With Soviet slogans on the walls and a bust of Lenin at the door, it looks as if time has stood still in the “Back in USSR” restaurant in Tiraspol, the dour capital of the Moldovan separatist region of Transnistria.
But appearances are not everything. Time may be running out for the Russian-backed rebel region: the war in neighbouring Ukraine is offering an opportunity for Moldova to finally resolve the 30-year-old frozen conflict, which is often depicted as a bleak prototype for the parts of Ukraine occupied by Russian forces.
“There is a general sense that this conflict should not survive the war in Ukraine,” said Valeriu Pașa, the chair of the Moldovan think-tank WatchDog.md.
Unrecognised except by other secessionist Russian entities, the breakaway region along Moldova’s border with Ukraine has over the past three decades encouraged Russian nationalist imagery to bolster its brand as a satellite of Moscow.
There are about 1,500 nominally Russian soldiers based in the enclave, the residue of a peacekeeping force deployed after the secessionist war in 1992, which claimed 700 lives, but most are local recruits and there is no rotation from Russia.
In the central park of Tiraspol, a gleaming bronze statue of Catherine the Great, completed three years ago, stares at a statue of Alexander Suvorov, her general who founded Tiraspol in the late 18th century.
But if these figures look towards Russia, the shelves of Tiraspol’s supermarkets brimming with western goods suggest a different story, as does the traffic going back and forth across the checkpoints separating this sliver of land from the rest of Moldova.
Key to resolving the conflict will be a deal between Moldovan authorities in the capital, Chișinău, and the owners of Sheriff, the conglomerate that monopolises the Transnistrian economy, analysts say. Sheriff owns a chain of supermarkets and fuel stations as well as Sheriff Tiraspol, the professional football club in a state of the art stadium on the edge of town.
The economy of this strip of land snaking along the Dniester river between Ukraine and Moldova relies on the supply of free gas from Gazprom, the Russian state energy company. This allows Transnistrian authorities to keep utility bills low and to pay better pensions than in the rest of Moldova as well as fuelling the power station that supplies electricity to all of Moldova.
“They have the perfect business model,” said Alexandru Flenchea, a former Moldovan deputy prime minister for reintegration and now director of the Initiative 4 Peace think-tank. “They have free gas and they sell it for Moldovan hard currency. All they want is to perpetuate the status quo.”
But that can no longer be guaranteed. Moldova is after years of inaction accelerating plans to end its reliance on Transnistria for electricity and once that happens, possibly in a few years, the separatists’ economy will be in deep trouble. “If they don’t sell electricity they go bankrupt,” said Pașa.
A critical shift, he noted, came last year when Ukraine closed its border with Transnistria. This not only halted trade but also choked off smuggling — long a lucrative revenue stream — and accentuated the enclave’s reliance on exports to the EU.
“The smuggling was a very important source of revenue” for the elite in Tiraspol and their backers in Moldova and Ukraine, said Pașa. “It worked for many years but now the Transnistrian region is very dependent on the EU. About 70 per cent of its exports go there. That’s good. That’s leverage.”
Since 2014 Transnistrian companies have had access to EU markets if they register in the Moldovan capital, Chișinău.
Thomas de Waal, a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe, said he believed the chances of an “economic meltdown” were far higher than of a security crisis.
Moscow has always had an interest in the enclave, but a vital difference with other regional disputes was that Russia has no border with Transnistria, he said. Additionally, despite being culturally and historically Russian, the Transnistrians did not want to be “saved” by Russia, he added.
“It’s not an ethnic conflict nor territorial, it’s about political identity,” said de Waal, noting that Transnistria only became part of Moldova in 1940 before being annexed into a shortlived Greater Romania and then incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1944.
Since the invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has intermittently invoked the threat of conflict in Transnistria. The enclave’s Russian-speaking population is officially estimated at 400,000, but in reality at least a third are believed to have emigrated. Partisan media have fuelled historical distrust of the rest of Moldova where Romanian is the official language.
“In the past, Sheriff wanted to keep Russia at arms length,” de Waal said. “Transnistrian top officials previously made [it] clear they wanted a balancing act between Russia and Europe. But that’s becoming unsustainable. I don’t think they have an idea for the moment except to survive.”
The Moldovan government appears to be playing a waiting game, hoping their courtship of the EU — the country has candidate status — will yield economic dividends that will make reintegration more tempting for Transnistrians.
They are also reluctant for reunification to be seen as a prerequisite for EU membership. Moldova’s president Maia Sandu said recently the big issue in EU talks was reform not Transnistria. “We do hope to have a geopolitical opportunity in the near future to solve the conflict,” she told the FT. “But we should not see this as the main problem” in accession talks.
Flenchea argues for seizing the moment. “Many in Chișinău think let’s wait til the end of the war. That’s a mistake. You have to pursue a plan now,” he said, adding that Sheriff should be offered “a future in an integrated country”.
“The message should be this: you don’t have many options; forget about the free Russian gas, that will end; but you have legitimate businesses and you can save those and legalise them — and the only way is by being part of Moldova,” he said.
But Moldovan officials are wary of pushing too fast, arguing that the country’s fragile economy and under-resourced government would right now struggle to cope with the absorption of Transnistria.
One official said the last thing they needed was the injection into the electorate of a tranche of conservative Russian speakers at a time when the government’s approval ratings have tumbled against a backdrop of high energy prices.
“Inject 15 per cent of voters from the Russian world into any democracy and see what would happen,” the official said. “I say, let’s make our reintegration more like EU accession than German reunification.”
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