{"id":448373,"date":"2008-04-21T09:05:24","date_gmt":"2008-04-21T09:05:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.moldova.org\/en\/?p=448373"},"modified":"2020-06-09T09:12:20","modified_gmt":"2020-06-09T09:12:20","slug":"mark-tkaciuk-and-the-negotiations-on-the-transnistrian-issue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.moldova.org\/en\/mark-tkaciuk-and-the-negotiations-on-the-transnistrian-issue\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Tkaciuk and the negotiations on the Transnistrian issue"},"content":{"rendered":"Reading Time: <\/span> 8<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>

This opinion piece was written by Dr. Aurelia Felea and Dr. Ionas Aurelian Rus. The opinion does not necessarily represent the opinion of the editorial staff of Moldova.org.<\/em><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Authors: Dr. Aurelia FELEA (Chisinau), Dr.\u00a0Ionas Aurelian RUS, Associate Professor, University of Cincinnati Blue Ash (USA)<\/p>\n

People following the evolution of the Transnistrian negotiations have had the opportunity to note that at most of these meetings, together with the Foreign Minister, the President of Moldova or other dignitaries, involve almost every time Vladimir Voronin’s former adviser on domestic policy issues, current political adviser Mark Tkaciuk.\u00a0As the involvement of this official in foreign policy seemed to go beyond his formal duties, it is natural to ask what role Tkaciuk plays in the negotiations with Moscow and in what sense he can influence them.\u00a0The effort is all the more justified as the speeches of the president and the councilor show remarkable ideational confluences.<\/p>\n

Phoenix, counterweight to the movement initiated by Romanian historians<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mark Tkaciuk was born on September 26, 1966 in the city of Soroca.\u00a0He comes from a mixed family, his mother being Armenian and his father Ukrainian.\u00a0In the late 1980s, while studying at the Faculty of History of the State University of the capital of Soviet Moldova, Tkaciuk was part of a group of young people concerned with the history of his homeland.\u00a0The group was called Fenix \u200b\u200band operated under the auspices of the Komsomol organization in Chisinau.\u00a0In the years 1988-1989, at the above-mentioned educational institution, there was the Bogdan-Petriceicu Hasdeu circle, created by the students of the History faculty, who refused to accept the official Soviet historiography and pleaded for an unadulterated, national history.\u00a0Examined in retrospect, the work of the Fenix \u200b\u200borganization, almost unknown to the general public, may be seen as a counterweight to the vigorous and popular movement for the liberalization of historical thinking initiated by the Romanian ethnic historians.<\/p>\n

In 1991, Tkaciuk studied in London, where, according to a source connected to a Western secret service, he came into contact with the British intelligence service MI-6.\u00a0Tkaciuk received his doctorate in 1995, in St. Petersburg, with a topic on the Getae, the connections with the political and academic world of the former empire being, by all accounts, extremely important for his intellectual formation.<\/p>\n

Organizer of the PCRM election campaign<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mark Tkaciuk appears among the supporters of the Party of Communists of the Republic of Moldova (PCRM) on the eve of the 2001 elections. editor of the Communist newspaper, the press body of the PCRM.<\/p>\n

Entering parliament on the party’s lists, Tkaciuk resigned as deputy in May 2002, saying he was returning to his scientific concerns.\u00a0Shortly afterwards, he would become an adviser to the President of Moldova.\u00a0He promptly, publicly and explicitly stated that he appreciated Vladimir Voronin, calling him “our beloved president.”\u00a0The latter named Tkaciuk’s friend Alexei Tulbure as Moldova’s representative to the Council of Europe.<\/p>\n

According to a Russian-language publication, in September of the same year, Tkaciuk met in Moscow with Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin’s deputy head of administration and one of the most influential politicians in Vladimir Putin’s entourage.\u00a0At the time, the Russian presidency was working to create a subdivision, which would develop and promote new strategies for unrecognized states and enclaves in the post-Soviet space.\u00a0At the heart of that discussion was the issue of privatization in Transnistria.\u00a0Earlier, in August 2002, the Russian leadership had discussed with Abkhazian leaders the need to privatize state property in the republic so that at least some of the buyers would be Russian entrepreneurs.<\/p>\n

