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Moldova, breakaway Transnistria leaders to meet soon

The leaders of Moldova and breakaway Transnistria will next time meet in May

CHISINAU, March 30. /TASS/. The leaders of Moldova and breakaway Transnistria will next time meet in May, Moldovan President Igor Dodon told a news conference after talks with Transnistrian leader Vladimir Krasnoselsky on Thursday.

"The next meeting is due in May. We will continue looking for ways to settle the issues that residents and economic operators from the left and right banks of the Dniester River are facing," the president said.

Dodon and Krasnoselsky managed on Thursday to agree on a number of issues, including those from the protocol signed last year in Berlin within the framework of the P5+2 format (Moldova, Transnistria, the OSCE, Russia, Ukraine and observers from the EU and the US). The Moldovan leader said they had discussed a free movement of people from the two banks of the river, restoration of telephone communication, recognition of documents and car number plates.

The president of Transnistria, for his part, hailed the meeting. "We had an efficient exchange, efficiently discussed issues of telecommunications and communications, the railway communication and other lingering problems in a dialog of Transnistria and Moldova," he said.

"We indeed have a host of issues. And we want to gradually advance in their settlement - from small issues to bigger," he added. The sides agreed to boost the activity of expert groups that will work on these issues at the inter-departmental level.

"Today I am voicing not only my position, but the position of the Moldovan leadership," Dodon stressed at a news conference following his Thursday meeting with Transnistria’s leader Vadim Krasnoselsky.

"Transnistrian settlement is the only problem on which we have no differences with the heads of parliament and government," he noted.

"We had coordinated with Prime Minister Pavel Filip and Parliament Speaker Andrian Candu the issues that were discussed at the talks today. We agreed to create a single platform that will be working out positions on the issues of Transnistrian settlement," he said, marking that the platform is functioning.

According to Dodon, he agreed with Filip and Candu that talks will be held at the presidential level for the time being. He expressed a bid, however, that the governments and parliaments join these talks.

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.