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Moldovan president says hope to resolve Transnistrian problem soon

According to Maia Sandu, Chisinau is taking "major steps toward the economic and social reintegration" of Transnistria

PARIS, February 24. /TASS/. Moldovan President Maia Sandu has said that she hopes to settle the Transnistrian problem in the near future.

"We hope to resolve this problem as soon as possible and, naturally, do this peacefully," she said in an interview with France’s Liberation newspaper.

According to the Moldovan president, Chisinau is taking "major steps toward the economic and social reintegration" of Transnistria.

At the same time, she claimed that the presence of Russian peacekeepers in the region "constitute a problem."

Earlier, Transnistrian President Vadim Krasnoselsky welcomed the important role of the Russian military in maintaining peace in the region. Those who call for the immediate withdrawal of Russian peacekeepers don’t know the history of this conflict, he said.

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 have been maintaining peace in the region.

Apart from that, a Russian group of forces of around 1,000 soldiers and officers is deployed to the region to ensure the security of depots holding more than 20,000 tons of munitions that were put in storage there after the withdrawal of Soviet troops from European countries.

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