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Beware Russia's pocket empire
WASHINGTON
Last weekend, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld visited Moldova, a country where the cold war never ended. His trip highlighted the threat to Western values and interests posed by Russia's ambition to retain control over strategic European enclaves it once ruled as part of the Soviet empire.
It is a reminder that despite the success of NATO's Istanbul summit, the West has not completed its grand geopolitical project of building a Europe of secure democracies extending to the borders of Russia.
Russia's nostalgia for its imperial past is evident in the pocket empire it maintains among neighboring nations. These imperial aspirations stifle democratic development on Europe's borders and repudiate the values necessary for lasting partnership between Moscow and the West.
Moldova, where a slice of the Soviet Union survives in the secessionist Transdniestria region, is just such a case. When the USSR collapsed 13 years ago, Moldova became an independent nation. But the 14th Soviet Army stayed on in the region, along the border with Ukraine, to support Transdniestria's secession from Moldova. Former apparatchik Igor Smirnov turned his autocratic fiefdom into a client state of Moscow. Today, Russian forces guard Transdniestria's borders, Russian officers command its Army, Russian troops guard an enormous Soviet arms depot, and Russia provides free energy supplies. President Smirnov answers to leaders in Moscow, many of whom allegedly profit from the international criminal network that operates in the area.
According to Western officials in the region, Transdniestria is a leading exporter of kidnapped women to Europe, a lucrative transit territory for illicit drugs, and a key link in the arms-smuggling network that peddles the Soviet Union's former military hardware on the international market. If Al Qaeda has not gone shopping there yet, it is only a matter of time.
Why does Russia support this illegitimate regime? In negotiations last fall that nearly resulted in a settlement recognizing the criminal regime's claim to federal status within Moldova, Moscow showed its hand by demanding that Moldova commit to a treaty legalizing the presence of Russian military forces on its soil until 2020. Thanks to Western pressure and the resistance of Moldovans who took to the streets in protest, the deal collapsed. Nonetheless, political reform in Moldova has been frozen by the Transdniestria crisis, which focuses the West's attention on conflict resolution rather than on democratic change.
Russia's Transdniestria strategy mirrors its approach to the other "frozen conflicts" sustained by Russian military forces and political support - two secessionist provinces in Georgia and the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Moscow's ambition is to make it seem normal for Russian troops to guard European borders and serve as outposts of imperial control in independent nations, without their consent.
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