Posted on 03/25/2014 1:08:45 PM PDT by Jim Robinson
(Reuters) - Russia's military staged training exercises on Tuesday in Transdniestria, a breakaway sliver of Moldova that is a focus of tension following Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea region.
NATO's top military commander said on Sunday he was worried that Russia might have its eye on Transdniestria, a largely Russian-speaking region that borders western Ukraine, after seizing Crimea, which has a narrow ethnic Russian majority.
The Interfax news agency quoted a spokesman for Russia's Western Military District, Colonel Oleg Kochetkov, as saying that Russian forces stationed in Transdniestria had "conducted an anti-terrorism drill and practiced operations to rebuff an attack on their military base".
Transdniestria, with a population of half a million, has run its own affairs since 1992 after fighting a brief war against the Moldovan government over fears that it might join Romania after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Russia has a permanent garrison of peacekeepers there.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
A little bitter, that the person to make plain to all the lazy, arrogant phoniness of BHO had to be a RUSSIAN.
I’m alarmed that it’s happening THIS way, but also have an eerie contentment that FINALLY, SOMEHOW this obvious truth is now being made clear to even the idiots.
Transdniestria was a geographic term invented in World War 2 for the land between the Prut and Bug Rivers. Hitler created it as a payoff to the Romanians; a substitute for Upper Transylvania, which had been taken from Romania in Ribbentrop’s Vienna Award of 1940. Transdniestria was a fiction; very few ethnic Romanians lived there, and it had historically been Russian before WW1 and part of the Ukrainian SSR afterward.
I didn’t know the term was still in use. Or maybe it’s only in use when politically expedient. And always has been.
The NATO/EUCOM Commander, GEN Breedlove, warned that this might be the next place Putin took to add to his collection.
Ping.
So Putin will encircle Ukraine with Belarus to the North, Russia on the east, Crimea on the south and Moldova on the west. Ukraine will be strangled economically and eventually will submit. Who would have thought the great victory Ronald Reagan achieved in crushing the Soviet Union would be given away in one generation.
Thanks JimRob.
This did not have to happen. Ukraine is rich in resources and should have been economically independent of Russia. With a proper market-driven economy, they should be tied to the west. But I guess Western Europe isn’t really a market economy any more either.
But in any event, Putin has been setting this up over the long haul and the west has been asleep at the switch.
You are so right. However, once they are encircled they will have a very difficult time getting products and commodities to other countries. The leverage they have with the natural gas pipelines will end when new pipelines are built going through Crimea.
We haven't exercised real power since Saddam Husein was defeated.
We could have helped the eastern bloc countries build their military's up, but that would have required "ticking off" Russia. Just image what the people in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Poland are thinking.
As we withdraw from being the leader in the world don't expect peace.
“Who would have thought the great victory Ronald Reagan achieved in crushing the Soviet Union would be given away in one generation.”
Anyone who has been paying attention to how dysfunctional the Baby Boomers are.
The impact on Romania could be significant, as many Moldovans (poorest country in Europe) enter Romania and obtain EU passports. I don’t see it going that far, though.
Moldova is militarily significant to Russia because whoever controls the Dniester River’s east bank has a straight shot over flat land all the way to Moscow. Tank heaven. That’s why the Russians have kept motorized rifle and anti-aircraft units there, even in the period immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union. That said, the units are majority Moldovan conscripts, not Russian draftees.
Flip it around and the Carpathian Mtns block any Russian armored advance west beyond Romania, so the west has not been as enamored over Moldova as Russia. How enamored? Putin spent his 50th birthday in Moldova.
If you don't mind my asking where in the Caribbean did you relocate to?
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