*To read Part One, please click here.
Western officials and commentators seem, on the whole, to overestimate Russia’s capacity and intentions to recapture Moldova by exploiting that country‘s current crisis. This overestimation partly explains the recent decisions in Washington, Brussels and Bucharest to accept billionaire Vladimir Plahotniuc’s full seizure of power, as preferable to a putative Russian takeover of Moldova in some form or another (see Part One, EDM, February 4).
That nervousness looked like a carryover from the real emergency in the spring of 2014, when Russia’s “Novorossiya” (“New Russia”) project in Ukraine’s southeast, with a focus on Odesa, could …read more
Source: The Jamestown Foundation