TRANSNISTRIAN LEADER SEEKS TO WIN TIME TO SHUN NEGOTIATIONS

Moldpress
Oct. 3, 2008
Moldova

By late September, it became clear that Transnistrian leader Igor
Smirnov wants no negotiations on the settlement of the conflict. Thus,
he opposed all the other participants in the five-plus-two format,
including Russia. Earlier, the media had quoted Russian sources as
saying that a meeting between the Chisinau and Tiraspol leaders and
a trilateral meeting between Dmitriy Medvedev, Vladimir Voronin and
Igor Smirnov will soon take place. These two events were expected by
late September. But, due to the efforts of the Tiraspol authorities,
the Voronin-Smirnov meeting was held neither. Thus, Smirnov struck
a painful blow to his Russian allies, destroying their geostrategic
plans.

The problem is that on 10 October, the European bodies are to meet to
broach the situation in the Caucasus and later on, in November, NATO
will conduct a meeting focused on Georgia’s and Ukraine’s inclusion
in the Alliance’s accession programme. The Russian diplomacy does not
stay idle and is trying to impede the Euro Atlantic integration of
these two countries. To this end, it would need diplomatic progress
in the settlement of the conflicts in Transnistria and in Nagorno
Karabakh. But after Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that
the recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia cannot be regarded as a
precedent for Transnistria, Smirnov decided to make a new "strategic"
U-turn.

Thus, the Transnistrian foreign minister made public a proposal
addressed to Ukraine to sign a protocol on cooperation with Tiraspol
similar to the Smirnov-Zhukov protocol previously signed with
Russia. One may assume that the Kremlin was not so eager about it
because the Russian leaders are far from being interested in sharing
their influence in the region with Ukraine. For its part, Ukraine
came out with the proposal to hold a meeting between the Russian and
Ukrainian leaders in Odessa. Russians will never agree to any kind of
eventual Ukrainian protectorate over the Voronin-Smirnov talks. But
they might however tolerate even such a "political geography" if
Smirnov would give up his unwillingness to offer his Russian allies
and financial backers at least several diplomatic aces in the dialogue
with the EU and NATO. If the peculiarity of the situation in Karabakh
makes it little interesting for the big political games between the
West and the Russian Federation, then things are different when it
comes to the banks of the Dniester River, which makes the blow stricken
to the Kremlin by the Tiraspol administration even more painful.

When Smirnov proposed to Voronin that an urgent meeting should be held
in Tiraspol, without giving the Moldovan president time for the most
elementary preparation, he counted namely on the fact that it would
be turned down. It is not by accident that right after that Smirnov
left for Sukhumi in order to win time.

Smirnov’s plans seem to be elementary. First, he is waiting for
10 October when the tension between the European Union and Russia
might increase because of the problems in the Caucasus. It is clear
as daylight that Russia will not give up its decision to recognize
Abkhazia and South Ossetia and neither will it cut the number of its
troops in these Russia-recognized republics. If so, Russia’s support
for Transnistria might become stronger, which would automatically
resolve the problem of advancement in the Chisinau-Tiraspol relations.

One way or another, Smirnov hopes that nothing will change by the
NATO summit in December, where a decision on Ukraine’s and Georgia’s
prospects is expected to be taken. The Tiraspol administration
relies a lot on a positive decision concerning the accession of
these two countries to the North Atlantic Alliance. If this happens,
the Smirnov’s actions in the Kremlin will increase considerably. If
Moscow tries to exert strong pressure on its ally, then Russians
might always be blackmailed with an eventual improvement of relations
between the West and Transnistria. It’s not by accident that one of
the newspapers controlled by the Tiraspol newspapers wrote in 2002,
when the relations between Moscow and Tiraspol were tense, that
"an American jarhead is better that a drunken Russian soldier"…