Foto: Ramin Mazur
Escalation in Transnistria?
While the EUSTORY International Office was preparing the Annual Network Meeting 2024, that was about to take place in Moldova, rumours from Transnistria, a separatist breakaway region in eastern Moldova, shook the news.
After a brief war in 1992, following Moldova’s independence from the Soviet Union and Transnistria’s subsequent declaration of independence from Moldova, the Russian military is still present in the territory east of the Dniester River. Just days before the competition organisers headed off, Moldovan media reported that the Transnistrian authorities might ask for the official annexation by Russia – a claim reminiscent of the start of the war against Ukraine. While it soon became clear that that the rumours were not followed by action, the news caused fear and insecurity.
Guests from Moldova at the Network Meeting – historians and experts on the situation in Moldova – took time to comment on the developments in Transnistria. They analysed not only the causes of the current escalation, but also appealed to the international community.
Paula Erizanu
Paula Erizanu is a writer and journalist from Chișinău, Moldova. She studied History with Literature and History of Art at the New College of the Humanities in London and Journalism at City University London. She collaborates with prestigious publications such as BBC World Service, The Guardian, London Review of Books, Financial Times and others. She was shortlisted for the Culture Journalist of the Year award in 2019 in the UK’s Words by Women competition.
“It’s really important to maintain and grow support for Ukraine because a victory for Ukraine means safety for Europe and Moldova, and a loss for Ukraine means that Russia can just keep going with its imperialist program and it’s not going to stop.”
Paula Erizanu
Moldovan journalist and writer
Sergiu Musteață
The historian Sergiu Musteață works as a Professor at the History and Geography Department, Ion Creangă Pedagogical State University in Chișinău. The former Fulbright research fellow is the founder and president of the National Association of Young Historians of Moldova and holds a Ph.D. in History from Alexandru Ioan Cuza University in Iași, Romania.
“From the historical perspective, of course we understand very well that it was provoked at the end of Soviet Union by the officials from Moscow because the leaders of Moldova didn’t support the project of signing the Treaty of the Soviet Union.”
Sergiu Musteață
Historian and organiser of the Moldovan history competition
Andrei Cuşco
Andrei Cuşco is a Researcher at the A. D. Xenopol Institute of History of the Romanian Academy in Iași, Romania. For a number of years, he has been working on issues related to Bessarabia’s symbolic geography, the competing Russian and Romanian visions of this contested region in the second half of the 19th and early 20th century, as well as on broader issues of Russian and Romanian intellectual history. He holds a Ph.D. degree (2008) from the Department of History of the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest.
„Historians have a responsibility to explain, to teach and to undermine these simplifying, even primitive narratives of identity of the past, and to offer a much more nuanced reading of both historical developments and our future prospects as societies.”
Andrei Cuşco
Historian