CHISINAU, January 27. /TASS/. Moldovan President Maia Sandu and her ruling Party of Action and Solidarity are boosting military spending amid the impoverishment of the population and the severe economic crisis they have plunged the country into, former head of Moldova’s Gagauz autonomy Irina Vlah said.
"When people take on loans to pay their utility bills, when elderly people in villages have to sleep in their coats to keep warm, and the situation with crime and drug addiction is out of control, the country’s president says that we need … more money for the army," she wrote on her Telegram channel.
According to statistics she cited, over the years Sandu and her party have been in power, expenditures on weapons have doubled and are planned to be further increased to up to 3% of GDP. "In such a situation, it makes sense to ask: why waste all this money? Wasting is the exact word! With whom is Moldova going to go to war with? With Romania? With Ukraine? No, because we have good neighborly relations with these countries and both have been designated as strategic partners in recent time," she noted, adding that a military solution to the Transnistrian problem must not even be considered.
"In light of the above said, it is obvious that the funds allocated to defense are wasted money that should be used much more rationally - in the interests of citizens. And the more the authorities understand this, the better it will be for the country," she emphasized.
Earlier, Moldova’s parliament approved the Sandu-proposed national security strategy, where Russia is described as the key threat. The opposition voted against this document. According to the strategy, Moldova, despite its constitutionally fixed neutral status, will strengthen military cooperation with NATO and EU countries. The document says that Moldova needs state-of-the-art, well-equipped and well-trained armed forces akin to Western armies. For these ends, the military budget had been increased by 68%, to 1.5 billion leu ($89 million).
Moldovan opposition parties, the authorities of the unrecognized republic of Transnistria and the Gagauz autonomy express concern over Moldova’s increasing militarization. In addition, Tiraspol is concerned over frequent NATO drills near the disengagement security zone that is guarded by Russian peacekeepers.