Russia Says Moldova Blocks Power Supply To Russian Exclave Transdniester After Moscow Cuts Gas Supplies – JP
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The Russian exclave of Transdniester sits on the Ukrainian border with Moldova, a frozen conflict from the fall of the Soviet Union.
There are 2,500 Russian ‘peacekeepers’ there and a large armory of decaying Soviet ammunition. A civil war was fought after the USSR fell apart.
Since January, when Ukraine ceased allowing Russian gas to transit through its territory to Europe, Moscow shut off gas to the capital of Moldova, Chisinau, which in-turn halted gas supplies to the Russian-controlled area.
Russia is seeking to use the cutoff, analysts and officials say, as a part of a concerted effort to weaken the pro-Western government in the small nation, which is sandwiched between Ukraine and European Union member Romania, and where the Kremlin aims to regain clout and control, writes Oilprice.com.
The shutoff has left many of region’s 450,000 people wearing extra clothes, firing up electric heaters, and shivering in their homes. A senior official in the de-facto government said it has forced the closure of all industrial companies except food producers.
“What the Russians have done to their 30-year proxy on the left bank of the Dniester River, it’s remarkable,” former ambassador to the area William Hill said. “People are going to remember this. It’s freezing there.”
Moscow focused on the lack of electricity moving to Transdniester in the absence of gas.
“They start to harass and persecute people on national and socio-cultural grounds. The entire armory, the whole toolkit is being used, as it concerns the absolutely limitless, permissive use of the whole range of methods that should have disappeared into oblivion. They use everything, from linguistic harassment to now shutting down vital sources. It’s mockery in the truest sense of this term,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.
“The blocking of power supplies to Transnistria by Moldova is a mockery of the area’s residents…happening under the model the West is promoting around the world, under the false slogans of freedom and democracy, which implies addressing political and geopolitical issues with all available tools, including, quite literally, neo-Nazism.”
The electric power plant in Transdniester has switched to coal but only has a few months of fuel available at this point, and prices are increasing.
Western analysts state Moscow is using the developments to pressure the pro-Western government in Moldova which won recent elections, that have been deemed unfair by the Kremlin.