[ummwhat]

Transnistria claimed independence a while ago. Only Russia acknowledges their claim but de facto Moldova has lost the monopoly on violence in that small region.

Transnistria is basically following the same pattern as North Georgia or East Ukraine. Step 1 is a "separatists" group pops up overnight and declares independence. Step 2 is the totally legit "separatists" happen to do exactly the things Russia would do if they had annexed the place per se. Step 3 is Russia acknowledges the "independence" of the "breakaway" region and also denies being behind the separatists to begin with. Step 4 is Western leaders send strongly worded letters and symbolic sanctions. Step 5 is everyone forgets and the relationship status is set to "it's complicated".

This is how Russia invades without invading. The relevant term of art is "hybrid warfare".

[manquer]

Perhaps so, Russian actions covert or overt are not justifiable.

However it should kept in mind all of these areas were part of Soviet Union, it is not unreasonable for pockets of broken up CIS states to want to split away, they could be ethnically Russian minority being oppressed and want to join Russia or be independent even., their problems may be genuine.

[gdy]

"Perhaps so, Russian actions covert or overt are not justifiable."

Why not?

[ClumsyPilot]

The North Georgia part is actually known as South Ossetia and they didn't want to be part of Georgia for decades.

Russia obviously used the opportunity, but the claim was not entirely without merit.

[ummwhat]

The extent to which these groups are legitimate vs. a front for Russia is always uncertain. The ambiguity is by design.

[AnAfrican]

no, the groups are legitimate. the real question is whever they'd have achieve so much without Russia's help.

[gdy]

Of course not. If not for Russian intervention Moldavian army would've drowned them in blood. Think Kosovo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transnistria#Transnistria_War

[gdy]

And God forbid researching the topic -- you might find that sometimes Russians are the good guys.

[gdy]

"Transnistria is basically following the same pattern as North Georgia or East Ukraine. ... This is how Russia invades without invading. The relevant term of art is "hybrid warfare"."

I don't think you have made even the slightest effort to research the issue before regurgitating this stale bit of Russophobic propaganda.

You could start from wiki [0]:

In the 1980s ... in the Moldavian SSR in particular, there was a significant resurgence of pro-Romanian nationalism among ethnic Moldovans. The most prominent of these movements was the Popular Front of Moldova. In the spring of 1988, PFM demanded that the Soviet authorities declare Moldovan the only state language, return to the use of the Latin alphabet, and recognise the shared ethnic identity of Moldovans and Romanians. The more radical factions of the Popular Front espoused extreme anti-minority, ethnocentric and chauvinist positions, calling for minority populations, particularly the Slavs (mainly Russians and Ukrainians) and Gagauz, to leave or be expelled from Moldova.

On 31 August 1989, the Supreme Soviet of the Moldavian SSR adopted Moldovan as the only official language with Russian retained only for secondary purposes, returned Moldovan to the Latin alphabet, and declared a shared Moldovan-Romanian linguistic identity. As plans for major cultural changes in Moldova were made public, tensions rose further. Ethnic minorities felt threatened by the prospects of removing Russian as the official language, which served as the medium of interethnic communication, and by the possible future reunification of Moldova and Romania, as well as the ethnocentric rhetoric of the Popular Front. The Yedinstvo (Unity) Movement, established by the Slavic population of Moldova, pressed for equal status to be given to both Russian and Moldovan. Transnistria's ethnic and linguistic composition differed significantly from most of the rest of Moldova. The share of ethnic Russians and Ukrainians was especially high and an overall majority of the population, some of them ethnic Moldovans, spoke Russian as a mother tongue. Ethnic Moldovans accounted for less than 40% of Transnistria's population in 1989.

The nationalist Popular Front won the first free parliamentary elections in the Moldavian SSR in the spring of 1990, and its agenda started slowly to be implemented. On 2 September 1990, the Pridnestrovian [Russian for Transnistrian] Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic was proclaimed as a Soviet republic by an ad hoc assembly, the Second Congress of the Peoples' Representatives of Transnistria. Violence escalated when in October 1990 the Popular Front called for volunteers to form armed militias to stop an autonomy referendum in Gagauzia, which had an even higher share of ethnic minorities. In response, volunteer militias were formed in Transnistria. In April 1990, nationalist mobs attacked ethnic Russian members of parliament, while the Moldovan police refused to intervene or restore order.

In the interest of preserving a unified Moldavian SSR within the USSR and preventing the situation escalating further, then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, while citing the restriction of civil rights of ethnic minorities by Moldova as the cause of the dispute, declared the Transnistria proclamation to be lacking legal basis and annulled it by presidential decree on 22 December 1990.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transnistria#Secession