Could Russia invade Moldova?

Armed soldiers patrol the checkpoints along the road into Transnistria, standing guard under a giant Soviet hammer and sickle flag. International law dictates that this thin tract of land along the border with Ukraine is part of Moldova. Yet it feels not just like a different country, but a different decade altogether.

Held by Russian-backed separatists since the fall of communism, the region is locked in a bygone era, with its estimated 350,000 residents going about their lives in the shadow of Soviet-era concrete buildings and statues of Lenin. Around 1,500 Russian troops have been stationed here as part of a ‘peacekeeping mission’ since a brief war in the early 1990s, operating alongside the unrecognised region’s own conscript army.

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Yascha Mounk

Europe must be stronger, or it will die

Together, they prop up the breakaway administration despite orders from Moldova and the UN to leave.