CHISINAU, July 13. /TASS/. Leader of the unrecognized republic of Transnistria Vadim Krasnoselsky said on Tuesday he is ready for settlement talks with Moldova’s new government that will be formed following Sunday’s snap parliamentary elections.
"It is typical of Moldova to change the negotiating agenda after each cycle of electoral processes. In any case, the Transnistrian side is ready to continue talks and hopes efforts in this area will be redoubled," his press service quoted him as saying during a meeting with members of Transnistria’s Public Chamber.
He noted that the outcome of Moldova’s elections was quite predictable. "The current changes in the neighboring state are evolutionary rather than revolutionary as it happened before: the nation has supported the course set by the political elite," he noted.
Moldova’s pro-European Action and Solidarity Party, which supports President Maia Sandu, won 52.8% of the votes at Sunday’s parliamentary elections and will be able to form a government on its own.
Moldovan President Maia Sandu earlier called for the withdrawal of Russian peacekeepers from Transnistria and replacing the current peacekeeping contingent with a mission of civil observers under the OSCE auspices. Krasnoselsky rejected this stance, saying that the Russian peacekeepers had helped the conflicting parties stop bloodshed back in 1992.
Sandu also said her new government would be tasked to find a political solution to the Transnistrian conflict that would be offered for discussion at the peace 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).
The talks began to lose momentum in recent years amid the political instability in Moldova and later because of the coronavirus pandemic. In January, the OSCE called on the sides to implement their commitments under agreements reached during the talks in Berlin in 2016 and Vienna in 2017, when Chisinau and Tiraspol arrived at compromise solutions on many matters of conflict.
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.