Transnistria is a long and skinny scrap of land along the Dniestr river, wedged between Moldova and Ukraine. In Soviet times, when an independent Moldova sounded about as likely as an independent Staten Island, the borders of the Moldavian SSR were drawn a little to the east of the Dniestr, the historical boundary of all things Moldavian. Over time, a large number of Russians relocated here, and the region grew into the Moldovan SSR’s industrial heartland. When the Soviet Union began to fall apart in 1991, Moldova decided it wanted to secede, and the Transnistrians decided they wanted no part of it.
The Moldovans sent armed troops to help persuade the Transnistrians to change their mind, at which point the locally stationed Soviet 14th Guards Army volunteered its own opinion that it would probably be best for the Moldovans to go home. The 14th army’s job, incidentally, was to oversee one of the largest conventional weapons depots in Europe, holding all of the ammunition and weaponry repatriated from East Germany and other parts of the disintegrating Warsaw Pact. The new Moldovan state found this line of argument very persuasive, and Transnistria has been a de facto independent state ever since.
Maciej Cegłowski, Transnistria
