Radio România Internațional

Tag: USSR

  • July 6, 2022 UPDATE

    July 6, 2022 UPDATE

    DROUGHT 70% of Romania’s territory has
    been affected by drought, Environment Minister Tanczos Barna has announced. He
    made an appeal to the population to properly use drinkable water and refrain
    from using it to water gardens. Barna has also said the country’s 40 strategic
    reservoires are filled 68%, which means they have the necessary amount of
    water. And although the Danube has a lower level at its entry into Romania it
    doesn’t affect the nuclear power plant in Cernavoda, southern Romania.






    TENNIS
    Romanian Simona Halep has
    qualified for the semifinals of the Grand Slam tournament in Wimbledon. On
    Wednesday she secured a two-set win 6-2, 6-4 against the US challenger Amanda Anisimova
    and will be next playing Elena Rybakina of Kazakhstan. A former world number
    one, Halep won the 2019 edition of the Wimbledon tournament and a year earlier
    the one in Roland Garros.






    COMMEMORATION The 73rd anniversary of the biggest wave of
    Stalinist deportations was commemorated on Wednesday in the Republic of Moldova
    (ex-Soviet, mostly Romanian-speaking). On the night of July 5-6, 1949, the
    Soviet communist regime deported tens of thousands of peasant families,
    including women, children, and the elderly. Their fortunes were seized by the
    Bolshevik regime. The so-called Operation South was the culmination of mass
    terror in Bessarabia and affected about 40,000 people. Last month marked the 81st anniversary of the
    first wave of Soviet deportations from Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, when
    25,000 people were taken to Siberia and Kazakhstan. Less than a year after the
    annexation, following an ultimatum, the repressive bodies displaced, from the
    night of June 12 to 13 and until June 22, 1941, tens of thousands of
    Bessarabians, most of them ethnic Romanians. The wealthiest people, as well as
    those who were perceived as a threat to the USSR, were taken to the most remote
    regions of the former Soviet Union. According to historians, the deportations
    were aimed at destroying the local elites, so that, later, the occupants would
    have those left at home accept the collectivization and expropriation of goods.


    SPORTS Romanian swimmer David Popovici on Wednesday won his second gold
    medal, in the finals of the 200 meter freestyle race of the European Junior
    Swimming Championships underway in Otopeni, southern Romania. In the
    competition’s first day on Tuesday, the Romanian team won the first gold in the
    4×100 meter relay event after an exciting race against Great Britain. The
    competition in Otopeni, close to the capital city Bucharest has brought
    together 500 athletes from 42 countries and Romania is being represented by 26
    swimmers. We recall that David Popovici, 17, is the new double world champion
    in the 100 and 200 meter freestyle races.





    (bill)

  • June 28, 2022

    June 28, 2022

    NATO — Romania’s President, Klaus Iohannis, participates in the NATO summit in Madrid until Thursday. The war in Ukraine and the security crisis in the Black Sea region are the main topics on the agenda of the summit. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will deliver a video speech in the first part of the meeting. According to the Romanian Presidential Administration, during the summit, the Romanian president will welcome the fact that the current security situation was reflected in the Alliance’s new strategic concept, starting from the recognition of Russia as the main threat to NATO, and the fact that the strategic importance of the Black Sea region for Euro-Atlantic security was mentioned for the first time. Klaus Iohannis will emphasize Romanias significant contribution to supporting Ukraine at humanitarian level, as well as the most vulnerable partners, especially those in the eastern neighborhood, mainly the Republic of Moldova (an ex-Soviet country with a majority Romanian-speaking population) and Georgia. Klaus Iohannis will reiterate Romanias firm support for NATOs “open door” policy, including the accession of Finland and Sweden to the North Atlantic Alliance.



    Partnership — The two Chambers of Romania’s Parliament have today adopted, in a joint session, a Declaration on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the launch of the Strategic Partnership between Romania and the US. The two countries, the document states, share common values ​​and interests, a deep commitment to democracy and a lasting strategic relationship. We particularly hail the important progress made in the cooperation between the two countries in the field of security, in order to strengthen NATOs eastern flank, including in the Black Sea region — shows the document adopted with a majority of votes by the Romanian senators and deputies. They welcome the intensification of the dialogue to meet the conditions for Romanias inclusion in the Visa Waiver program, a program that would allow Romanian citizens to travel to the US for tourism or business purposes for up to 90 days, without the need to obtain a travel visa. During the speeches, both the ruling coalition and the opposition representatives underlined the importance of the Strategic Partnership between the two countries.



