*To read Part One, please click here. The local elections, just held country-wide in Moldova (see Part One in EDM, July 1), confirm an incipient tendency toward political-territorial fragmentation of the country’s heartland, the right-bank of the Nistru River. This creeping trend became noticeable with... MORE

Moldova would not be the country of procedural democracy it is, were it not to suffer from the syndrome of permanent elections, dictated by government crises and calendar dates in combination. Moldova held country-wide local elections in two rounds, June 14 and June 28, under... MORE

Following the June 22 decision by the European Union to extend its sanctions on Russia for another six months, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev soberly declared two days later that the country’s faltering economy would force the government in Moscow to make some difficult choices... MORE

Historically, Russia has treated the Balkans as an area solidly within its sphere of vital interests, and that is still the case today. While individual Balkan countries are not especially important geostrategic players in Europe, their location imparts to them a greater, even possibly exaggerated,... MORE

At the European Union’s Eastern Partnership summit in Riga (May 21–22), the EU’s neighborhood and enlargement policies came to a grinding halt. To some extent this is an effect of Russia’s war against Ukraine, the centerpiece country of the EU’s Eastern Partnership. But, irrespective of... MORE

The Gagauz autonomous territory, instituted in 1994, is the only jurisdiction with ethnic autonomy in Moldova. Adjacent to the Gagauz territory, the Bulgarian-majority district (“raion”) of Taraclia has no particular status. Legislation now pending in the Moldovan parliament would allow conferring a special status on... MORE

Russia demands a “special status” for certain territories in Ukraine and Moldova as a device to promote territorial secession processes. Moscow encourages local Russophile groups to claim a “special territorial status” or orchestrates such demands on their behalf, instigating state fragmentation. The first case study... MORE

President Petro Poroshenko recently instructed the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) to “nip any separatist organizations in the bud […] so that Ukraine should not again have to pay a heavy price later on,” as is now the case in Donetsk-Luhansk (Dzerkalo Tyzhnia, March 25).... MORE

On March 30, Irina Vlah was officially declared the winner of the election for the post of Bashkhan (head of the executive authority) in Moldova’s Gagauz Autonomous Territorial Unit (Gagauz Yeri). As now confirmed, Vlah won the election in the first round on March 22,... MORE

Moldova has a new government, the Alliance for a European Moldova (AEM), since February 28, after elections and an agitated interregnum. It is a minority coalition and, moreover, an internally divided one, requiring cooperation with the Communist Party’s “constructive opposition” (see EDM, March 5). The... MORE