Most Popular
1. It’s a New Macro, the Gold Market Knows It, But Dead Men Walking Do Not (yet)- Gary_Tanashian
2.Stock Market Presidential Election Cycle Seasonal Trend Analysis - Nadeem_Walayat
3. Bitcoin S&P Pattern - Nadeem_Walayat
4.Nvidia Blow Off Top - Flying High like the Phoenix too Close to the Sun - Nadeem_Walayat
4.U.S. financial market’s “Weimar phase” impact to your fiat and digital assets - Raymond_Matison
5. How to Profit from the Global Warming ClImate Change Mega Death Trend - Part1 - Nadeem_Walayat
7.Bitcoin Gravy Train Trend Forecast 2024 - - Nadeem_Walayat
8.The Bond Trade and Interest Rates - Nadeem_Walayat
9.It’s Easy to Scream Stocks Bubble! - Stephen_McBride
10.Fed’s Next Intertest Rate Move might not align with popular consensus - Richard_Mills
Last 7 days
Stocks, Bitcoin and Crypto Markets Breaking Bad on Donald Trump Pump - 21st Nov 24
Gold Price To Re-Test $2,700 - 21st Nov 24
Stock Market Sentiment Speaks: This Is My Strong Warning To You - 21st Nov 24
Financial Crisis 2025 - This is Going to Shock People! - 21st Nov 24
Dubai Deluge - AI Tech Stocks Earnings Correction Opportunities - 18th Nov 24
Why President Trump Has NO Real Power - Deep State Military Industrial Complex - 8th Nov 24
Social Grant Increases and Serge Belamant Amid South Africa's New Political Landscape - 8th Nov 24
Is Forex Worth It? - 8th Nov 24
Nvidia Numero Uno in Count Down to President Donald Pump Election Victory - 5th Nov 24
Trump or Harris - Who Wins US Presidential Election 2024 Forecast Prediction - 5th Nov 24
Stock Market Brief in Count Down to US Election Result 2024 - 3rd Nov 24
Gold Stocks’ Winter Rally 2024 - 3rd Nov 24
Why Countdown to U.S. Recession is Underway - 3rd Nov 24
Stock Market Trend Forecast to Jan 2025 - 2nd Nov 24
President Donald PUMP Forecast to Win US Presidential Election 2024 - 1st Nov 24
At These Levels, Buying Silver Is Like Getting It At $5 In 2003 - 28th Oct 24
Nvidia Numero Uno Selling Shovels in the AI Gold Rush - 28th Oct 24
The Future of Online Casinos - 28th Oct 24
Panic in the Air As Stock Market Correction Delivers Deep Opps in AI Tech Stocks - 27th Oct 24
Stocks, Bitcoin, Crypto's Counting Down to President Donald Pump! - 27th Oct 24
UK Budget 2024 - What to do Before 30th Oct - Pensions and ISA's - 27th Oct 24
7 Days of Crypto Opportunities Starts NOW - 27th Oct 24
The Power Law in Venture Capital: How Visionary Investors Like Yuri Milner Have Shaped the Future - 27th Oct 24
This Points To Significantly Higher Silver Prices - 27th Oct 24

Market Oracle FREE Newsletter

How to Protect your Wealth by Investing in AI Tech Stocks

Ukraine II - Why Moldova Urgently Matters

Politics / Eastern Europe Jul 10, 2014 - 06:20 PM GMT

By: STRATFOR

Politics

Robert D. Kaplan writes: "NATO's Article 5 offers little protection against Vladimir Putin's Russia," Iulian Fota, Romania's presidential national security adviser, told me on a recent visit to Bucharest. "Article 5 protects Romania and other Eastern European countries against a military invasion. But it does not protect them against subversion," that is, intelligence activities, the running of criminal networks, the buying-up of banks and other strategic assets, and indirect control of media organs to undermine public opinion. Moreover, Article 5 does not protect Eastern Europe against reliance on Russian energy. As Romanian President Traian Basescu told me, Romania is a somewhat energy-rich island surrounded by a Gazprom empire.


The president ran his finger over a map showing how Romania's neighbors such as Bulgaria and Hungary were almost completely dependent on Russian natural gas, while Romania -- because of its own hydrocarbon reserves -- still has a significant measure of independence. In the 21st century, the president explained, Gazprom is more dangerous than the Russian army. The national security adviser then added: "Putin is not an apparatchik; he is a former intelligence officer," implying that Putin will act subtly. Putin's Russia will not fight conventionally for territory in the former satellite states, but unconventionally for hearts and minds, Fota went on. "Putin knows that the flaw of the Soviet Union was that it did not have soft power."

Thus, Moscow's strategy is about taking over countries from within. In this battle, it is precisely during the quiet periods, when an issue like Ukraine drifts off the front pages because of the Middle East, for example, that we should be worried. And remember that weak democracies can be more useful to Russia than strong dictatorships. A ruthless communist autocrat such as Josip Broz Tito in Yugoslavia was able to keep the Soviets out of his country during the Cold War. But a feeble polity, however democratic, such as Romania's neighbor Moldova, offers the Russians many local politicians to bribe.

