Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma teamed up with Romanian President Emil Constantinescu on Friday to demand that Russia speed up the withdrawal of its troops from Moldova.
In a joint statement released at the close of a tripartite summit, Kuchma, Constantinescu and Moldovan President Petru Lucinschi urged Moscow to live up to a 1994 peace agreement in which Russia agreed to close its 14th Army base in Moldova’s separatist Dniester region.
‘We express our concern … and plead for a peaceful and definitive solution’ to the conflict over the Dniester region, the statement said.
The statement pointedly did not recognize the self-proclaimed independence of the Dniester region, saying it is ‘inside the territory of an independent, unitary and sovereign Moldova.’
The joint statement represented Kuchma’s and Constantinescu’s boldest stands yet on the Dniester issue, and a major boost to Lucinschi’s position.
Pro-Moscow forces in the Dniester region, a sliver of land between the Dniester River and Ukraine’s western border that is populated mainly by ethnic Russians and Ukrainians, declared the region’s independence from Moldova in 1990. They said they feared that Moldova, dominated by ethnic Romanians, would seek to reunite with neighboring Romania.
In 1992 Moldova and the separatists fought a brief war for which the separatists were clearly armed from the stores of the former Soviet 14th Army, which is based in the Dniester region.
After a cease-fire brokered by Aleksandr Lebed, who was the base’s commanding general at the time, Russia sent in 5,000 troops. In the 1994 peace agreement, brokered by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, both Russia and Ukraine signed on as ‘guarantors.’
Although relations between the Dniester separatists and Moldovan government have grown fairly calm, the two sides have not budged noticeably in their dispute over the legal status of the region.
However, until recently Kyiv left the dispute to Chisinau and Moscow to solve. Only in the past year has Ukraine begun to insist on its right under the 1994 agreement to send peacekeepers to the Dniester region, and Russia remains uneasy about any significant Ukrainian presence there.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry reacted by attacking a separate statement released by the Moldovan Foreign Ministry that described in detail how Russia, in Moldova’s opinion, was not living up to the 1994 accord.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Vladimir Rakhmaninov said the statement ‘passes over in silence’ a provision of that agreement that says the withdrawal of Russian troops depends on progress in the solution of the Dniester problem.
Rakhmaninov said that although the accord had not been ratified by Russia’s State Duma, ‘it is well-known that the Russian leaders have repeatedly expressed their allegiance to it and have acted in line with it.’
‘The strength of the Russian Task Force in Moldova was reduced over the past few years by 2.5 times – from 6,500 to 2,600, of whom 500 are Russian peacekeeping troops,’ Rakhmaninov said. ‘Officials from the Moldovan Foreign Ministry surely know about that, but in their statements for the public they say that ‘insignificant results were achieved in the evacuation of troops.’ No figures are given in this connection.’
‘In this situation a hasty withdrawal of the remaining small Russian military contingent, which is a factor of stability in the region, may bring about another growth of tension, or even the resumption of the conflict that was put down in 1992,’ Rakhmaninov warned.
Rakhmaninov also ruled out a special government resolution putting the treaty into effect in Russia, saying that would contradict Russian law.
On its own, Moldova has virtually no leverage with Russia, as Moldova heavily depends on Russian gas and is not needed by Russia to ship gas to Europe. On Monday, a Moldovan delegation in Moscow agreed to give Russia’s Gazprom 50 percent ownership in Moldova’s gas pipeline network as partial payment toward Moldova’s gas debts.
Although private, Gazprom cooperates closely with the Russian state. In their Moscow meetings with Gazprom officials, the Moldovan delegation also agreed to supply Russia with food this winter.
Kuchma’s statements in Chisinau indicated that settling the Dniester dispute has become a Ukrainian priority. After the three-way meeting of presidents, Kuchma proposed holding a new summit on the Dniester issue and said he would contact Russian President Boris Yeltsin with ‘concrete proposals to settle the conflict.’
Kuchma also met with a delegation from the Dniester region led by its self-declared president, Igor Smirnov.
In the joint statement, the three presidents included the lack of progress in settling the Dniester dispute and the slow withdrawal of Russian troops in a list of ‘seats of instability’ that they said were contributing to an economic decline in the lower Danube region.
Kuchma’s interest in the issue is probably also influenced by the very weak controls on the Dniester region’s border with Ukraine.
The Romanian, Ukrainian and Moldovan presidents also discussed setting up a ‘Lower Danube Free Economic Zone’ and the transshipment of Caspian oil across their countries.
‘If Russia wishes to breathe life into this region, we will be grateful,’ Kuchma was shown saying on Russian public television.
