Tiraspol - Moldova - Mafia in Uniform

ITAR-TASS: Yushchenko's Dniester settlement plan no longer viable

24.04.2006


The plan to settle the Dniester region conflict proposed by Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko "has, in effect, become obsolete," leader of the Dniester region Igor Smirnov told Russian reporters on Monday. "Moldova destroyed this plan with its own hands by imposing an economic blockade," Smirnov said. "Ukraine turned from a guarantor country to a conflicting side. A majority of Dniester region's residents have disappointed in Ukraine," the leader of the self-proclaimed republic emphasized. "The Dniester region awaits the solution of the Kosovo problem. We believe that many states will be able to express their positive attitude to self-proclaimed republics more independently and freely," Smirnov said.

In his view, the numerous signatures by Moldovan presidents and prime ministers on Moldovan-Dniester agreements show that Chisinau has recognized the Dniester region officially as an independent state long ago. He also said talks with Chisinau will resume only after it lifts the economic blockade. "We are ready to sit down at the negotiating table after the restoration of status quo, i.e. resumption of the previous procedure of the movement of cargoes across the border.

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Kyiv Post: Separatists seize contested port

Apr 26 2006, 23:35


A port on the Dniester River in a village of a little over 5,000 inhabitants has become the center of the latest flare-up in the long-running dispute between Moldova and the self-proclaimed Transdniester Moldovan Republic (TMR), which lies along Ukraine’s southwestern border.

According to Tudor Serbov, the head of the village of Varnita, which is located in the jurisdiction of Moldova proper, a group of more than 90 Transdniester policemen and around 30 others dressed in civilian clothes seized the village cargo port at midday on April 21, forcing nearly 20 of its employees to leave. Serbov told the Post on April 26 that the Transdniester police occupied the port until late in the evening, when they made off with a barge, a towboat and dredger, which had been docked at the port.

At the moment, said Serbov, the port is surrounded by a peacekeeping force consisting of Russian, Moldovan and Transdniester military units, while negotiations on the port’s further status continue.

The port in Varnita is very close to the southern Transdniester town of Bendery and is considered disputed territory. On some Transdniester maps, Varnita is shown as part of the self-proclaimed republic’s territory.

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RIA Novosti: Transdnestrian public asks Russia for more peacekeepers

11/ 05/ 2006


Public organizations in Moldova's breakaway region of Transdnestr have appealed to Russia's president and parliament, asking them to send more troops into the region.

The Anti-Blockade Coordinating Council of Public Organizations, set up in the wake of what the organizations call an economic blockade against Transdnestr, said it was concerned about steps being taken by the parties to the peace process, and feared they might spark a new conflict in the region.

"The public is particularly concerned about the Moldovan authorities' tendency to ignore the opinions of Transdnestr, a party to peace talks, and to force it to make unilateral concessions, which has been supported by Ukraine, acting as a guarantor [of the peace process]," the organizations said in their appeal.

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RIA Novosti: Transdnestr May talks cancelled as deadlock continues

15/ 05/ 2006


Internationally brokered talks on the breakaway Moldovan region of Transdnestr originally slated for May 17-18 will not be held, the head of the OSCE Mission to Moldova said Monday.

William Hill, mission head to the country for the world's largest regional security organization, said negotiators had told him there was no consensus either on the agenda of the meeting in 5+2 format - involving Moldova, Transdnestr and Ukraine, Russia, and the OSCE, plus U.S. and EU observers - or even on the possibility of holding it.

He said Trandnestr representatives only wanted to discuss a new system for crossing the Moldovan-Ukrainian border and the terms of Transdnestrian enterprises' foreign economic activity

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IHT: Ukraine cracks down on smuggling at border

MAY 28, 2006


It did not take long for the European Union's border experts to spot evidence of the shadowy trade on Ukraine's notoriously porous border with Moldova. It came in an unexpected form, though: frozen chicken from America.

In a recent six months, more than 40,000 tons of chicken was shipped, legally, into Transnistria through Black Sea ports in Ukraine, said experts sent by the European Union this year to monitor the border.

