by Vladimir Socor, The Jamestown Foundation

Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin is pulling back from the bilateral, non-transparent negotiations with the Kremlin, on which he had embarked in September 2006. Concessions offered by Chisinau incrementally in the negotiating rounds with Russian Security Council Deputy Secretary Yuri Zubakov and, periodically, with President Vladimir Putin during 13 months, did not bring a settlement of the Transnistria conflict any closer. Voronin still seemed prey to illusions in that regard as late as July-August (see EDM, July 27, August 1); but no longer, as he now indicates in a carefully prepared interview (Komsomolskaya Pravda v Moldove, October 4). Read full article

by Vladimir Socor, The Jamestown Foundation

Moscow is using the negotiations on resolving the Transnistria conflict as a means to weaken Moldova’s political system. This is a collateral goal of the negotiating channel run by Security Council Deputy Secretary Yuri Zubakov with core members of the Moldovan presidential team. Moscow’s specific proposals through this channel to change Moldova’s political system -- ostensibly in order to facilitate a Transnistria settlement -- contravene Moldova’s constitution. The Russian side now seeks to tempt Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin into dissolving the parliament and changing or breaching the constitution for the sake of a settlement that seems illusory in any case. Read full article

by Vladimir Socor, The Jamestown Foundation

In several policy conferences with a small number of top officials in recent days, most recently on April 11, Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin has presented a new Russian scenario to settle the Transnistria conflict. It stems from Russia’s Security Council, whose deputy secretary, Yuri Zubakov, runs the Russian side of the Russia-Moldova negotiating channel, outside the official 5 + 2 format.
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Centre for Eastern Studies: Unresolved conflicts continue to smoulder in Transnistria, Chechnya, Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh and South Ossetia. “Para-states” have formed in most conflict-affected areas. These have grown to become permanent players in the region. In Chechnya, guerrilla fights continue in the wake of the Russian army’s siege of the republic. The conflict in Tajikistan ended in 1997 and the normalisation process is currently under way... Each of these conflicts has entailed profound political, social, ethnic and economic changes, as well as affecting other spheres of life. The “para-states” have fortified their independence and are no longer controlled by the external powers on which they depended in the initial phases of the conflicts... Unresolved conflicts ave an adverse effect on the situation in the region. They hinder political and economic development of the affected countries, lead to the brutalisation of political life and breed instability by providing save havens for organised crime, terrorism, etc. They are also the cause of large-scale migration problems. However, with time, these negative effects become less and less turbulent... Read full article

Prof. Dr. Dmitry POLIKANOV: As the EU intervention and crisis management capabilities have been ripending and surviving the first tests in the Balkans or Congo, there is a growing interest in spreading this experience and introduce some ‘pilot projects’ of intervention in other parts of the world. In this respect, the areas, which attract most of the EU attention, are situated in its close neighborhood. Stability in Moldova, the South and the North Caucasus is important for the enlarging EU. Read full article