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OSCE says preparations for talks on Transnistria to begin in near future

Moldova’s President Igor Dodon said earlier that Chisinau and Tiraspol had a chance to get closer to a political solution in the next two or three years

Tiraspol, Transnistria EPA/Zsolt Czegledi

Tiraspol, Transnistria

© EPA/Zsolt Czegledi

CHISINAU, January 18. /TASS/. Providing a special status to the unrecognized Republic of Transnistria could help solve the conflict, Special Representative of the Austrian OSCE Chairperson-in-Office for the Transnistrian Settlement Process Wolf Dietrich Heim said on Wednesday at a press conference after arriving in Moldova to meet with the country’s authorities and the Transnistria leadership.

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"We have a strong resolve to obtain a settlement of the Transinstiran conflict based on the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Republic of Moldova with a special status for Transnistria that fully guarantees the human, political, economic and social rights of its population. In terms of putting this into concrete practice, we look at steps that we would like to take in the course of this year to formulate areas where we can do that," he said.

Heim has already met with Moldova’s Prime Minister Pavel Filip. On Thursday, he will visit Tiraspol to hold talks with Transnistrian leader Vadim Krasnoselsky.

According to him, OSCE Chairperson-in-Office, Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz will visit Moldova in the next two weeks, after that the preparations for the next five-plus-two meeting (Moldova, Transnistria, the OSCE, Russia, Ukraine and representatives of the US and the EU). The talks have remained suspended for the past two and a half years.

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Moldova’s President Igor Dodon said at a TASS press conference on Tuesday that Chisinau and Tiraspol had a chance to get closer to a political solution in the next two or three years. "We have agreed with Vadim Krasnoselsky (head of Transnistria) that in the next few weeks we will discuss a package approach towards solving the problems that our people have been facing," the Moldovan president said.

At the same time, Dodon admitted that Chisinau and Tiraspol had different views on settling the issue. "But that doesn’t mean we can’t sit at the negotiating table and try to find solutions to common problems," he added. Dodon said that he had handed a 2016-2018 road map over to Russia.

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