The idol Che Guevara<\/strong><\/p>\n

The ideological preferences of the counselor may be said to be heterogeneous, with an emphasis on authoritarianism.\u00a0The ideal of the young Tkaciuk was Ernesto Che Guevara, a revolutionary whom he still worships.\u00a0In the 1990s, Tkaciuk leaned toward “anarchism as an anti-politics and as an ethic of daily assertion of freedom” and extolled the emancipatory mission of exceptional personalities.\u00a0Although he describes in gloomy colors the situation in the USSR (“cumbersome state capitalism”, “venal partocracy”, etc.), he seems to nurture the conviction that, after 1990, the Soviet regime had to follow a different path than the one we know, but avoids identifying the alternative.\u00a0In Tkaciuk’s treatment, the communist system did not collapse, but merged with the capitalist one,\u00a0and the ideal of social equity has survived the socialist states and “continues its triumphant march on the planet.”\u00a0Tkaciuk argues that it is not right for the words communism and democracy to be associated with the “monsters and rejects”, who periodically try to monopolize them.\u00a0The historian ignores the reality accessible to common sense, but also important works of political philosophy, which highlight the immorality intrinsic to communist doctrine.<\/p>\n

Tkaciuk disapproves in terms that leave no room for nuanced assessments of the state construction carried out for ten years after the proclamation of the independence of the Republic of Moldova.\u00a0In his opinion, until 2001, Moldova was a “ghost state”, whose citizenship was only a “residence visa”, “a punctuation mark easy to face in southern European geopolitics”, a country where the abyss between citizens and officials is greater than anywhere else in the world and that people are constantly leaving.\u00a0Tkaciuk suggests that at the root of the evil lies the national movement of the 1990s and that the “Romanian past” could in no way generate a “promising Moldovan present.”<\/p>\n

The enemy of the Romanian past
\n<\/strong>
\nIn the understanding of Tkaciuk and the people in his circle, the Republic of Moldova is a point of contact between cultures and peoples, which must take advantage of its advantageous positioning to play the role of connector of civilizations.\u00a0The same ideas are promoted by the archeology journal Stratum plus, which appears in Russian, under the auspices of the Higher Anthropological School in Chisinau, an institution founded and led by Tkaciuk.\u00a0In the pages of the magazine appear from time to time articles dedicated to issues of medieval and modern history, which justifiy the occupation of Bessarabia by Russia in 1812, mock the modernization of Romania, appreciated as superficial, ridiculously mimetic in relation to Western European civilization (modernization that Bessarabia did not need to follow, because it had another, superior, model, Russia) and the post-Soviet Moldovan reality is treated with contempt.<\/p>\n

According to Tkaciuk, the cultural elite in Moldova is horribly primitive.\u00a0Regarding the opposition, the president’s adviser has repeatedly suggested that it is an evil comparable to fascism.\u00a0In an interview with Nezavisimaja Moldova on May 14, 2004, he described most opposition forces as totalitarian sects, emerging from the former Soviet nomenclature, intellectually exhausted, and concerned exclusively with their own interests.\u00a0The president’s adviser said they were subordinated to foreign political technologies, particularly from the United States, and would soon reach the end of a dramatic process of self-destruction.\u00a0It is worth noting, among other things,\u00a0the fact that in his essays and articles, Tkaciuk expressed his distrust of the values \u200b\u200bof Western civilization and ridiculed the scientists and political actors in the Republic of Moldova, who receive support from the West.\u00a0Voronin also said that what happened after the proclamation of independence was a disaster and that the main enemy of the communists in power was the post-Soviet “nomenclature”, which he also called “feudal bureaucracy”.\u00a0Following this line of thinking, one can only conclude that the only healthy political force in the Republic of Moldova is the Party of Communists and that the country must persist in its pro-Eastern orientation.<\/p>\n

