TRANSDNIESTER IMPASSE DEEPENING.

At the August 8 meetingof the tripartite armistice control commission, the Transdniesterside raised the new demand that the Moldovan peacekeeping contingentgive up its armored vehicles, Flux and Basapress reported. Thosevehicles are legal under the 1992 Yeltsin-Snegur armistice convention,but Transdniester interprets last month’s agreement on mutualsecurity guarantees signed by President Mircea Snegur and Transdniesterleader Igor Smirnov as requiring the withdrawal of Chisinau’sarmor while permitting Tiraspol’s armor to stay. At the same commissionmeeting, the Transdniester side continued to ignore the Moldovanside’s objections to the deployment of Transdniester contingentsin the security zone far above the limit stipulated in the armisticeconvention, while the Russian side on the tripartite commissioncontinued condoning the violation. Also on August 9, in retaliationfor Chisinau’s requirement that cars traveling the left bank ofthe Transdniester River have Moldovan instead of the old Soviet-typelicense plates, Transdniester set up a military checkpoint onthe right bank and stopped cars from traveling toward Ukraine.And on the same day, Moldovan prime minister Andrei Sangheli madepublic a letter to Igor Smirnov, "appealing to [Smirnov’s]goodwill" to permit Moldovan schools in Transdniester torevert to the use of the Latin script which has been banned theresince 1992. Two days earlier, Transdniester set up a commissionto draft its own constitution, which would constitute a furtherstep toward secession. Taken together, these developments beliePresident Mircea Snegur’s repeated predictions that the Transdniesterproblem will be settled before the end of 1995.

North Ossetian-Ingush Talks Mark Time.