MOSCOW, February 20. /TASS/. Moldova’s authorities are sparing no effort to hamper the negotiating process with Transnistria, Transnistrian Foreign Minister Vitaly Ignatyev said on Monday.
"It (the Moldovan side - TASS) is not ready for dialogue. <…> In this new reality, statements that Chisinau is ready for dialogue and other elements linked with socio-economic issues, I think that these declarations have nothing to do with the real state of things. In reality, Chisinau is sparing no effort to destroy the negotiating structures we have and to create new problems to dodge the implementation of its liabilities," he said in an interview with the Rossiya-24 television channel.
In this context, he mentioned amendments to Moldova’s Criminal Code envisaging prison terms of from two to six years for "actions aiming to separate parts of the Republic of Moldova." According to Ignatyev, it can serve as a ground to declare all Transnistrian residents as separatists. Apart from that, in his words, Moldova is hampering imports of food and medicines to the unrecognized republic.
The Transnistrian top diplomat recalled that during the talks with North Macedonia’s top diplomat and the 2023 OSCE Chairman-in-Office Bujar Osmani last week, the Transnistrian side suggested informal talks be organized in 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, to give "a certain impetus to the dialogue."
"But instead of establishing communication, Moldova is saying one thing but is building an unsurmountable wall, widening an unbridgeable gap between the sides," he stressed.
Transnistria, a largely Russian-speaking region, broke away from Moldova following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Its relations with Moldova’s central government in Chisinau have been highly mixed and extremely tense at times ever since then. In 1992 and 1993, tensions erupted into a bloody armed conflict that claimed the lives of hundreds of people on both sides.
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 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, 2021 and 2022. A number of agreements between Chisinau and the unrecognized republic are now in a suspended state.
Transnistria’s authorities are blaming Moldova for trying to impose an economic blockade on the region but insist on the resumption of talks without any preliminary conditions.