The chicken is reloaded into smaller trucks, often with makeshift refrigeration, and smuggled back into Ukraine. There it is sold at below-market rates, because it evaded customs duties and Ukrainian sanitary inspections, turning a hefty profit - for whom, exactly, is not clear - of nearly $1,000 a ton. "They make more money than they would dealing with weapons," said Joachim Haack, a German who is in charge of the EU outpost here.

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MosNews: U.S. Urges Russia to Withdraw Troops From Moldova

28.05.2006


The United States would ratify an adaptation agreement on the European arms treaty only if Russia withdrew its troops from Moldova unconditionally, reports from Moldova’s capital Chisinau said on Friday.

As an explicit signal on the issue for the first time, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Paula DeSutter said Russia’s withdrawal from the Dniester River region was a precondition for the U.S. ratification of the Adaptation Agreement on the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE Treaty).

The U.S. official, in charge of arms control, made the remarks after she held talks with Moldova’s President Vladimir Voronin during her two-day visit to the country starting from Thursday. DeSutter said the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) sided with Washington on the issue.

An international conference will be held from May 29 to June 2 in Vienna, Austria, with the adaptation agreement on the CFE Treaty top on the agenda.

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The Sunday Times: Calls for freedom make the jigsaw of Europe more complicated than ever

June 02, 2006


Igor Smirnov, Transdniestr’s “President”, has announced that its 550,000 people will vote in a referendum in September on whether to seek formal independence from Moldova. “The recent example of Montenegro proves that a referendum is becoming a norm for solving conflicts,”, said Mr Smirnov, 64, a former metalworker.

Although never recognised internationally, it has close ties to Russia, which helped the ethnic Russians in the war and has maintained 1,500 troops there. Officially, they are there to keep the peace and guard a stockpile of 40,000 tonnes of weapons stored there in case of a Nato invasion. In reality, this remains Moscow’s westernmost strategic outpost — a bulwark against the expanding EU and Nato. It is also a haven for money-laundering, smuggling and illegal weapons sales. Mr Smirnov runs it as a personal fiefdom, financed by local oligarchs and propped up by nostalgia for the Soviet Union. It has its own currency based on the old Soviet rouble, uses the old Soviet Moldovan flag, and stages annual Soviet-style military parades. Police wear uniforms bearing the hammer and sickle. There is no direct telephone link to Moldova and no mobile network.

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RIA Novosti: Russia lays responsibility for CFE treaty on NATO states

02/ 06/ 2006


"Given the unconstructive position of NATO member countries, and their unwillingness to launch the ratification process of the adaptation agreement, all responsibility for the CFE's future will rest with our Western partners," said Anatoly Antonov, who heads the Foreign Ministry's department on security and disarmament. "Russia will conduct a comprehensive analysis of the situation regarding control over armaments," he said, adding that the treaty no longer reflected the signatories' interests.

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RIA Novosti: CFE Treaty unviable, out of touch with reality - Russia diplomat

31/ 05/ 2006


The Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty was signed in 1990 to classify and set the ceiling for weapons that can exist in the European theater. In 1999, an adapted version of the treaty was signed and has been ratified by Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, but the document has sparked debates over some clauses that have been interpreted differently by the signatory states. "The balance of rights and commitments [of the countries party to the treaty] has been upset," Anatoly Antonov, the chief Russian delegate to a Vienna conference on the CFE Treaty, said Tuesday.

"Today the blocking basis of the treaty offers considerable privileges to members of the military and political alliance [NATO] at the expense of those countries who are not in the alliance, including Russia," he said. Antonov said the document, which had originally been intended as a mechanism for preserving and consolidating control over conventional weapons in Europe, was used by some countries as "an instrument for attaining their geopolitical interests in the former Soviet republics." The diplomat blamed this approach for undermining the work of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the world's largest regional security organization, and for causing serious problems in relations between Russia and NATO.

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RIA Novosti: Russia denies link between adapted CFE Treaty, military pullout

09/ 06/ 2006


Russia's envoy to Europe's largest security organization denied Friday statements that an adapted Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) could only be ratified after Moscow fulfilled commitments it undertook in Istanbul in 1999. The commitments include withdrawal of Soviet-era bases, now belonging to Russia, from Georgia and Moldova.

