MOSCOW, August 28. /TASS/. The situation around Transnistria remains difficult and is fraught with risks for the security of both Moldova and other countries, Deputy Secretary of the Russian Security Council Alexey Shevtsov said in an interview with the Rossiyskaya Gazeta, which came out on Monday.

"The situation in Transnistria remains quite difficult," with Chisinau demanding that the Russian contingent be withdrawn and the peacekeeping contingent be replaced by an OSCE civilian mission, he said. While paying lip service to a political settlement, the Moldovan leadership concurrently blocks efforts in the 5+2 format (Moldova, Transnistria, the OSCE, Russia, Ukraine and observers from the United States and the European Union), he stressed.

"Obviously, the current situation in Moldova is fraught with risks not only for its internal but also for regional security," Shevtsov said.

Transnistria, a largely Russian-speaking region on the left bank of the Dniester River, broke away from Moldova in September 1990 when radical Moldovan politicians demanded that the republic withdraw from the former Soviet Union and unify with Romania. Its relations with Moldova’s central government in Chisinau have been highly mixed and extremely tense at times ever since then. In 1992, after Chisinau tried to resolve the problem with the use of force, 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 ceasefire was signed in 1992 and Russian peacekeepers were brought into the conflict area. Negotiations on the conflict’s peace settlement known as 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) started after that.

Relations between the two Dniester banks became strained after Maia Sandu was elected Moldovan president. She made a series of tough statements about Transnistria and refused to meet with its president, Vladimir Krasnoselsky.