CHISINAU, July 1. /TASS/. Moldovan President Igor Dodon must recognize the republic of Transnistria, President of the unrecognized republic Vadim Krasnoselsky said on Friday.
"We are an accomplished state, we have all the grounds to be recognized. I think the Moldovan president understands the Transnistria is to be recognized but cannot do that, cannot dare to do that," Krasnoselsky said in an interview with First Transnistrian television channel.
The Transnistrian leader said he expects his Moldovan counterpart to give a political and legal assessment of the 1992 developments when an armed conflict between the two banks of the Dniester sparked out.
"As a man, Dodon recognizes that it was a tragedy but as a president he has never said it openly but the president is supposed to give a legal or political assessment. But so far, we have none, hence there is no guarantee against recurrence of such developments. So, we can hardly speak about being brotherly peoples in this context," the Transnistrian leader stressed.
He expressed concern over "Kiev’s and Chisinau’s attempts to establish blockade of Transnistria" and spoke for resumption of settlement talks in the 5+2 format. "We must refrain from political slogans and focus on concrete problems that are of concern for people living on both banks of the Dniester," he added.
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.
As was initially agreed, meetings in this format are to be convened at least six times a year. The latest such meeting was held in June 2016 in Berlin, after a two-year break, and yielded a protocol where the sides agreed to settle the problem of mutual recognition of documents and establish cooperation in the sphere of telecommunications. Apart from that, they undertook to abandon criminal prosecution of official and refrain from unilateral actions. However these agreements have not been fully implemented.