5/11/2023 0 Comments Tsar bomba crater![]() ![]() There is some worry that the Russians could mobilize the occupying force in Transnistria to attack Ukraine from the west, but then, we kept hearing over and over that Belarus was really about to join the war right NOW, while Lukashenko repeated "yes boss whatever you want boss" and ordered his army to just constantly march back and forth without ever actually entering Ukraine. The southern coast is not even remotely close to being under full Russian control, and it doesn't seem likely that, barring a sudden and unprecedented collapse in Ukrainian resistance, it will be any time soon. The good news is that as is usually the case with Russia, its overblown propaganda declarations are in no way correspondent to either what they have achieved in reality or what they have the capacity to do. It's no wonder that Putin and his apparatchiks, seeing tiny little Moldova (population 2.5 million, active armed forces numbering about 7,000) trying to defy the almighty tsar, have tried to intimidate them by threatening to expand their control from Transnistria back into the entire country. She has now submitted a formal application for Moldova's EU membership, and Moldova itself has taken in hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees, which is a huge burden for them. Another of Putin's puppets, Igor Dodon, used to be the president, until he was defeated in 2020 by the pro-European Maia Sandu. Moldova is tiny and very poor, it's also a non-NATO, non-EU former Soviet satellite republic, and Russia has occupied the Transnistria region since 1990, along with interfering deeply in its business, political, and financial matters. So yes, this declaration that they want Moldova next, once they're "finished" with Ukraine, isn't shocking to anyone who is remotely oriented to reality. They've always warned that if Russia was allowed to succeed in Ukraine, they would go after the other parts of the Soviet territorial empire to which Vlad the Invader thinks he has a claim, and feels empowered to reunite by military force. I think it's not a surprise at all to anyone who has been following the Russian rhetoric around this invasion, and what Ukrainians themselves, especially Zelenskyy in his various speeches to Western governments, have been saying all along.
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