    Tennis — On Monday evening the Romanian tennis player Irina Begu qualified to the second round of the Wimbledon Grand Slam tournament, after defeating the Georgian Ekaterine Gorgodze 6-4, 6-1. Sorana Cîrstea also qualified to the second round, after defeating 7-6, 7-6 the Serbian player Aleksandra Krunic. Five other Romanians are playing today in the first round: Simona Halep (against the Czech Karolina Muchova), Gabriela Ruse (against the American Cori Gauff), Mihaela Buzărnescu (against the German Nastasja Schunk), Irina Bara (against the French Chloé Paquet) and Ana Bogdan ( against Ukrainian Daiana Iastremska).



    Moldova — The Republic of Moldova is today marking 82 years since the occupation of Bessarabia by the Soviet Union on June 28, 1940. Back then, the Soviet troops annexed Bessarabia, northern Bukovina and Herța land, regions with a majority Romanian-speaking population, following an ultimatum to Bucharest. Radio Chişinău recalls that the annexation led to the establishment of a totalitarian communist regime, which meant forced collectivization, the replacement of the Latin alphabet with the Cyrillic one and Russification, political oppression and deportations. Tens of thousands of people were deported to Kazakhstan and Siberia, many of them dying on the way to or in the USSR camps. Historian Ion Varta said that under the Soviet regime forcefully established on the left bank of the Prut River, ‘about 400,000 people were victims of organized famine’, ‘626,000 people were subject to forced labor’, and between 120,000 and 130,000 people were deported. “It was a true genocide,” the historian concluded. The territories annexed in 1940 now belong to the former Soviet republics of Moldova and Ukraine, that gained their independence from Moscow in August 1991, after the failure of the neo-Bolshevik coup against the last Soviet leader, the reformer Mikhail Gorbachev. (LS)

  • Snake Island

    Snake Island

    Snake Island reappeared in the public eye on February 25, 2022, the day after the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War. On a Friday, a Russian warship ordered the Ukrainian guard of the island to surrender, and after a brief bombardment, the island was captured. This aggression brought back into question the history of the only island in the Black Sea, its ecosystem and its anthropogenic habitation.

    Located 20 nautical miles or 44 kilometers from where the Danube flows into the Black Sea, Snake Island is a limestone rock, with no water or trees, with poor vegetation, reeds and thistle. Its name comes from the small, non-venomous water snakes that once lived here. It covers 17 hectares, from north to south it is 440 meters long and from east to west 662 meter. Due to the harsh living conditions there, the island has no permanent residents besides the border guards.The island has been used as a fishing base since ancient times. It was also called the White Island, Leuke or Achilleis, where Milesian merchants used to stop.

    In the 16th century, the island came under the control of the Ottoman Empire, and in 1829, under the Treaty of Adrianople, Russia annexed the island and in 1842 built a lighthouse there. In 1878, Romania received the island together with the Danube Delta and Dobrogea following the Berlin Peace Treaty. In 1940, after the annexation of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina by the Soviets, the island remained a Romanian territory.In 1948, after the conclusion of the Paris Peace Treaty of 1947, the Soviet Union committed its first territorial robbery after the Second World War. Under a protocol concluded on February 4, 1948 and the minutes of May 23 of the same year, Romania lost the island. It should be noted that these acts have not been ratified.

    On November 25, 1949, the Soviet Union did it again: the Danube border between Romania and the USSR was pushed to the Musura Canal, west of the mouth of the northern Chilia arm of the Danube Delta. Eduard Mezincescu was Romania’s deputy foreign minister at the time and the one who signed the ceding of the island. In 1994, he recalled the circumstances of that decision:

    In 1948, I received an order from Ana Pauker telling me that when they drew the borders after the war with the USSR, they missed Snake Island, which should have been ceded to the Soviets. Pauker, Romania’s foreign minister, said the Soviets had recently raised the issue and decided to get the island. Profir, the Minister of Public Works, and I went to Tulcea and, further, to Sulina and to the island to complete the process of handing it over. Which I did. On the island, the Soviets were represented by the ambassador, the deputy foreign minister, and military personnel. An outdoor table had been set up and the minutes were ready. We were invited to sign. I said I wanted to see first what I was supposed to hand over. So, I actually forced everybody there to take a tour the island on foot. With this whim, I delayed the signing of the document.

