CHISINAU, October 31. /TASS/. The Moldovan government will soon unveil its action plan on Transnistria, designed to help Moldova reunify with its breakaway republic within the next four years, President Igor Dodon told the RTR-Moldova TV channel.
"The presidential administration has already received the basic provisions of the Transnistrian settlement concept, which we are finalizing at the moment. I’m firmly convinced that we can come up with a formula allowing to launch the negotiation process and solve the issue of the country’s reunification within the next four years," Dodon said.
He admitted, however, that "favorable geopolitical situation" is required for the effort.
Speaking at the UN General Assembly session in September, Dodon said his country’s authorities were preparing to unveil the final version of their Transnistrian settlement plan as early as next year.
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 (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.
The latest 5+2 talks in Bratislava in October 2019 that focused on trust-building measures failed to yield a final protocol and the sides agreed to continue these efforts at a conference in Bavaria in November. That meeting however brought about no progress either.