\n

Extrapolates his own identity crisis<\/strong><\/p>\n

Although it refers to Western sources and currents of thought, the group of intellectuals to which Mark Tkaciuk adheres is mainly informed by works published in Russian.\u00a0The aforementioned Stratum plus magazine pays homage almost exclusively to Soviet researchers in the Russian Federation.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, the people in this category do not belong to the Bessarabian culture, of Romanian essence, nor to the Russian one. Moreover, they are resentful in relation to the eastern metropolis, insinuating that it does not give them enough consideration.\u00a0From here probably come major internal tensions and an acute identity crisis, which he extrapolates to the majority population of the Republic of Moldova.\u00a0This segment of the political elite questions the sincerity of the Bessarabians who identify with Romanianism, qualifying such manifestations as opportunistic.\u00a0Moldovans are treated not with hatred or disrespect, but with a kind of condescending tolerance, which quickly metamorphoses into hostility if they try to define themselves as Romanians.<\/p>\n

The ideologue of federalization<\/strong><\/p>\n

The position occupied by the presidency in settling the Transnistrian dispute is decrypted, to some extent, following the analysis of the opinions expressed on this issue, in various situations, by Tkaciuk.\u00a0Coming to power in 2001 and relying on the fact that its ideological foundation, especially views on identity, the Soviet past, etc., are not fundamentally different from those shared by the Tiraspol leaders, the Communist Party leadership imagined that it would be able to resolve the Transnistrian conflict in the near future.\u00a0In 2002, we find the president’s adviser, together with Alexei Tulbure, actively promoting the federalization plan of the Republic of Moldova, developed by the OSCE.<\/p>\n

After the failure of the Kozak Plan, Tkaciuk was given a particularly delicate task – to explain the president’s sudden refusal to sign the document, after the “parties” had apparently reached a consensus at key moments.\u00a0Dmitry Kozak is known to have commented on Voronin’s conduct in the fall of 2003 in an interview with Moscow’s Kommersant.\u00a0Kozak claimed that Voronin had self-flagellated with the worst words, that he had deeply regretted the fact that he had disappointed Putin, etc.\u00a0The Russian diplomat hinted that the “unpredictable” president of Moldova did not deserve respect: “Neither in everyday life, he concluded, nor in politics do you fall in such a state.”<\/p>\n

Representatives of a part of the Russian elite<\/strong><\/p>\n

The president’s adviser offered his own version – unnaturally emotional for his situation – of the negotiations on the Memorandum.\u00a0Tkaciuk’s answer was hosted by the same publication that interviewed Kozak.\u00a0Tkaciuk claimed, among other things, that Chisinau officials were disturbed by the inclusion, at Kozak’s unexpected request, of the point about the Russian military presence, extended until 2020. Kozak said that such a stipulation was absolutely necessary to gain Tiraspol’s good will, but promised that the Russian armies would not stay for more than three years.\u00a0The Russian diplomat, says Tkaciuk, assured Voronin that the most important actors on the world political scene – the OSCE, the USA, and the EU – had been informed of the content of the plan and that they had approved it;\u00a0but when the Moldovan side began contacting European bodies, stating their position, it was learned that Russian officials had not arranged anything with anyone and were simply lying.\u00a0Consequently, says Tkaciuk, the Chisinau leadership became aware of its own naivety, of the big game, but also of the fact that, in reality, \u201cthere is no independent Transnistrian party, only Transnistrian representatives of the interests of a certain part of the elite of the Russian Federation \u201d.<\/p>\n

Simulation of the negotiation process<\/strong><\/p>\n

At first glance, the statements may pass as an indictment directed toward Moscow, if behind the guilt of “a certain part of the elite of the Russian Federation” there would be no tendency to save the attractive image of Russia as a whole and its top leadership.\u00a0Recent developments, including the meetings of the Chisinau leaders with President Putin, seem to validate this interpretation.\u00a0Note also that Tkaciuk claims the helplessness of small countries in the face of pressure from large states, the powerful Western states not being different in this respect from those in the East.\u00a0The statement tends, in our opinion, to induce in society a feeling of powerlessness and communes, in a way, with the idea, circulated by the government, according to which any attempt to remedy the situation in Bessarabia – in the economic, political or cultural realm \u2013 is compromised from the start compromis\u0103, as long as the Transnistrian conflict is not settled.<\/p>\n