    In 1999, the Oral History Center of the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation recorded an interview with Admiral Constatin Necula, the head of the Romanian navigation security on the Black Sea during the Second World War. He recalled:

    After August 23, 1944, when the delimitation of the Romanian-Soviet border began, I was sent to Sulina to participate, together with 2 Soviet officers, in drawing the maritime border. I went to Sulina without receiving any instructions, also because there were no specialists. I was told that the map would be drawn, I was not told about where the border would be and how this would be done. I was only told to talk to the Soviets and avoid any conflict with them. I found in Sulina the two Soviet officers who had already finished tracing the border. They had set up a beacon north of the port of Sulina, about 1-1.5 km away. They had taken the entire Delta that Chilia’s arm formed. The border went to the beacon fixed north of Sulina, and then to the east. They were careful to place the beacon in such a way that a line going east, perpendicular to the shore, passed south of Snake Island, so they could keep it. They put together a file with a map and a report that I didn’t want to sign. I told them that I was not authorized to sign any ceding of territory or to place a buoy.

    After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, Snake Island became part of Ukraine. On February 3, 2009, the International Court of Justice in The Hague gave its verdict in the trial between Romania and Ukraine for the delimitation of the continental shelf of the Black Sea and of the exclusive economic zone. Romania was granted sovereign jurisdiction over an area of ​​9,700 square kilometers, or 79.34% of the disputed area, with the rest going to Ukraine. (MI)

  • Language and computers in Romania

    Language and computers in Romania

    Translation software today employ information technology, which,
    like any other piece of tech surrounding us today, has a fascinating history.
    It is a mix of a plethora of disciplines, which, at first sight, have very
    little in common. The history of artificial intelligence, a new subject
    clustering a number of sciences together, also has a chapter on Romanian
    contribution, which consisted first and foremost in the marriage of linguistics
    and mathematics.


    Emerged in the United States, computational linguistics is the
    successful name of this inter-disciplinary field. It bridges the gap between
    language and computer science, studying the connection between natural language
    and computer language as artificial intelligence. In the years before the
    Second World War, cybernetics was a novel science encouraging the association
    between various fields of research. It was the forefather of computational
    linguistics. At the end of the 1930s, Ștefan Odobleja was one of the pioneers
    of this new field. But after the second world war, when the Soviet occupation
    created a new communist regime, the scientific prospects changed for the worse.


    In Romania, one of the pathfinders of computational linguistics was
    mathematician Solomon Marcus. In a 1998 interview for the Center for Oral
    History, Solomon Marcus described how the ideology of the one-party state
    shaped scientific research.


    Cybernetics was chastised as a bourgeois construct. At the time,
    Romania was following Moscow’s orders to a fault. And Russian scientists came
    up with a very inspiring idea, to separate certain linguistic research, such as
    mathematical linguistics, from the broader umbrella of human sciences. They
    associated it to the branch of technological sciences. After a period of
    criticism against cybernetics, Moscow changed its attitude, hailing the
    technological and scientific revolution. And hence this would become one of the
    goals of communist society, achieving a technological and scientific society.


    As any other shift of policy adopted by the communist regime,
    pragmatism prevailed over ideology. The same happened in Moscow, and Soviet
    satellites followed closely in Moscow’s steps. Solomon Marcus:


    Obviously, Bucharest too set out to accomplish this objective. It
    achieved two things. First, it recognized all mathematical linguistic research,
    and second, computation linguistics was associated with the technological and
    scientific revolution. Mechanized translations was the goal at the time, and
    efforts were made to make this happen. Machines, not people, were meant to do
    translations. The issue was key, as both the Russians and the Americans wanted
    to be able to swiftly translate texts from English and Russian. Linguistics had
    been anathema to Stalin, considering his Marxist views. Yet, all of a sudden, computational
    linguistics was no longer stigmatized, being included in the branch of
    technological sciences.


