Wallachian Gazette:
🇲🇩❌🇷🇴 Professor of international relations, Dan Dungaciu, gives a short history lesson on why Moldova and Romania didn't unite back in 1990-1991:

"(...) The first obstacles came from the Moldovan Parliament. Back in 1990, in the run-up to the declaration of independence, the Popular Front, who didn't have parliamentary majority but had the moral majority, got the Parliament to adopt the Leu as the national currency, to make Romanian the official language, to make the Latin Alphabet as the official script.. the Moldovan Parliament voted all of these, they voted the national flag, a copy of the Romanian one, even the same national anthem.. all of these things were voted at the behest of a minority party, the Popular Front.

The Agrarians who held the majority were having a hard time dealing with the collapse of the USSR and the Popular Front used the confusion in their ranks to pass these laws. Then came the declaration of independence. It was written with help from Romania as Moldova had little experience in writing documents meant for international organisations. In the original version of the declaration of independence, they referenced explicitly the year 1918. If you look in the current, final version, this paragraph is missing. The declaration talks about the historical continuity of the people etc. but the mention of the Great Union of 1918 is missing because someone in the Moldovan Parliament said after reading that declaration: "This isn't a declaration of independence, its a declaration of reunification".

This paragraph was pulled out of the declaration of independence. If this had not happened and the declaration had been voted, and we know who did what, if they had voted the declaration of reunification, the reunification of Romania and Moldova would have become a reality and this is what many of the people who were there will tell you but someone didn't want this to happen and blocked it.

Sure there will be some who will say that the Great Powers will have stepped in to prevent this, that there wasn't any interest.. as if the Little Union of 1859 was any different. We created The Little Union which was absolutely glorious, IN SPITE of the wishes of the Great Powers and in 1989, there were so many pressing issues.

The USSR was disintegrating, everyone was worried about the fate of the Soviet nuclear weapons. Ukraine gave up its arsenal of nuclear weapons in this context, the fear that those weapons could fall into the wrong hands. People were very paranoid and paid much attention to Russia to see if any extremist movements arise that may attempt to acquire one of these weapons. Do people seriously think the West paid any attention to the Moldavian SSR?

The first president of Moldova, Mircea Snegur, wrote in his memories that wherever he was traveling in the USSR he was asked left and right "when will you unite with Romania?" and those questions became more frequent after East Germany reunited with West Germany. Because the two Germanies united in October 1990, it set a precedent. If Romania and Moldova had united back then, no one would have opposed, feeling it was only natural to happen.

It never happened though because.. our mind works in such a way to find excuses for the deeds we are incapable of carrying out. That was one opportunity but the train of history doesn't pass by your house too often (...) some may think that the Russo-Ukrainian War can still make reunification become a reality but the current geopolitical reality is different than that in 1990".

@Wallachian_Gazette

🇷🇴🇲🇩🇷🇺🌐 Dan Dungaciu: Unionism is an idea Russia has spent years trying to combat.

"Unionism has been the subject of many debates on both sides of the Pruth river, always contested by pro-Russian and pro-Soviet forces, but for geopolitical, not cultural reasons. The belief that unionism is backed by Russia is held by people who have no idea what they are talking about.

The Russians do not really care about the culture and language spoken in Moldova. They did understand pretty quickly that if unionism isn't ridiculed and made taboo, NATO's frontier will advance eastward to the Dniester river and from their perspective, it represented a strategic defeat. Russia's problem with unionism always was NATO, that's why they always fought and will fight against it.

This is why and I reiterate, those who say unionism is supported by Russia have no clue what they are talking about".

@Wallachian_Gazette

🇷🇴🧡🇲🇩 Dan Dungaciu on the likelihood of Romania and Moldova reuniting sometime in the future:

"Unfortunately the likelihood is low as there are many more obstacles now than in 1990. On this topic, I don't think Maia Sandu would have opposed the union. Not just because she has Romanian citizenship but also because she never took a side in this debate. Sure when you are president, it is harder to give up the privileges that come with it.

This isn't up to Maia Sandu though. There have been other presidents in Moldova who were sympathetic to reunification but couldn't do anything to make it a reality. After 1990 an important phenomena started and it is important to watch what happened in Transnistria. (...)