In 2006, Mark Tkaciuk and Vasile Sova visited Moscow, where they were supposed to discuss the prospect of a Moldova loyal to Russia, if the latter would help solve the Transnistrian problem.\u00a0It should be noted that, although he vehemently criticized the alienation of Transnistrian companies operated by the separatist regime in Tiraspol, Voronin was also pleased that most of the new owners came from Russia.\u00a0The Chisinau leadership continues to define Moldova’s relations with the Russian Federation as a “strategic partnership” after repeatedly declaring since 2004 that Russia maintains occupation forces in Moldova.<\/p>\n

Mentally connected to the eastern space<\/strong><\/p>\n

The great drama of the Moldovan communists is their inability to understand – or openly admit – even after the Kremlin clearly undermined their 2005 election campaign, that Russia’s treatment of Moldova does not depend at all on “noble sentiments” nurtured by the leadership in Chisinau towards Moscow.\u00a0The long-term maintenance of a party in power in Moldova, regardless of its ideological orientation, implies the stabilization of the situation and it can be argued that it is likely to generate favorable conditions for the reunification of the country.\u00a0However, the international situation created after the fall of the USSR did not in any way allow the settlement of the dispute in the direction desired by Russia and the restoration of its control over the entire Moldova.\u00a0That is why the power in the east has been interested over the years – and still is, for now – to simulate a process of negotiations, to procrastinate the conflict resolution and to periodically imbalance the political life from Chisin\u0103u.<\/p>\n

As the political biography of the influential presidential adviser Mark Tkaciuk once again sees, the communist leaders continue to be mentally connected to the Eastern space and have not for a moment given up in their inner forum the authoritarian traditions of governance.\u00a0They will continue to be tempted to settle the Transnistrian conflict in a voluntarist manner, mimicking the consultation of the people, but always keeping an eye on the reaction of the Kremlin leader.<\/p>\n

First published in Jurnal de Chi\u0219in\u0103u<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Time: <\/span> 8<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>This opinion piece was written by Dr. Aurelia Felea and Dr. Ionas Aurelian Rus. The opinion does not necessarily represent the opinion of the editorial staff of Moldova.org. *** Authors: Dr. Aurelia FELEA (Chisinau), Dr.\u00a0Ionas Aurelian RUS, Associate Professor, University of Cincinnati Blue Ash (USA) People following the evolution of the Transnistrian negotiations have had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-448373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"content_social_share":"Reading Time: <\/span> 8<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>

This opinion piece was written by Dr. Aurelia Felea and Dr. Ionas Aurelian Rus. The opinion does not necessarily represent the opinion of the editorial staff of Moldova.org.<\/em><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Authors: Dr. Aurelia FELEA (Chisinau), Dr.\u00a0Ionas Aurelian RUS, Associate Professor, University of Cincinnati Blue Ash (USA)<\/p>\n

People following the evolution of the Transnistrian negotiations have had the opportunity to note that at most of these meetings, together with the Foreign Minister, the President of Moldova or other dignitaries, involve almost every time Vladimir Voronin’s former adviser on domestic policy issues, current political adviser Mark Tkaciuk.\u00a0As the involvement of this official in foreign policy seemed to go beyond his formal duties, it is natural to ask what role Tkaciuk plays in the negotiations with Moscow and in what sense he can influence them.\u00a0The effort is all the more justified as the speeches of the president and the councilor show remarkable ideational confluences.<\/p>\n

Phoenix, counterweight to the movement initiated by Romanian historians<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mark Tkaciuk was born on September 26, 1966 in the city of Soroca.\u00a0He comes from a mixed family, his mother being Armenian and his father Ukrainian.\u00a0In the late 1980s, while studying at the Faculty of History of the State University of the capital of Soviet Moldova, Tkaciuk was part of a group of young people concerned with the history of his homeland.\u00a0The group was called Fenix \u200b\u200band operated under the auspices of the Komsomol organization in Chisinau.\u00a0In the years 1988-1989, at the above-mentioned educational institution, there was the Bogdan-Petriceicu Hasdeu circle, created by the students of the History faculty, who refused to accept the official Soviet historiography and pleaded for an unadulterated, national history.\u00a0Examined in retrospect, the work of the Fenix \u200b\u200borganization, almost unknown to the general public, may be seen as a counterweight to the vigorous and popular movement for the liberalization of historical thinking initiated by the Romanian ethnic historians.<\/p>\n

