The New Year’s Day decision by Ukraine to suspend a five-year gas transit agreement with Moscow has triggered an energy crisis in Europe and threatened to spill its ongoing conflict with Russia over into neighboring countries.
The termination of Russian gas exports to the continent via Ukrainian pipelines has already impacted several European nations reliant upon fuel from Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned energy giant, including Slovakia and Moldova.
Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico, who survived an assassination attempt last year over his opposition to the Ukraine proxy war, has threatened to cut off electricity supplies to Kyiv in retaliation. Meanwhile, Moldova has declared a national state of emergency after the gas stoppage plunged the little-known breakaway region of Transnistria, a tiny separatist enclave landlocked along the Moldovan border with Ukraine, into a humanitarian catastrophe.
Officially known as the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (PMR), the breakaway state is internationally unrecognized and has been deadlocked in a “frozen conflict” with Moldova since the signing of an armistice in 1992 following an armed rebellion.
One of several disputed post-Soviet territories in a never-ending stalemate since the dissolution of the USSR, Transnistria faces imminent collapse as its fuel provisions continue to run out amidst freezing winter temperatures and rolling blackouts. At the same time, Moldova will no longer receive Russian gas-fired electricity from the country’s largest power plant located in the PMR.
Hellbound and Down 