CHISINAU, September 16. /TASS/. Moldova is determined to seek EU membership even without the unrecognized republic of Transnistria if the settlement process takes too long, Moldovan President Maia Sandu said.

"We hope that we will be able to settle the Transnistrian problem. But if we fail to do this in the next several years, it doesn’t mean that we will put off European integration for ten or twenty years. This is not a solution for us. We want to [get integrated] together. If not together, it will be done in two steps," she said in an interview with the Moldova 1 television channel.

According to Sandu, Brussels doesn’t demand that Chisinau settle the Transnistrian problem before being integrated into the European Union. She stressed that Moldova is opting only for peaceful, diplomatic ways of settling the problem.

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 (Moldova, Transnistria, the OSCE, Russia, Ukraine and observers from the United States and the European Union) started after that. Since then, Russian peacekeepers, along with their Transnistrian and Moldovan colleagues, as well as group of military observers from Ukraine have been maintaining peace in the region.

The negotiating process has been stalled in recent year. Transnistria puts the blame for that on Moldova and insists on resuming talks. Moldova, however, says that talks are impossible until the situation in Ukraine is settled.

In June 2022, the European Union granted the candidate country status to Moldova and Ukraine and articulated a number of conditions for beginning accession talks. A decision on launching these talks was made at the EU summit in December 2023.