From In Europe’s Shadow (Robert D. Kaplan, 2016) pp 175-6
GIVEN, THEN; MOLDOVA CONSTITUTED bleak political environment, Whether it was interethnic relations, the stability of its institutions, the vulnerability of its economy, the utter corruption of its political class, the manifest Russian subversion everywhere apparent, or the very fact of this place being a frontier region with a confused identity, there was demonstrably much to be pessimistic about. “Since 1812, Russia has always, in the end, been able to consolidate its position here,” a top-ranking Moldovan official told me. “The czars and the Soviets destroyed our intellectual class in previous eras, now our [Western-oriented] intellectuals are leaving for Europe.”
It occurred to me that the Russians loved weak, murky systems, whether autocratic or democratic it made little difference—where it was easy for them to bribe parliamentarians even as a handful of oligarchs controlled the economy, always hedging their bets based on which faction and imperial system called the shots.* The Russians simply hated strong governments, even authoritarian ones in some instances. After all, the Titos of the world had little trouble keeping the Soviets out. (So did Ceausescu, up to a point at least.) But give the Russians a weak and chaotic democracy like Moldova’s, without the rule of law, and the Russians were in their element. And because they liked murkiness, whether legal, political, or otherwise, they preferred the confused legal status of Transdniestria just as it was: if Putin officially annexed it, then Moldova would be rid of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians and might then be in a position to one day reunify with Romania. Transdniestria, a smugglers’ paradise, had been the perfect Stalinist creation: one built on ethnic divisions rather than on ethnic reconciliations.
So it wasn’t a conventional land invasion of eastern Ukraine that Putin desired so much as the creation of mini-Transdniestrias there – a much more efficient way to weaken the Ukrainian state. Nothing should be legally settled. Putin had annexed Crimea only because he had to, in order to satisfy public opinion back home in Russia after the loss of the pro-Moscow Kiev regime. Crimea was clean, as little else would be in this new age of Russian imperial subversion, which bore striking resemblances to a nonlinear insurgency of sorts.
But while the ground-level analysis I am providing is, perforce, unsentimental and cold-blooded, the policy that emanates from it must be, if at all possible, moral and inspirational. For the future is open to all manner of possibilities, however miserable the present may seem. In the 1980s, when I reported from Ceausescu’s Romania, Moldova was about to undergo a revival under Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika, and thus would be comparatively better off. So who knows how things may look a decade hence under brave policy formulations from the West, deftly executed?
Indeed, I had been down this road before. I had described a dark human landscape in the Balkans, specifically in Yugoslavia, while reporting there in the 1980s, in advance of the violent breakup of that country in the 1990s. My writing apparently influenced a White House policy of inaction from 1993 to 1995. But, I repeat, it is only the darkest human and political landscapes where intervention is ever required in the first place. Therefore, you should never have to romanticize landscape — or shade your analysis in any way — in order to take action on its behalf. And you should know the worst about a place before you craft even the boldest and most humanistic policy toward it. I am not in this book recommending any particular policy toward Moldova or the other Central and Eastern European states facing Russia. That is for others to do. But I am saying that there are incalculable human costs to Western inaction. And as others have said, there is a large space of opportunity between doing nothing and putting boots on the ground. I feared for Moldova, because I knew that what was I writing at the moment would soon be dated by events. I worried that Moldova had a future in the headlines.
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