Transnistria has managed to avoid choosing sides while following its own system. It is still technically part of Moldova, but it lies outside Moldovan government control. It prints its own money (the Transnistrian ruble), flies its own flag, sings its own anthem and runs an industrial economy supporting around 300,000 people.
It does all of this thanks to billions of dollars in subsidies from its benefactors in Moscow, which in return gets a strategic enclave at the edge of the European Union where it bases at least 1,500 troops.
It would be stupid for Russia to try to use this against Ukraine, and the Ukrainians know it
, said Anatoly Dirun, a Transnistrian political scientist and opposition politician.
He said that Ukraine and Russia were pumping up the threat to Transnistria for their own, different reasons.
Russia is trying to draw Ukrainian troops away from the battle in the east. And Ukraine is trying to paint a picture of a spreading war so the West sends more weapons.
This is all noise
, Mr. Dirun said.
He and others said that Russia could not easily fly reinforcements into Transnistria even if it wanted to because the planes would have to cross Ukrainian or European airspace, putting them at risk of being shot down.
Jeffrey GettlemanThe hostilities in Ukraine have brought attention to a long-ignored territorial dispute between it and Moldova, the region of Transnistria, another relic of the dissolution of the Soviet Union thirty years ago. The article itself is not very substantial, but it made me think how different recent history could have been for Romania if we reunited with Moldova at the end of the Cold War, as Germany did: this Transnistria issue would have plagued our accession negotiations with NATO and the European Union, and Romania would most likely never have been admitted into NATO at least.
Another aspect that few people seem to acknowledge these days is how, prior to 2015, Ukraine permitted the transit of Russian troops through its territory to access landlocked Transnistria – a reminder how much Ukraine cares about good relations with its less powerful neighbors.
The piece of information about the Cobasna ammunition stockpile was interesting as well, considering how a couple of hotheads on Twitter kept suggesting that Ukraine should attack it and seize them for its current war – not sure decades old ammunitions would have been of much use.
The explosions have been small and have not hurt anyone. But there could be a much bigger one. At the edge of Transnistria, right on the Ukraine border, sits the Cobasna ammunition dump, one of the largest arms stockpiles in Europe.
A Soviet-era relic guarded by hundreds of Russian troops, Cobasna holds a staggering 44 million pounds of bullets, grenades, rockets and artillery shells. Some of the inventory is more than 60 years old, and no one knows what kind of shape it is in. Some arms experts have warned that if Cobasna gets hit and the whole stockpile blows up, the explosion could rival the size of the Hiroshima bomb.
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