The inevitable re-election of Putin this week for a new six-year term as president of Russia is causing some concern in the West. The election will allow him to stay in the Kremlin until 2030. Some three decades of power which will place him in the leading group of Russian autocrats with Stalin and Catherine II.
Not only did he succeed in getting the Russian people to overcome their dismay caused by some 400,000 soldiers killed in Ukraine, but he also eliminated his two most formidable adversaries. First Alexeï Navalny, probably assassinated on his orders in February in a Russian penal colony. And mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, who died in an explosion aboard a plane last August after leading a mutiny against Putin.
Things are likely to get complicated for NATO members with his re-election. Especially since we could see Trump return to power in Washington, he who threatens to withdraw the United States.
A second front for Putin
With his bogus re-election, Putin could provoke a new crisis in Eastern Europe. It is no coincidence that officials from the pro-Russian separatist regions of Transnistria and Gagauzia in Moldova have just asked Moscow to “protect” them against the Moldovan authorities whom they accuse of wanting to reintegrate them. Moldova is a landlocked country between Romania and Ukraine. The Moldovan government has denied having such intentions.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry said protecting Transnistria’s residents – calling them “compatriots” – was one of Russia’s priorities.
A region in eastern Moldova, Transnistria is a narrow strip of territory along (approx. 250 km) the western border of Ukraine inhabited by Russian speakers where Russian troops have been deployed since the end of the USSR in 1991.
The White House still found it necessary to declare that “given Russia’s increasingly aggressive role in Europe, we are closely monitoring Russia’s actions in Transnistria.”
And Transnistria is not the only Moldovan problem. Putin said this week that he would also support the Moldovan autonomous region of Gagauzia, sparking further fears of destabilization in Moldova. Gagauzia is a region in southern Moldova with around 150,000 inhabitants that was granted some autonomy from Moldova after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
It all appears to be part of a Russian plan to increase political tensions in Moldova ahead of that country’s crucial presidential election this fall, which could go ahead with a referendum on its European Union membership.
If indeed Putin decides to intervene, he will justify himself by claiming that he is acting to protect Russian citizens, as he did in eastern Ukraine for Donetsk and Luhansk, and in the separatist regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia. Both of these cases led to war.
Putin knows that the West is already entangled in multiple crises in the Middle East and Ukraine while the ongoing US election campaign limits the possibilities for US intervention: he can count on Trump and the Republicans.
Putin Tsar of All Russia
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, concerns have grown that Moldova and Georgia could be next in line. Putin, as we know, wants to rebuild Russia as it was during the era of the Soviet and Tsarist empires.
Moldova and Georgia have pro-Western governments like Ukraine and want to join the European Union like Finland and Norway – other neighbors of Russia – have done recently.