MOSCOW, January 25. /TASS/. Moldovan ex-president Igor Dodon believes that the current period is favorable for launching negotiations with the unrecognized republic of Transnistria, but the incumbent government in Chisinau is not ready to begin them.
“Honestly, I believe that the current period is very favorable for negotiating with Transnistria. Transnistrian leader [Vadim] Krasnoselsky has repeatedly made calls to the current government of Moldova, inviting them to the negotiating table for discussions on political settlement, but the Chisinau government does not seem prepared for that,” he told the Rossiya-24 TV channel on Tuesday night.
The Transnistrian Republic was proclaimed on September 2, 1990, on the left bank of the Dniester River and has a predominantly Russian-speaking population. The region’s residents opposed radical Moldovan politicians who sought the republic’s secession from the USSR and its unification with Romania at that time.
The fratricidal war was stopped after a peace agreement was signed in Moscow in 1992 and Russian peacekeepers were brought into the conflict area. Negotiations on the conflict’s peace settlement known as the 5+2 format (involving Moldova and Transnistria as parties to the conflict, Russia, Ukraine and the European security watchdog OSCE as mediators and the United States and the European Union as observers) talks started after that.
The settlement talks began to lose momentum in 2019 amid the election campaigns in Moldova. Not a single round of 5+2 talks was organized in 2020 and 2021. A number of agreements between Chisinau and the unrecognized republic are now in a suspended state.
