Moldova asks to join Russia

[Camilo]

Another Crimea? Ukraine's neighbor asks to join Russia

As Russian president Vladimir Putin signed a treaty on Tuesday making Crimea part of Russia, a little-known region in neighboring Moldova has also pleaded to join the country.

Russian loyalists in the breakaway region of Trans-Dniester, which shares a border with Ukraine, asked the parliament in Russia to write new laws that would allow them to join the country.

The Trans-Dniester region split from Moldova around 1990 and made a failed attempt at independence in 2006, when it held a referendum that was unrecognized internationally.

The region did not want to split from the Soviet Union at the time of its collapse and has now requested unity with Russia.

Otilia Dhand, vice president at advisory and intelligence firm Teneo Intelligence said Trans-Dniester has been asking to join the Russian Federation for two decades, so now is an opportune moment to ask again.

Dhand said up until now the Kremlin had shown little interest in absorbing the region as it offers little strategic and economic benefits.

"There are 550,000 citizens of citizens of Trans-Dniester who mostly also claim other citizenships. There are about 150,000 of them that claim dual citizenship with Russia and many others claim Ukrainian citizenship or Romanian so it is kind of a mixed picture," Dhand told CNBC.

"Russia has roughly 1,000 soldiers based there and also some ammunition and equipment that comes with it. They are not such a substantial force as they are in Crimea and Russia does not have common borders with Trans-Dniester, so it would be difficult to service as a territory," she said.
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Another Crimea? Ukraine's neighbor asks to join …
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"If they were interested in tactically taking it over - it would just really be for show. Should Russia choose to take Trans-Dniester over, it would be quite intimidating for Ukraine," she added.

Speaker of the high council, Mikheil Burla sent a written address to a speaker in Russia's Duma, the lower house, asking him to consider legislation that would allow the non-recognized republic to become part of Russia, according to media reports.

The President of Moldova Nicolae Timofti has warned that any move to enable the mainly Russian speaking region to join Russia would be a "mistake".

"This is an illegal body which has taken no decision on inclusion into Russia," Reuters cited Timofti as saying at a news conference.

"If Russia makes a move to satisfy such proposals, it will be making a mistake," he said.

Russia's decision to sign a treaty to annex the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, after a referendum held under Russian military occupation showed overwhelming support for the move, has further damaged relations with the West.

The United States and the EU imposed travel bans and asset freezes against a number of officals from Russia and Ukraine following Sunday's referendum and U.S. Vice President Joe Biden called Moscow's action a "land grab".

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in a telephone call that such sanctions were unacceptable and threatened "consequences", without going into detail.

Trans-Dniestrian citizens: A 'mixed picture'

Trans-Dniester is recognized as part of Moldova by the U.N. rather than as an independent state, but the region is self-governed and runs its own institutions.

Moldova has a population of approximately 3.56 million. Crimea has 2.3 million people compared to Trans-Dniester, the thin strip of land between the Dniester river and the Ukraine border, which is populated by approximately 550,000 people and has its own currency, the Trans-Dniester rouble.

At the time of the collapse of the USSR, Moldova as a constitutive republic of the USSR wanted independence but Trans-Dniester wanted to stay with Russia. There was a short, but bloody war in 1992, but the issue has never been fully resolved.

Teneo's Dhand said many citizens living in the region have as many as three passports: a Trans-Dniesterian one which is not recognized, a Russian one and potentially one other from "whichever other country allows them to have one. So it is complicated to define each and every person, where they belong,"she said.

The referendum held in Trans-Dniester in 2006 resulted in about 97 percent of the population voting for independence and to join Russia.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/another-crimea-ukraines-neighbor-asks-join-russia-111331723.html

[Tesseract]

Belarus more likely to join Russia - has been openly discussed for many years.

[Mixteca]

Trans-Dniester is run by some rather terrifying folks. A psychopath in a Russian military uniform decided that Moldova (approximately the size of Maryland) was no longer sufficiently Russian or Communist after they gained independence, although it is the only former Soviet state that still has standing statues of Lenin and calls itself Communist. He started a surprisingly horrific and bloody war for such a small area of land.

Moldovans had finally been allowed to speak their native Romanian and write it once again in latin script (Moldova was carved out of Romania by the Soviets after WWII and Moldovans had to learn to write Romania in Cyrillic and were told it was a separate language from Romanian and a peasant language that no civilazed person would speak. I have personally hear an ethnic Russian tell a Moldovan to speak a "human language.") The insane Russian general however, decided that everyone needed to write Romanian in cyrillic again.

The military in charge there call themselves avid communists and run around in black BMW and Mercedes SUVs. They kidnap and torture anyone who dissents. They are called by people there "gangster communists" and that's exactly what they are. They are thugs. Russian mafia backed by Russian military. At the border you have to go through 3 checkpoints. One of them is run by Russian military. Tiraspol has one of the most dreary, scary, oppressive atmospheres I've ever encountered. People who live there were terrified to even be seen pointing us in the right direction when we asked where to find the Afghanistan war memorial.

No referendum held in Trans-Dniester at this point in history is going to be fair and democratic.

The region may not be of any strategic interest to Russia (although that is debatable), but it is of pivotal importance to the rest of Moldova. Virtually all of the energy for the country comes from Trans-Dniester.

The region was highjacked from a country poorer than Albania by thugs who were backed by Russian politicians and mafia. Moldovans who could, fled to other areas.

There can be no fair and democratic referendum on this region that does not include the whole of Moldova.

[Frederick Jackson]

A friend of mine who has traveled to Moldova a number of times is skeptical of the Crimean situation because of her experience in Moldova, where she mentions Trans-Dniestria in particular:


My thoughts on Crimea are heavily influenced by my experiences in Moldova. I have a hard time believing that the referendum in Crimea was free and fair and legitimate when Russian troops were patrolling the streets. And I still don’t think any referendum that does not include the whole of Ukraine is going to be legitimate.

An insane Russian general annexed Trans-Dniestria in Moldova with backing from Putin and Russian mafia and that place is ****ing terrifying. I have never seen people look more scared just to be outdoors and simply witnessing that we were there. It was surreal. They had a “referendum” too. But nothing about it was legitimate. The gangster communists there routinely kidnap and torture and kill anyone there who gets in their way, all while driving black SUVs while everyone else still has a horse drawn cart – if they’re lucky.

There are an awful lot of similarities to the Ukraine here, including the interests of the Russian oligarchs and Putin, the forced populating and depopulating of target territories, etc.

When the original Orange revolution happened, it was a beautiful and amazing thing. Even AFTER the Medici-like poisoning of the legitimate winner of the election, a single woman – a translator for the deaf – alerted the deaf population that the election results were a fraud. She didn’t think she would get out of the building alive, but fortunately none of the “minders” understood sign language.

Tymoshenko may have had issues, but she was a far more legitimate choice than Yushenko. Although I’m still very unclear about the current people in place in Ukraine, if they are in fact neo Nazis, it’s because of the power vacuum left when Yushenko and Putin purged their legitimate opponents from the picture through positively medieval means.

There is nothing going on right now in Ukraine that I see as being legitimate. And it just makes me unbelievably sad.

i wrote back to her that I thought the elections in Crimea were free and fair, that the ballot boxes were even clear to you could actually read the ballots inside. The Crimean situation it would appear is very different from the Moldovan Trans-Dniestria situation. The thread title here should probably be changed to "Breakaway region of Moldova asks to join Russia" to reflect more accurately what is happening. But the present title with Moldova appearing to make the request is catchy. It sure caught my attention!