    The two scientific communities, made up of philologists and
    mathematicians, were unenthusiastic about the new discipline. Solomon Marcus:


    Rosetti was one of the few philologists who hailed and encouraged
    this new type of activity. His peers either ignored the matter or argued
    against it. They said it was not linguistics. Professor Emanuel Vasiliu’s
    approach to linguistics was quite similar to logic and mathematics.
    Mathematicians, on the other hand, believed that mathematics was by tradition
    close to mechanics, physics or chemistry, but didn’t overstep the boundaries of
    these disciplines. Mathematics being associated with a human science such as
    linguistics went very much against tradition. Because of that, a great deal of
    mathematicians were very skeptical. They didn’t believe this could work. I
    can’t say they took an active stance against it, but they were hesitant. Moisil
    was one of the few who were enthusiastic about it. You do realize the luck we
    had. Due to their support, we could teach mathematical linguistics at the
    University of Bucharest starting with the 1960s.


    With a view to researching the new field, Solomon Marcus therefore
    got support from some of the most influential mathematicians, like Grigore
    Moisil, and from philologists like Alexandru Rosetti. He therefore moved to
    implementing the new tendencies in university lectures and published articles.


    I was very lucky, because I remembered that Moisil and Rosetti
    worked together and militated for the introduction of mathematical linguistics
    activities in Romania. They also championed the creation of a mathematical linguistics
    university class, and Romania was one of the first countries in the world to
    have this discipline taught in universities. Emanuel Vasiliu and I, a
    mathematician and a linguist, we had a good start in the field. We also
    benefited from certain exchanges with our peers abroad. I had published a
    mathematical linguistics handbook at the University of Bucharest in 1963, and
    this allowed us to send our papers to various scholars abroad who were pursuing
    similar lines of research. The handbook was immediately translated in London,
    New York, Moscow, Paris and Prague.


    In 1966, Bucharest played host to the International Linguistics
    Congress, bringing together a number of prestigious scholars in the field. The
    event put Romania on the map of world science and turned computational
    linguistics into the most important science that would shape people’s way of
    life over the coming decades. (V. Palcu)



  • Radio Bessarabia

    Radio Bessarabia

    Radio Romania has been a national project right from the start. It was part of the effort to educate and inform people that were to be part of the new Romanian society. Coverage of the entire territory was an integral part of the strategy to consolidate the Romanian state after territories with predominant Romanian population emerged from multinational empires and united with the Kingdom of Romania in 1918. In addition to the central station in Bucharest, which was inaugurated on November 1, 1928, regional, or territorial, stations were created in Cluj, Iasi, and Chisinau, which was then part of Romania. The territorial station in Chisinau, the regional seat of Bessarabia, was meant to combat anti-Romanian propaganda carried out the Soviet station of Radio Tiraspol, over the Dnestr, which started broadcasting in 1930. Chisinau was the first territorial station for the Romanian Broadcasting Corporation, because reception was quite poor over there. Its schedule was similar to that of the central station, plus a few hours of local interest programming over the week. The Board of Administrators of the corporation, in its meeting on October 29, 1937, approved the creation of the Chisinau branch, dubbed Radio Bessarabia, which would broadcast in the 291.2 meter band, with a nominal power of 20 kW.

    In the 1930s, Gheorghe Crisbasanu was a technician with Radio Romania, and was working on assembling the broadcast equipment in Chisinau. In a 1997 interview with the Radio Romania Oral History Center, he recalled the work they were doing back then:

    “The 20 kW station was taken apart and carried to Chisinau. It was two days on the road for us. The first day we went to Bacau, then the second day we went to Iasi, where we stopped to get the equipment onto the trucks and wait for refueling. There were four ton trucks, International, Ford, Plymouth, and Dodge, because the RBC only had American vehicles. Then we went to Chisinau, we unloaded the equipment, and the lads got to assembling, the building was ready to have the antenna set on top. We were two to a truck, plus two sedans. In one of them we had General Director Lulu Ionescu and Technical Director Lohan. After we finished the assembly, they went to Bucharest and we, the technical crew, stayed behind to run things.”

    As work was going on, the October 1, 1938 issue of Radio Universe magazine announced: “Starting on January 1, 1939, radio listeners from Bessarabia will be able to hear Romanian language and song without needing bulky equipment, but easily affordable, small sized units. The Chisinau broadcast tower is ready, and it is a point of pride for the locals. Technical installation is almost done, as well as the studio in the center of Chisinau, on Pushkin Street.”

