CHISINAU, May 5. /TASS/. President of the unrecognized republic of Transnistria Vadim Krasnoselsky has stated his readiness for compromises and called on Chisinau to engage in full-format talks to settle relations.
"We want to engage in talks. We are open to talks," he said in an interview with the Pervy Pridvestrovsky Telegram channel. "We are open to dialogue, we are ready for compromises, we are oriented toward results."
According to the Transnistrian leader, this requires organizing talks in the 5+2 format, involving Moldova, Transnistria, the OSCE, Russia, and Ukraine, and observers from the European Union and the United States, which has been stalled since 2019. In his words, meetings between political directors yield no practical results. "Nothing but absurd statements can be expected from Chiveri (Moldovan Deputy Prime Minister Valeriu Chiveri - TASS), who doesn’t seem to be ready for any agreements," Krasnoselsky noted.
Earlier, the Russian foreign ministry called for the soonest and unconditional resumption of the 5+2 format, the only internationally recognized and effective mechanism for resolving the conflict. The OSCE mission to Moldova also acknowledged that the suspension of the dialogue has triggered escalation between the two Dniester banks.
After Ukraine closed the Transnistrian section of its border with Moldova in 2022, people and commodity to and from the unrecognized republic can move only via the Moldova-controlled territory. Tiraspol accused Chisinau of using Transnistria’s vulnerable situation to block trade and exert pressure on it.
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 started after that. However, the talks have been frozen since 2019.