CHISINAU, March 28. /TASS/. Talks on the Transnistrian settlement are at a standstill because Moldova’s authorities are not ready for a constructive dialogue, Vitaly Ignatyev, Foreign Minister of the unrecognized republic of Transnistria, said on Monday after his last week’s meeting with OSCE Chairperson-in-Office and Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau.
"The Moldovan side should revise its attitude to the talks and to the relations with Transnistria. It should stop blocking actions, stop incurring damage on Transnistria’s economic agents and citizens and become a responsible participant in the talks. If Chisinau finally sees it, the situation will change for the better," Ignatyev, who leads the Transnistrian delegation to the talks, said in an interview with the First Transnistrian television channel.
The Moldovan side "is not ready settle problems in a constructive way," he said, adding that this is why the process has made no progress over 32 years. "To reach the result, it is necessary to work out actions that will make it possible to really resolve problems rather than indulge in dialogue for 32 years more," he stressed.
According to Ignatyev, his talks with Rau demonstrated that settlement of the Transnistrian conflict is one of the priorities of the Polish presidency of the OSCE.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Rudenko visited Chisinau and Tiraspol in February. He called on the sides to resume Transnistrian settlement talks 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).
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 and 2021. A number of agreements between Chisinau and the unrecognized republic are now in a suspended state.
After taking Moldova’s presidential office in late 2020, Maia Sandu made a series of tough statements in respect of Tiraspol and said she was not going to meet with the Transnistrian leaders, as her predecessors his. She accused Russia of being behind the armed conflict back in 1992. Transnistrian leader Vadim Krasnoselsky denied these accusations and stressed that the Russian peacekeepers had stopped bloodshed and saved thousands of lives of Transnistrian residents.