"Where there's smoke, there's fire"; Another country should get ready

"Where there's smoke, there's fire"; Another country should get ready

Just half an hour's drive from Ukraine's southern border, hundreds of Russian soldiers are guarding a large ammunition depot in the breakaway Moldovan region of Transnistria.

This warehouse, these soldiers and this pro-Russian separatist region have been under increasing global surveillance in recent days, Slobodna Dalmacija reports, citing BBC.

Accusations between Russia, Ukraine and Moldova for destabilization and the opening of a new crisis hotbed in Moldova were exchanged quite intensively and loudly, and "where there is so much smoke, fire is certainly possible," adds the Croatian newspaper.

Due to the possibility of a conflict breaking out in the country that borders Ukraine, it is a more than realistic scenario that Moscow could soon reach for.

Moldovan Prime Minister Dorin Recean has said openly that Russian troops should be expelled from the entire region, and Moldovan President Maia Sandu has previously stated that Moscow plans to topple her pro-Western government.

Meanwhile, Russia has declared that it will consider any attack on its troops in Transnistria as an attack on Russia itself.

Many Western analysts point out that Transnistria could provide the Kremlin with the possibility of another entry point for an attack on Ukraine, which would tie up Ukrainian troops from other areas of conflict on the Ukrainian-Moldovan border.

The Moldovan village of Molovata Nouã is particularly affected by the difficult atmosphere and the possibility of a new conflict, the BBC reports.

As they state, their lives are torn between the needs for Russian gas and the economy of Moldova, which had to reject that gas due to sanctions.

"I will be honest," says the mayor of Molovata Nouã, Oleg Gazea: "It is very difficult to convince people that life is better in Moldova when in Transnistria they pay only a fraction of our gas price. We cannot tell people about freedom and a better life, and at the same time to tell them to go across the river and pay their bills 30 times higher".

Russians have been buying the sympathy of the poor for years with cheap gas. So, some people believe quite firmly that Moscow is not a military threat, but an economic ally – and that it is President Sandu who is causing the crisis and war with her political rapprochement with the West.