In 1991, Tkaciuk studied in London, where, according to a source connected to a Western secret service, he came into contact with the British intelligence service MI-6.\u00a0Tkaciuk received his doctorate in 1995, in St. Petersburg, with a topic on the Getae, the connections with the political and academic world of the former empire being, by all accounts, extremely important for his intellectual formation.<\/p>\n

Organizer of the PCRM election campaign<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mark Tkaciuk appears among the supporters of the Party of Communists of the Republic of Moldova (PCRM) on the eve of the 2001 elections. editor of the Communist newspaper, the press body of the PCRM.<\/p>\n

Entering parliament on the party’s lists, Tkaciuk resigned as deputy in May 2002, saying he was returning to his scientific concerns.\u00a0Shortly afterwards, he would become an adviser to the President of Moldova.\u00a0He promptly, publicly and explicitly stated that he appreciated Vladimir Voronin, calling him “our beloved president.”\u00a0The latter named Tkaciuk’s friend Alexei Tulbure as Moldova’s representative to the Council of Europe.<\/p>\n

According to a Russian-language publication, in September of the same year, Tkaciuk met in Moscow with Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin’s deputy head of administration and one of the most influential politicians in Vladimir Putin’s entourage.\u00a0At the time, the Russian presidency was working to create a subdivision, which would develop and promote new strategies for unrecognized states and enclaves in the post-Soviet space.\u00a0At the heart of that discussion was the issue of privatization in Transnistria.\u00a0Earlier, in August 2002, the Russian leadership had discussed with Abkhazian leaders the need to privatize state property in the republic so that at least some of the buyers would be Russian entrepreneurs.<\/p>\n

The idol Che Guevara<\/strong><\/p>\n

The ideological preferences of the counselor may be said to be heterogeneous, with an emphasis on authoritarianism.\u00a0The ideal of the young Tkaciuk was Ernesto Che Guevara, a revolutionary whom he still worships.\u00a0In the 1990s, Tkaciuk leaned toward “anarchism as an anti-politics and as an ethic of daily assertion of freedom” and extolled the emancipatory mission of exceptional personalities.\u00a0Although he describes in gloomy colors the situation in the USSR (“cumbersome state capitalism”, “venal partocracy”, etc.), he seems to nurture the conviction that, after 1990, the Soviet regime had to follow a different path than the one we know, but avoids identifying the alternative.\u00a0In Tkaciuk’s treatment, the communist system did not collapse, but merged with the capitalist one,\u00a0and the ideal of social equity has survived the socialist states and “continues its triumphant march on the planet.”\u00a0Tkaciuk argues that it is not right for the words communism and democracy to be associated with the “monsters and rejects”, who periodically try to monopolize them.\u00a0The historian ignores the reality accessible to common sense, but also important works of political philosophy, which highlight the immorality intrinsic to communist doctrine.<\/p>\n

Tkaciuk disapproves in terms that leave no room for nuanced assessments of the state construction carried out for ten years after the proclamation of the independence of the Republic of Moldova.\u00a0In his opinion, until 2001, Moldova was a “ghost state”, whose citizenship was only a “residence visa”, “a punctuation mark easy to face in southern European geopolitics”, a country where the abyss between citizens and officials is greater than anywhere else in the world and that people are constantly leaving.\u00a0Tkaciuk suggests that at the root of the evil lies the national movement of the 1990s and that the “Romanian past” could in no way generate a “promising Moldovan present.”<\/p>\n

