But many people in Tiraspol that day seemed less glued to their phones and, despite the sandbags and checkpoints, unusually friendly to outsiders.The New York Times Crossword is one of the most popular crosswords in the western world and was first published on the 15th of February 1942. Maybe it had something to do with life in a Soviet enclave. Nearby, kids wheeled around on rollerblades. In front of him, a young couple sat at a sidewalk cafe in the waning sunshine eating burgers and sipping beer. “We have the same clothes as you and we have the same devices. “I think the outside world has the wrong impression of us,” said Edward Volsky, a user-experience designer who was on his way one recent evening to see “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” at a cinema in Tiraspol. Still, most of the Transnistrians recently interviewed seemed proud of their Transnistrian identity and pro-Russia, but not blindly so. “It makes you feel like you live in a jail.
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“There is no freedom of speech or freedom of thought,” said one young woman, Rina, who did not want to reveal her full name for fear of reprisals.
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“The Transnistrian economic model is based on two things: free Russian gas and smuggling,” said Alexandru Flenchea, a former Moldovan government official. Russia subsidizes this because Transnistria serves as a powerful geopolitical lever, especially on Moldova, which wants to join the European Union but is much less attractive with Russian troops on its soil, among other issues. He and others said that Russia could not easily fly reinforcements into Transnistria even if it wanted to because the planes would have to cross Ukrainian or European airspace, putting them at risk of being shot down.īut the flow of cheap Russian gas has not stopped, allowing Transnistria’s factories to make shoes, textiles and steel bars at competitive prices. And Ukraine is trying to paint a picture of a spreading war so the West sends more weapons.
Russia is trying to draw Ukrainian troops away from the battle in the east. He said that Ukraine and Russia were pumping up the threat to Transnistria for their own, different reasons. So they declared independence, and two years later, with the help of Russian troops, won their separatist battle against Moldova. In 1990, Transnistrians felt Moldova was leaning too close to Romania, which many still associated with Nazism. Both of those areas eventually exploded in bloodshed. It was part of a larger strategy to create Russian-dominated enclaves across the Soviet republics the Russians also did this in South Ossetia, Georgia, and the Donbas, in Ukraine. But they did not develop the republic evenly they constructed gigantic factories and power plants in the Russian-speaking areas, the region that would become Transnistria. Soviet forces eventually ran them out and built up the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic.
In the 1920s, Soviet authorities carved out an autonomous zone from Ukrainian territory along the eastern banks of the Dniester River, a major waterway that traditionally separated Russia’s sphere of influence to the east and Romanian-speaking areas to the west.ĭuring World War II, the Nazis and their Romanian allies invaded, massacring hundreds of thousands, especially Jews. At the edge of Transnistria, right on the Ukraine border, sits the Cobasna ammunition dump, one of the largest arms stockpiles in Europe. The explosions have been small and have not hurt anyone. But outside analysts believe they are the handiwork of Russian saboteurs trying to firm up local loyalties - much the same tactic Russia used in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. The Russian media bubble, which dominates in Transnistria, blamed the explosions on Ukrainian saboteurs. Boyish Russian soldiers strutted down the city’s grand boulevards in squads of twos and threes, Kalashnikovs gleaming. Now their presence takes on a new dimension.ĭuring a reporting visit this month, after the first wave of mysterious explosions, New York Times journalists saw new sandbag positions across Tiraspol, the capital. Until Russia invaded Ukraine in February, the world had mostly forgotten about those troops.
It does all of this thanks to billions of dollars in subsidies from its benefactors in Moscow, which in return gets a strategic enclave at the edge of the European Union where it bases at least 1,500 troops.
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