War as a neighbour
Moldova as an ex-Soviet Union country had many citizens still supporting Russia, until the outbreak of the war. Before the war a great percentage of the population was pro-Russia. The Russian influence in Moldova since the Soviet Union is still great. Most of the people in the country are bilingual, speaking Romanian and Russian, and since about a decade ago, Russian was mandatory to study in schools, similarly to how English is now. People also watched mostly Russian television. But, how can you blame them? It’s not like they had much of a choice. There were just a few TV programmes in Romanian and they were definitely not as interesting as the Russian ones. The point is, indirectly, Russia still had a lot of influence in the social, economic, and political life of the country.
In 2020, President Maia Sandu was elected. It was the bound of a change for good. As the war started, Moldovans started panicking. I remember my aunt saying she was hearing the bombardments on Kyiv from her house, and while she was taking it with the philosophy “If they are going to throw a bomb on us we’re not going to take our belongings with us” others were having panic attacks while packing all their things. And after some time people calmed themselves, kinda. This was the decisive moment for the government to try to separate itself from its dependency on Russia. From changing the destination of the 20% of exports directed towards Russia to the EU to searching for many alternative providers of gas with a price more convenient than Russia… Not going too much into the political aspect, after some tryouts on the Russian side to bring the Moldovan population on its side, citizens started to change their views. From a mostly pro-Russian country, this was the shake that changed the citizen’s opinion.
Important to say, it’s that I am not including the people from the self-proclaimed independent region Transnistria. In fact that line of the country is strongly pro-Russian, so much so that it decided to be independent, even though neither Moldova nor any other country, other than Russia has recognized it as such. This change in their views of the ruling party can be considered a big win. In particular, because the political views of the president were difficult to enforce as there was still a major part of the parliament that was pro-Russia. This allowed a new pro-EU government to be elected, when the precarious pro-western government collapsed, resulting in most of the parliamentarians not being pro-Russia. A new law against separatist movements has been approved, as there are still protests. However, according to the media the protestants are being paid to protest.
It’s obvious that Moldova, while already having many problems to solve for itself had and continues having a period of chaos. It’s definitely not easy to live in a country that lives war as a neighbour. On one side Moldovan citizens were exposed to Russian propaganda which portraid Russia as the side in the “right”. On the other side, the internet and the West made Russia the “monster” of the situation. There were a lot of divergent opinions, coming from the exposure to different media: people not trusting the government, people wanting to trust it but with poor expectations and people with high expectations. Today, this situation is slowly stabilizing, but the road ahead is still unclear. It’s a chapter yet to be finished, right now there’s a “to be continued, stay tuned to know what will happen.” The only fault is that this is real life and no one can know how the situation and people’s minds will evolve.