Eastern Romania and Moldova

With this in mind I traveled to Iasi on Romania's northeastern frontier with Moldova. There I met Iasi's county council president, Cristian Mihai Adomnitei, who reflected on how a relatively small group of Bolshevik conspirators had taken the great cities of Moscow and Saint Petersburg in November 1917. "Putin is heir to this tradition," Adomnitei said. "In his heart, he is a Bolshevik. He knows that you can conquer vast territories without big armies." Adomnitei took me inside Iasi's 19th-century National Theater, a little jewel dripping in gold leaf in celebration of the Rococo and Baroque styles, where Verdi's Traviata was to be performed in a few days. Alone with me in the empty theater, Adomnitei declared, "Here is Europe, here is its history and culture, its artistic values, and maybe soon its political values. Here is the borderland of the Habsburg Empire. We need your help to defend us."

From Iasi I crossed the Prut River into Moldova -- historic Bessarabia, a territory that has been traded back and forth through the centuries between Romania and Russia but that, since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, has been independent. Immediately the quality of the road deteriorated and the houses became marked by rust, scrap iron and undressed concrete -- like the Romania I had known from a generation before. I noticed that the houses along the road were connected to a natural gas pipeline network coming from Siberia, so that the quality of life was dependent upon Russia. Men and women in dusty fedoras and kerchiefs rolled by in leiterwagens, or wooden wagons. In the first town through which I passed, Ungheni, the park and sidewalks were devoured by weeds.

Almost a quarter century after the Soviet Empire's collapse, its legacy lives on not only through underdevelopment but also through corruption -- which in Moldova is the overwhelming fact of political life that dares not speak its name, so that nationality questions receive all the prominence. Because of strong ethnic Russian, ethnic Ukrainian, ethnic Bulgarian and ethnic Turkic elements, and an ethnic Romanian majority that until the end of the Cold War had used the Cyrillic alphabet to read and write, Moldova's very identity is still somewhat an issue, the prime minister, Iurie Leanca, admitted to me in a long interview.

Witness Balti, a city in northern Moldova, heralded by Soviet-era apartment buildings that resemble yellowing teeth. Here I met a local politician, Cecilia Graur, who told me that, "everyone is afraid. The situation in eastern Ukraine could happen here. We all know this because of our own divisions," political, ethnic and linguistic. "People talk about it all the time." Balti, with its pro-Russian sentiment, could become a Moldovan Donetsk, a Western diplomat warned me. While Graur was pro-European and spoke Romanian, Alexander Nesterovskii, another politician I met in Balti, was pro-Russian and spoke Russian. He said that local support for Putin represented a rational choice. "People could never afford to have Russia slow down natural gas deliveries or cease buying the region's agricultural products." Communism no longer meant Communism per se, but an advantageous economic relationship with Russia.

Comrat, in southern Moldova, is home to the Christian Orthodox and Russian-speaking Turkic Gagauz -- a potential fifth column that Putin could use to undermine Moldova. Vitaliy Kyurkchu, a local Gagauz politician, told me that with 160,000 Gagauz in Moldova and 40,000 over the border in Ukraine, "we have ongoing kitchen discussions -- discussions mainly among ourselves, I mean -- about the creation of a Greater Gagauzia" should Moldova and Ukraine weaken or ever collapse. This was dangerous irredentism, of course. The Gagauz themselves are uncertain about their origins. Local identity is so complex that Georgetown's Charles King, among the leading experts in the field, calls nationality in Moldova a "decidedly negotiable proposition."

Then there is Transdniestria, a sliver of territory east of the Dniester River that is officially part of Moldova but that, with its heavily ethnic Russian population, seceded from Moldova after a brief war in the early 1990s. Transdniestria is now packed with Russian troops to act as a hammer against Moldova should the latter ever want to pivot toward the West. Transdniestria is the kind of legally murky, ill-defined smugglers' paradise that Putin wants to see multiply in eastern Ukraine.

For weeks I traveled around Moldova. Indeed, the common theme everywhere was that Russia is a reality while the West is only a geopolitical concept. Ultimately, this is why even many of the ethnic Romanians are resigned to the fact that Russia must be engaged.

I cannot help but recall the dark political landscape in Yugoslavia while reporting there in the 1980s in advance of the violent breakup of that country in the 1990s. My writing apparently helped influence a White House policy of inaction from 1993 to 1995. Yet it is only the darkest landscapes where intervention is ever required in the first place: You should know the worst about a place before you craft the most humanistic policy toward it. I am not here providing a fully fleshed-out policy toward Moldova or the other states facing Russia. I am saying only that there are incalculable human costs to Western inaction. And Western action must mean a whole-of-government approach -- political, intelligence, economics and so forth -- in order to counter what the Russians are doing.

Time may be short. Russian officials have reportedly held meetings with Moldova's ethnic minorities to get them to demand even more autonomy after Moldova goes ahead with the association agreement with the European Union signed at the end of June. The Russians know that Moldova is more than just a borderland: It is an unwieldy mix of peoples constituting multiple borderlands within a small and weak state. I fear for Moldova.

"Why Moldova Urgently Matters is republished with permission of Stratfor."

This analysis was just a fraction of what our Members enjoy, Click Here to start your Free Membership Trial Today! "This report is republished with permission of STRATFOR"

© Copyright 2014 Stratfor. All rights reserved

Disclaimer: The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information purposes only. Information and analysis above are derived from sources and utilising methods believed to be reliable, but we cannot accept responsibility for any losses you may incur as a result of this analysis.

STRATFOR Archive

© 2005-2022 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication.


Post Comment

Only logged in users are allowed to post comments. Register/ Log in