the southwestern edge of the country could now present a potential bookend to any Russian assault westwards from Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.