The enemy of the Romanian past
\n<\/strong>
\nIn the understanding of Tkaciuk and the people in his circle, the Republic of Moldova is a point of contact between cultures and peoples, which must take advantage of its advantageous positioning to play the role of connector of civilizations.\u00a0The same ideas are promoted by the archeology journal Stratum plus, which appears in Russian, under the auspices of the Higher Anthropological School in Chisinau, an institution founded and led by Tkaciuk.\u00a0In the pages of the magazine appear from time to time articles dedicated to issues of medieval and modern history, which justifiy the occupation of Bessarabia by Russia in 1812, mock the modernization of Romania, appreciated as superficial, ridiculously mimetic in relation to Western European civilization (modernization that Bessarabia did not need to follow, because it had another, superior, model, Russia) and the post-Soviet Moldovan reality is treated with contempt.<\/p>\n

According to Tkaciuk, the cultural elite in Moldova is horribly primitive.\u00a0Regarding the opposition, the president’s adviser has repeatedly suggested that it is an evil comparable to fascism.\u00a0In an interview with Nezavisimaja Moldova on May 14, 2004, he described most opposition forces as totalitarian sects, emerging from the former Soviet nomenclature, intellectually exhausted, and concerned exclusively with their own interests.\u00a0The president’s adviser said they were subordinated to foreign political technologies, particularly from the United States, and would soon reach the end of a dramatic process of self-destruction.\u00a0It is worth noting, among other things,\u00a0the fact that in his essays and articles, Tkaciuk expressed his distrust of the values \u200b\u200bof Western civilization and ridiculed the scientists and political actors in the Republic of Moldova, who receive support from the West.\u00a0Voronin also said that what happened after the proclamation of independence was a disaster and that the main enemy of the communists in power was the post-Soviet “nomenclature”, which he also called “feudal bureaucracy”.\u00a0Following this line of thinking, one can only conclude that the only healthy political force in the Republic of Moldova is the Party of Communists and that the country must persist in its pro-Eastern orientation.<\/p>\n

\n

Extrapolates his own identity crisis<\/strong><\/p>\n

Although it refers to Western sources and currents of thought, the group of intellectuals to which Mark Tkaciuk adheres is mainly informed by works published in Russian.\u00a0The aforementioned Stratum plus magazine pays homage almost exclusively to Soviet researchers in the Russian Federation.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, the people in this category do not belong to the Bessarabian culture, of Romanian essence, nor to the Russian one. Moreover, they are resentful in relation to the eastern metropolis, insinuating that it does not give them enough consideration.\u00a0From here probably come major internal tensions and an acute identity crisis, which he extrapolates to the majority population of the Republic of Moldova.\u00a0This segment of the political elite questions the sincerity of the Bessarabians who identify with Romanianism, qualifying such manifestations as opportunistic.\u00a0Moldovans are treated not with hatred or disrespect, but with a kind of condescending tolerance, which quickly metamorphoses into hostility if they try to define themselves as Romanians.<\/p>\n

The ideologue of federalization<\/strong><\/p>\n

The position occupied by the presidency in settling the Transnistrian dispute is decrypted, to some extent, following the analysis of the opinions expressed on this issue, in various situations, by Tkaciuk.\u00a0Coming to power in 2001 and relying on the fact that its ideological foundation, especially views on identity, the Soviet past, etc., are not fundamentally different from those shared by the Tiraspol leaders, the Communist Party leadership imagined that it would be able to resolve the Transnistrian conflict in the near future.\u00a0In 2002, we find the president’s adviser, together with Alexei Tulbure, actively promoting the federalization plan of the Republic of Moldova, developed by the OSCE.<\/p>\n

After the failure of the Kozak Plan, Tkaciuk was given a particularly delicate task – to explain the president’s sudden refusal to sign the document, after the “parties” had apparently reached a consensus at key moments.\u00a0Dmitry Kozak is known to have commented on Voronin’s conduct in the fall of 2003 in an interview with Moscow’s Kommersant.\u00a0Kozak claimed that Voronin had self-flagellated with the worst words, that he had deeply regretted the fact that he had disappointed Putin, etc.\u00a0The Russian diplomat hinted that the “unpredictable” president of Moldova did not deserve respect: “Neither in everyday life, he concluded, nor in politics do you fall in such a state.”<\/p>\n

