Is Putin about to invade Moldova?

‘If you don’t like how the table is set, turn over the table,’ said Frank Underwood, the Machiavellian character played by Kevin Spacey in the US version of House of Cards. One needs to look no further than Vladimir Putin’s body language in his recent meeting with defence minister Sergei Shoigu to conclude that Russia’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine is not going according to plan. While that is good news, the Russian dictator might be moving to turn over the table in the neighbouring Moldova.

On Tuesday morning, two explosions destroyed a radio tower re-broadcasting Russian stations into Transnistria and Ukraine and a ‘terror attack’ targeted a military unit near the capital of the self-declared republic. The two incidents followed earlier blasts, on Monday evening, by Transnistria’s ‘ministry of state security.’

Given that the dispute over Transnistria has been frozen for decades and that Moldova’s armed forces are next to non-existent, the most obvious explanation for the attacks is that they are a Russian false-flag operation laying the groundwork for a different phase of Putin’s effort to reconstitute the Russian empire.