CHISINAU, September 12. /TASS/. The current stagnation in the Transnistrian settlement talks stems from the position of the West, which may use this conflict against Russia, Moldova’s former President Igor Dodon said in an interview with TASS on Monday.
"Chisinau is waiting for a go-ahead from the West, which is not ready for more active talks. Moreover, certain circles in the West would like to have another hotbed of tension in our country to drag Russia into it. But it looks like that the final decision has not been made yet," he said.
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 (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) 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.
In February 2022, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko visited Chisinau and Tiraspol and called on the sides to invigorate dialogue.