By: Gašper Blažič
For Moldova, probably most Europeans hardly know that this country even exists. And this in Europe, in its east, between Romania and Ukraine. It is one of the heirs of the former Soviet Union, and in fact most of its population speaks Romanian. A brief overview of its history is quite interesting: with the formation of the Soviet Union, a fairly small autonomous republic was established in the then Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine, but with the seizure of Romanian territory it greatly increased and gained the status of Soviet Socialist Republic. On August 27th, 1991, it declared independence, just days after a failed coup in Moscow that momentarily diverted the attention of the European public from the increasingly fiery conflict in the disintegrated Yugoslavia.
But about six months later, Moldovans were the first to pay the price for independence from Kremlin. A large Russian and Ukrainian minority along the Dniester River launched an armed uprising in fear of Moldova’s reunification with neighbouring Romania. A rather short war was followed by a truce that continues to this day, and a new state has emerged on Moldavian soil that has never achieved international recognition. The Transnistrian Republic (aka Transnistria), as the territorial belt along the border with Ukraine is called, is a completely independent state with its own state symbols that have preserved all Soviet iconography. And even current reports from this area of Moldova testify to the fact that time stopped there in 1991 – as if the Soviet Union had never disintegrated. Apparently, however, the architects of the 1992 Dniester uprising are not even bothered by the fact that their country does not exist for the world and that they are still under the flag of Moldova. In the end, they achieved what they wanted: Moldova could not fall into the arms of Romania without their consent, which got rid of dictator Ceauşescu just two years before the collapse of the Soviet Union but was occupied by other members of the Romanian Communist Party. The project of an independent state within Moldova, which apparently inspired the creation of the SAO Krajina in Croatia, also inspired separatists in other former Soviet countries, such as Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian ethnic island of Azerbaijan, and South Ossetia, a breakaway part of Georgia, which can also no longer control the said part of its territory.
Such interethnic conflicts, which began to simmer in the late 1980s, were in fact the main factor in the West’s opposition to Slovenia’s independence process. There were fears that Soviet nuclear weapons would fall into the hands of extremists, thus repeating the great danger of 1983, when the world was on the brink of a nuclear missile conflict. It is interesting that the first man of the Russian Federation Boris Yeltsin obviously understood the signs of the times well: he knew that the Soviet “superpower” would not last long, so he remained open to the Slovenian direction: in mid-May 1991, a Slovenian government delegation led by Lojze Peterle visited Moscow and met with Yeltsin. Even though Yeltsin’s Russia later remained an ally of Serbian interests, Yeltsin cautiously supported Slovenia’s independence aspirations (as shown in the headline in the newspaper Delo of May 17th, 1991), as he was aware that there was no other option. This, of course, meant that the Russian Federation, in addition to its traditional connection with the Serbs, would not prevent Slovenia’s international recognition. Around the same time, then-Yugoslav Defence Minister Veljko Kadijević was looking for a strong ally in Moscow with his Soviet counterpart, Dmitry Yazov, but the latter could not promise him much. However, in August 1991, Yazov sided with the putschists who overthrew Mikhail Gorbachev, but it was again Yeltsin who trip up the coup architects in Moscow.
Nevertheless, Yeltsin also made some fatal mistakes: in his post-Soviet period, Russia was a country of great chaos and privatisation, when many oligarchs became shamelessly rich and most of the population was plunged into poverty. After gaining the necessary public confidence in a referendum on April 25th, 1993, the autumn of the same year was intensified by a political-constitutional crisis culminating in the military siege of the Russian parliament and the war in central Moscow, where Vice President Alexander Ruckoy and Chechen-born politician Ruslan Hazbulatov opposed Yeltsin. The new constitution consolidated the role of the president of the Russian Federation, and a year later the first wave of the Chechen war followed, in which Russia suffered severe damage. In 1999, so to speak, at the time of his decline, Yeltsin allowed the then 47-year-old Vladimir Putin (grandson of Lenin’s cook!) to head the Russian government first, and then, when he resigned, to head the Russian Federation. Less than two years later, Putin visited Slovenia for the first time when his interlocutor US President George W. Bush was in Brdo pri Kranju.
Although the new Russian ruler at the time, despite his undisputed KGB career, was among those who argued that communism was a dead end, he soon shifted to his characteristic imperialist policies. We can agree with the statement of Dr Aleš Maver in the last issue of the supplement of the Family “Slovenski čas” that it was Putin and his Belarusian colleague Alexander Lukashenko who raised the Soviet leviathan from the dead. Nevertheless, it is true that Putin chose very carefully the time, context, and manner of the imperialist conquest. In the war with Georgia in 2008, he succeeded in finally snatching South Ossetia from Stalin’s (narrower) homeland. This was followed by a poorly disguised action against Ukraine, which first led to the dramatic ouster of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, who had previously been first governor of Donetsk and then prime minister of Ukraine. After Euromaidan, which washed away Yanukovych, Ukraine began to shrink: first the seizure of Crimea, and then the war in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas (Donetsk and Lugansk), which even a two-time peace agreement in Minsk could not completely eliminate.
Russia’s recognition of the two separatist “People’s Republics” in eastern Ukraine and the entry of Russia’s “protective troops” into the area were just a confirmation that Putin is a very cunning imperialist, who can read the weak points of the West very well. The latter should have acted no later than in 2014 in the wake of the Crimean crisis, which in practice tore apart the then 20-year-old international agreement from Budapest, by which Ukraine renounced nuclear weapons in exchange for the inviolability of its borders. The agreement, signed by Russia, Kazakhstan, and Belarus on the part of the former Soviet Union, and the United States, Britain, and France on the part of the West, has been dead since 2014, as the international community has reacted very faintly to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Which was a very valuable message for Putin, he just had to wait for the right moment.
Nevertheless, I remain of the thesis that Russian looting in Ukraine benefits the Biden administration in the United States in some way, as this superpower has the weakest president since the end of the Cold War. Putin, however, has only reaffirmed that he is a big fox against which the West will find it difficult to find a counterbalance, mainly due to the prices of energy sources flying into the sky. However, the international public will have to inform Kremlin that any change in Europe’s borders without a unanimous revision of the 1994 Budapest Agreement is out of the question.
Gašper Blažič is a journalist for Demokracija, editor of its daily board and editor of the Blagovest.si portal.
