CHISINAU, June 18. /TASS/. Leader of the unrecognized republic of Transnistria Vadim Krasnoselsky said on Sunday he is ready for consultations with Moldovan President Igor Dodon and Prime Minister Pavel Filip.
"We have sent no official request for a meeting but I have said more than once than I am ready to meet with any Moldovan official. So, l would like to say that I ask Mr. Filip to meet with me," Krasnoselsky told a news conference in Tiraspol commenting on a more than two-year’s break in the negotiating process.
"Transnistria is an equal participant in the 5+2 format, with its rights and liabilities. It seems to be an irritating factor someone is seeking to do away with. I am profoundly confident that this is why this format has been frozen," he said, adding that Tiraspol’s call was supported by Moscow only.
"As a matter of fact, only Transnistria and Russia are really ‘in favor,’ all the rest agree only verbally. To get over this verbal threshold, I called on Igor Dodon back on March 30 to sign a joint message of the presidents of the two conflicting sides to Sebastian Kurz, the current OSCE Chairperson-in-Office and Austrian Foreign Ministers. But Dodon has opted for a pause. It’s June 18 already but we have no reply from him," the Transnistrian leader stressed.
He criticized the ruling of the Moldovan Constitutional Court declaring deployment of Russian peacekeepers in the region illegal. Apart from that, he was critical about Moldova’s expelling Russian diplomats, most of whom were members of the joint control commission for the peacekeeping operation.
"It reveals efforts to deprive Russia and Transnistria of this format. But you can take it from me that no one will be able to oust the Russian military from here without Transnistria’s consent as the peacekeepers are our security guarantee," Krasnoselsky 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 peaceful settlement known as the 5+2 format talks (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) started after that.