Representatives of a part of the Russian elite<\/strong><\/p>\n

The president’s adviser offered his own version – unnaturally emotional for his situation – of the negotiations on the Memorandum.\u00a0Tkaciuk’s answer was hosted by the same publication that interviewed Kozak.\u00a0Tkaciuk claimed, among other things, that Chisinau officials were disturbed by the inclusion, at Kozak’s unexpected request, of the point about the Russian military presence, extended until 2020. Kozak said that such a stipulation was absolutely necessary to gain Tiraspol’s good will, but promised that the Russian armies would not stay for more than three years.\u00a0The Russian diplomat, says Tkaciuk, assured Voronin that the most important actors on the world political scene – the OSCE, the USA, and the EU – had been informed of the content of the plan and that they had approved it;\u00a0but when the Moldovan side began contacting European bodies, stating their position, it was learned that Russian officials had not arranged anything with anyone and were simply lying.\u00a0Consequently, says Tkaciuk, the Chisinau leadership became aware of its own naivety, of the big game, but also of the fact that, in reality, \u201cthere is no independent Transnistrian party, only Transnistrian representatives of the interests of a certain part of the elite of the Russian Federation \u201d.<\/p>\n

Simulation of the negotiation process<\/strong><\/p>\n

At first glance, the statements may pass as an indictment directed toward Moscow, if behind the guilt of “a certain part of the elite of the Russian Federation” there would be no tendency to save the attractive image of Russia as a whole and its top leadership.\u00a0Recent developments, including the meetings of the Chisinau leaders with President Putin, seem to validate this interpretation.\u00a0Note also that Tkaciuk claims the helplessness of small countries in the face of pressure from large states, the powerful Western states not being different in this respect from those in the East.\u00a0The statement tends, in our opinion, to induce in society a feeling of powerlessness and communes, in a way, with the idea, circulated by the government, according to which any attempt to remedy the situation in Bessarabia – in the economic, political or cultural realm \u2013 is compromised from the start compromis\u0103, as long as the Transnistrian conflict is not settled.<\/p>\n

In 2006, Mark Tkaciuk and Vasile Sova visited Moscow, where they were supposed to discuss the prospect of a Moldova loyal to Russia, if the latter would help solve the Transnistrian problem.\u00a0It should be noted that, although he vehemently criticized the alienation of Transnistrian companies operated by the separatist regime in Tiraspol, Voronin was also pleased that most of the new owners came from Russia.\u00a0The Chisinau leadership continues to define Moldova’s relations with the Russian Federation as a “strategic partnership” after repeatedly declaring since 2004 that Russia maintains occupation forces in Moldova.<\/p>\n

Mentally connected to the eastern space<\/strong><\/p>\n

The great drama of the Moldovan communists is their inability to understand – or openly admit – even after the Kremlin clearly undermined their 2005 election campaign, that Russia’s treatment of Moldova does not depend at all on “noble sentiments” nurtured by the leadership in Chisinau towards Moscow.\u00a0The long-term maintenance of a party in power in Moldova, regardless of its ideological orientation, implies the stabilization of the situation and it can be argued that it is likely to generate favorable conditions for the reunification of the country.\u00a0However, the international situation created after the fall of the USSR did not in any way allow the settlement of the dispute in the direction desired by Russia and the restoration of its control over the entire Moldova.\u00a0That is why the power in the east has been interested over the years – and still is, for now – to simulate a process of negotiations, to procrastinate the conflict resolution and to periodically imbalance the political life from Chisin\u0103u.<\/p>\n

As the political biography of the influential presidential adviser Mark Tkaciuk once again sees, the communist leaders continue to be mentally connected to the Eastern space and have not for a moment given up in their inner forum the authoritarian traditions of governance.\u00a0They will continue to be tempted to settle the Transnistrian conflict in a voluntarist manner, mimicking the consultation of the people, but always keeping an eye on the reaction of the Kremlin leader.<\/p>\n

First published in Jurnal de Chi\u0219in\u0103u<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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