"No agreements of the kind have been reached," Alexei Borodavkin told a session of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Vienna. He said some countries were speculating on a link between the agreement and Russia's commitments on its military bases, to achieve their political goals, but that their comments had no legal basis.

"In the current situation, where negotiations have reached a dead-end, it is difficult to expect any progress on the issue," Borodavkin said.

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Moldova.org: Speaker Marian Lupu says referendum organized by Tiraspol will not be recognized

14 June 2006


According to the Parliament’s press service, at a meeting with Kimmo Kiljunen, Head of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly’s Team on Moldova, Marian Lupu said that the referendum planned by the Tiraspol authorities would not be recognized. ”This referendum will not be recognized by the international community but it will arouse additional political tensions. Elections in Transdniestria can be held only after the region is democratized and demilitarized in compliance with Ukraine’s Plan and documents approved by the Moldovan Parliament last summer," Lupu said.

Kimmo Kiljunen said in turn that the Transdniestrian region can be granted a special juridical status only within a territorially integral Moldova.

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Moldova.org: Five Moldovan policemen kidnapped by Transnistrian special services

15 June 2006


Five employees of the Moldovan Interior Ministry (MAI) were kidnapped by the special services of the self-proclaimed Transnistrian republic on Wednesday, 14 June, in the evening. MAI says the kidnapping's reasons are not known, and describes the incident as the Transnistrian authorities' "provocation" aimed at destabilising the situation.

Papuc informed that today in the morning, a MAI representatives left for an ordinary meeting of the Joint Control Commission to discuss the created situation.

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RIA Novosti: Moldova fails to end policemen's arrest spat with Transdnestr

16/ 06/ 2006


A special meeting of a commission regulating the ongoing conflict around Moldova's breakaway Transdnestr region to discuss the arrest of five Moldovan policemen in the province has failed to resolve the dispute.

The policemen were arrested Wednesday by Transdnestr special forces.

After several hours of intense discussions, the JCC agreed to end the discussion and meet again next Tuesday.

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Moldova Azi: Helsinki Committee in Moldova Asks for the Support of International Organisations for Release of Policemen Arrested in Tiraspol

June 21 2006


Lawyers of Helsinki Committee Anna Ursachi and Lilia Prodan at Wednesday conference stated that they had met arrested policemen. The lawyers say that Stefan Mangir and Constantin Condrea have been tortured with the use of psychtrop substances into admission of the accusations.The lawyers confirmed that they saw marks of injections and tortures on the policemen's bodies.

Ursachi and Prodan claim that they have recieved threats from officers of Transnistria Ministry of State Security after they tried to obtain the right for other meetings with the detained.

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RIA Novosti: Breakaway regions in ex-U.S.S.R. form joint peacekeeping force

24/ 06/ 2006


Three breakaway regions in former Soviet republics currently embroiled in "frozen conflicts" have started forming a joint peacekeeping contingent to be deployed should Russian peacekeepers withdraw, the president of the breakaway Moldovan region of Transdnestr said Saturday. The leaders of Abkhazia and South Ossetia - both in Georgia - and of Moldova's Transdnestr region met in the Abkhaz capital, Sukhumi, in mid-June to discuss peacekeeping missions.

Russia has had peacekeepers in all three regions since bloody conflicts erupted at the beginning of the 1990s, but NATO, Georgia and Moldova have been urging a military pullout from former Soviet republics under the 1999 Istanbul Commitments, part of the amended Conventional Forces in Europe treaty.

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ITAR-TASS: Transdniestria releases Moldovan policemen arrested in Tiraspol

24.06.2006


Authorities of the breakaway republic of Transdniestria released two Moldovan policemen on Saturday after the interference of Russian officials

Transdniestria’s State Security Ministry said the Moldovan policemen had been suspected of planning an abduction of people. Moldovan authorities denied these accusations. Moldovan Interior Minister Gheorghe Papuc said the detention of Moldovan policemen in Tiraspol was a “provocation” in response to the investigation of a criminal group by Moldovan police.

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