Page 46 - bne magazine February 2024_20240206

46 I Southeast Europe bne February 2024
Moldovan President Maia Sandu meets with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Kyiv as both countries pursue EU accession. / presedinte.md
Tiny Moldova stands up to Russia’s might
As Russia became bogged down in the land war in Ukraine, and it was clear this was not going to be the expected walkover for Moscow, Moldova has become increasingly assertive against the regional great power. It has responded to threats – some more explicit than others – with steady progress towards EU integration and indications by top officials that it is considering scrapping its long-held neutrality and may opt for a closer partnership with Nato.
“The next victim”
Russia has not let up on its threats
to Moldova. At the OSCE summit
in Skopje at the end of November, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warned Moldova is "the next victim of the hybrid war launched by the West against Russia”.
The Moldovan foreign ministry responded with a strongly worded statement condemning Russian destabilisation efforts, and stressing that Moldova is firmly on its European path.
“Since the beginning of the brutal invasion of the Russian Federation against Ukraine, in Moldova we have felt the entire arsenal of destabilisation attempts that Russia has unleashed against us. Russia's statements, whether today or on previous occasions, are part of the series of hostile actions that the Russian Federation has been trying to implement towards our country over the past 30 years,” the statement said.
“[W]e hope that our message – clear and sharp – will be understood by him [Lavrov] ... the Republic of Moldova is going, irreversibly, on the European path.”
In the following days, Russia took further action, re-introducing restrictions on imports of agricultural products from Moldova. Russian phytosanitary control service Rosselkhoznadzor said this
was because insect pests were found in shipments from Moldova. However, the Moldovan side said there were no real grounds for the embargo. Bans on exports of Moldovan wine and other products have several times been used by Russia in the past.
Clare Nuttall in Glasgow
Moldova’s parliament is poised
to adopt the country’s new national security strategy that for the first time explicitly names Russia as a threat to the state. This is the latest step in a serious of actions taken by
the pro-EU government in Chisinau as
it tries to throw off decades of Russian influence.
Russia has taken a hybrid approach to Moldova, using multiple channels to destabilise the country and undermine the pro-EU government formed
by President Maia Sandu’s Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS). As well
as Russia’s backing of separatists in the Transnistria region, the main battlefields are Moldova’s energy security, the spread of Russian propaganda via the media and explicit interference in Moldovan elections.
It’s nearly two years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – the state that physically separates Russia from Moldova – in February 2022. At that time, it was feared that Russia posed an existential threat to Moldova too. There
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was speculation from the earliest days of the war that Moldova could get dragged into the conflict through the Russian military presence in the Transnistria region that lies on Moldova’s eastern flank bordering Ukraine.
This was fuelled by rumours on social media in the early days of the war. Among them was a viral picture of Belarusian President Aleksander Lukashenko standing in front of what appeared to be a battle map, with a red arrow pointing from the Ukrainian port city of Odesa into Transnistria.
That Moldova did not get dragged into the war was partly thanks to the dogged determination of the Ukrainian army to fight back Russian forces, preventing them from making it to Odesa and
an easy land route to Transnistria.
Part of the credit also goes to the Transnistian authorities’ unwillingness to get dragged into the war, despite apparent provocations like the series of unexplained explosions within the separatist republic.