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The leadership would rather let the population freeze than do the right thing.
I'm gonna be more-generous.
My understanding is that most of the economy in Transnistria is basically there because Russia has been providing highly-subsidized gas, and that if they were paying market rate, a lot of the industry there would simply go under.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transnistria#Economy
The economy is based on a mix of heavy industry (steel production), electricity production, and manufacturing (textile production), which together account for about 80% of the total industrial output.
Steel production and electricity production at least are going to be basically driven by access to that gas.
I mean, yeah, it'd probably be efficient for it to go under and for resources and labor tied up in it to shift to something else. But I suppose that they're basically staring at overwhelming and rapid deindustrialization. Like, I would guess that a lot of people in Transnistria are basically looking at the future and seeing a giant gaping void.
I mean, Germany was very much affected by political pressures related to cheap Russian natural gas around the outset of the conflict, and Germany's industry is much less dependent on the gas and has a more-diversified economy.
The place might have a whole ton of other factors involved, ethnic, corruption, Russia buying influence, whatever, but even if you removed that from the picture, and you're just thinking about the perspective of some random person in Transnistria, I can believe that the economic disruption that they're facing from that huge shift is pretty staggering.
They probably need to make plans no matter what, and they probably shouldn't have put themselves in this place, but at this point, I expect that all the options they have are gonna be near-term very bad.
The dependence had been very much encouraged. The political influence there was a core strategy and very effective.
May your frozen asses enjoy the long European winter.
As long as the Romanian power link isn't finished yet, Moldova is electrically dependent on a power plant in Transnistria, that runs on gas (1992-2024 from Russia) or coal.
Moldova's electricity company claims they can import enough energy and it seems the difficulties are mostly contractual not technical.
@5714 They're connected already and they do just fine, but the prices on our market are bigger. They want to import from Ukraine too.
He can change! He’s gonna take me to Paris, he said so!
Like how? By truck through Romania 😂 ?
Sooo… it appears to be a county of Moldova? Surely one county doesn’t have that jurisdiction? So why didn’t they just say Moldova?
It's basically a region owned by pro-Russian rebels.
Because it’s a semi-autonomous state inside a state.
It doesn’t reflect Moldova just as Moldova doesn’t reflect it.
There are Russian-ish soldiers stationed there and some thousands of ... eh... I think artillery shells? Grenades? Well, weapons are stored not under Moldovian control, essentially acting as a three decade stalemate.
Edit:
18 tanks, 107 APC, 73 field guns, 46 antiaircraft installation, 176 tank destroyer, 1 Mi-8T, 1 Mi-24 (2009)
20,000 t Ammunition (2004)
Noting that the majority of the munitions stored there are 50+ years old and are as unstable as hell.
How many soldiers could there be? 10k? 20k?
Wikipedia said 4-5k and some untranslated quotes implicated not the highest morale, but it'd be best if this goes down without a repetition of the 700 dead in 1992.
I will do a wild guess and say that that number is not useful as distraction or cannon fodder given how russian tactics work