Russia maintains about 1,500 troops there and long provided free gas. That ended on New Year’s Day when Ukraine, nearly three years after Moscow’s full-scale invasion, refused to extend a transit deal letting Russia pump gas across its territory to central and eastern Europe.
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A view of the business tower Lakhta Centre, the headquarters of Russian gas monopoly Gazprom in St. Petersburg, Russia, File Photo- AP
The closure of one of Russia’s last gas export routes to Europe is having its greatest impact on a small, predominantly Russian-speaking breakaway region of Moldova. This enclave, long reliant on Moscow for support and protection, now faces growing challenges as the energy supply dwindles.
Russian-backed separatists split from Moldova as the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, winning de facto independence for the region of some 450,000 people known as Transdniestria.
Ukraine on Wednesday halted Russian gas supplies to European customers through its pipeline network after a prewar transit deal expired at the end of 2024 and almost three years into Moscow’s all-out invasion of its neighbor.
Even as Russian troops and tanks moved into Ukraine in February 2022, Russian natural gas kept flowing through the country’s pipeline network — set up when Ukraine and Russia were both part of the Soviet Union — to Europe, under a five-year agreement.
The blow to Transdniestria was immediate. Households’ central heating and hot water were cut off on Wednesday. On Thursday, the government said all industrial enterprises apart from food producers had been forced to cease production.
At a summit in Brussels last month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy vowed that Kyiv would not allow Moscow to use the transits to earn “additional billions … on our blood, on the lives of our citizens.” However, he briefly held open the possibility of the gas flows continuing if payments to Russia we