A sociological analysis of the identity of the inhabitants of Transnistria revealed that the majority identify as Transnistrians, followed up by Russians, 12% who identify as Moldovans and the rest as Ukrainians. The authorities in Chișinău contested these results, saying that the Transnistrian identity is fake so I say to them: if there is a Moldovan identity, separate from Romanian, so if a regional identity can transform into an ethnos, (nation) what Moldova is doing serves only as an example to Transnistria that they too can become an ethnos, as Transnistrians were a regional identity the same way Moldovans were.

So, if Moldova declares itself an ethnically Moldovan republic different from Romania, then Transnistria can declare itself different from the population of Moldova and this is what happened. The more time passes, the harder these conflicts are to solve. Since 1990 an entire generation has been raised in Transnistria that lived separately from Moldova. In Moldova an entire generation was raised in the Moldovanist identity. The Moldovanization of Bessarabia is a process which we in Romania are blind to and we tend to ignore it.

The Moldovanization process really started in 2001 with the ascension of Vladimir Voronin, when Romania decouples from Moldova as it was busy pursuing integration into the EU and NATO. Voronin was the first communist president elected in an election that was fair and free. Never in the history of the world did a communist politician get elected without fraud. This was a shock for politicians in Bucharest and the Americans".

@Wallachian_Gazette

🇲🇩❌🇷🇴 Dan Dungaciu on how the 2001 presidential elections in Moldova were the most consequential in its history:

"The results of the 2001 presidential elections shocked the Americans. This is the reason why the U.S. allowed the Russians to keep their garrison in Transnistria. That was a Russo-American deal based on the results of the 2001 presidential elections and as a compensation paid to Russia for the decision to bring Romania into NATO.

Romania meanwhile was busy working for NATO and EU membership and didn't have the resources and time for Moldova. We turned our backs to them and Voronin did his best to seal Moldova off from Romania. 2001 was the year the Moldovanization process really started to take off. The way Romanian was spoken in Chișinău started to become different. Back in the 1990s, the inhabitants of Moldova didn't have their own identity and would rhetorically ask: "who do we join now?" Romania or the USSR/Russia?

There was no European identity back then and it took 20 years to make that idea reach Moldovan discourse. Paradoxically, Voronin too was a promoter of the European identity but we'll get to that. In 2001, Voronin won on the promise of bringing Moldova into a union state with Russia and Belarus. This caused a violent split from Romania as Romanians stopped being welcome and Moldovans lost interest. This is when the Moldovanization process begins.

Tacitly, the Bessarabian accent is embraced. Before that, at least in public, politicians, journalists, made efforts to speak Romanian "the right way" as it was spoken in Bucharest. This process continued even after Voronin's switch towards Europe in 2005 as a result of Russo-American negotiations.

Not to get bogged into specifics: its 1992, the Transnistrian War ends leaving Russian troops stationed there. In 1999 during the Istanbul negotiations, the OSCE demands that Russia withdraw from Transnistria and the Russians comply. A bunch of soldiers and several dozen train carriages leave Transnistria for Russia. In 2002, Russia had to report to the OSCE every detail of the withdrawal but after the 2001 elections and Romania's upcoming entry in NATO left the Americans trying to find a way to calm the Russians. So they added a small caveat to the OSCE report writing "Russia must withdraw all troops and munitions.. provided that all necessary conditions are in place" thus pushing the withdrawal to an unknown date.

The Russians welcomed this development and for those who remember, in 2002, women in Transnistria were throwing themselves on train tracks "begging" the Russians to not leave and they complied. What happened next is unclear, we don't know if it was a misunderstanding or intentional but the Russians thought they were given the greenlight to vassalize Moldova.

In 2003 came the Kozak Memorandum and the proposed federalization of Moldova. Putin's advisor, Dmitry Kozak, flies to Tiraspol, he was scheduled to go to Chișinău where he, the Transnistrian president, Igor Smirnov and Vladimir Voronin were going to sign the peace deal. A night before the deal was going to be signed the Western embassies call Voronin and tell him not to sign. What follows was a Dostoyevskian scene, Voronin going sleepless knowing Putin will never forgive him. Voronin announces that the deal is off and Kozak returns empty handed to Moscow.

Voronin switched sides in 2003, receiving the backing of America and the EU. In 2005, Voronin's 2nd term, Moldova begins the long & arduous path for the EU. This whole turnaround was called "The Orange Revolution inside Voronin's head" by the former Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili".

@Wallachian_Gazette