    Radio Bessarabia started broadcasting on October 8, 1939, and Radio Universe announced with pride on November 2, 1939: “Since the station went on the air in Chisinau, we have seen a sizable increase in the number of subscriptions in Bessarabia and Moldova. They are, of course, the portable size or the one or two lamp receiver owners that can now get Romanian broadcasts loud and clear on their minuscule receivers.”

    Unfortunately, Radio Bessarabia would be suddenly silenced right the following year. After the ultimatum given to Romania in June 1940, the USSR occupied Bessarabia, the Romanian territory between the Prut and the Dnestr. The losses that Romania incurred then were the radio station and its crew. 90,000 subscribers were lost, and 150 million lei of the total budget of 300 million lei, a 50% loss. In June 1941, Romania took Bessarabia back. The NKVDs so-called destruction battalions had the mission to raze to the ground several major buildings, which could not be evacuated. On 25 June 1941, Radio Bessarabias building became one of them. To top it all off, the Soviets shot the crew there without a trial, deeming them traitors and agents of Romanian imperialism. Their bodies were later found in an abandoned well. Gheorghe Crisbasanu recalls what he found when he went back to Radio Bessarabia after the 1941 liberation:

    “When the war broke out, I was in the 1st Armored Division, A company, and we occupied Chisinau. After we finished that, the next day I took two riflemen with me and went to the radio station. We could see one of the pylons, the other one had been blown up, and a single pylon was left, which we could see from the hill where we were. I left on foot to get there, and we found the station had been blown up, but not entirely. I sent word to the director general of RBC by a motorcycle courier who was going to Bucharest, to General Quarters, to come with cars and get back whatever was left. About four days later we went to see what was going on. The Director General, Ionescu, had come with four trucks and two cars with all the people he needed. I went back to my barracks and after that left in pursuit of the Russians, to Odessa.”

    After 1941, Radio Bessarabia could not be restored, and its mission was taken over by Radio Iasi. After December 2011, RBC is represented in Bessarabia by Radio Chisinau.

  • Romanian-Russian ties in the context of EU sanctions

    Romanian-Russian ties in the context of EU sanctions

    Recent opinion polls on foreign policy issues reveal that, of all the important international players, Russia is the country that Romanians trust the least. If we attempt an explanation from the historical perspective, the 12 Russian military invasions in the past three centuries, the USSR’s annexation of the eastern Romanian territories in 1940 and the instatement by force, after WW2, of a puppet communist regime in Bucharest are surely some of the reasons.



    At present, Romania is a neighbor of two former Soviet republics, Moldova and Ukraine, both devastated by the pro-Moscow secessionism. At the same time, it is a NATO and EU outpost. Loyal to the principles and values that define these two organizations, Bucharest has not hesitated to plead for the consolidation of the allied military presence in Eastern Europe and for keeping in place the economic sanctions imposed by the EU on Russia, in answer to the latter’s annexation of Crimea.



    Having returned, after two years, at the helm of the Romanian diplomacy, at the proposal of the coalition government made up of the Social Democratic Party and the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats, Teodor Melescanu said on Radio Romania that the relationship between Bucharest and Moscow was further maintained within the limits imposed by the EU sanctions.



    Melescanu made this specification after the Russian Ambassador to Bucharest, Valeri Kuzmin had announced in the Russian media that three bilateral cooperation programmes would be signed, that a Romanian-Russian business forum would be organized in Moscow and that he anticipated a better collaboration between Russia and the new leftist government in Bucharest.



    Teodor Melescanu: “We will further cooperate, but within the limits of the sanctions decided by the EU, which we also agreed with. Obviously, the cultural relations between Romania and Russia will not be affected; on the contrary, they should be enhanced. As for our dialogue with Russia, it will be pragmatic and constructive as far as we are concerned, with the strict observance of the limits imposed by our NATO and EU membership.”



    Melescanu made these statements after having participated, in Munich, in an annual conference on security that brought together tens of defense and foreign ministers and hundreds of MPs, experts, analysts and journalists from all over the world. In Munich, Russian Foreign Minister Serghei Lavrov prophesized a post-western future. Talking about Lavrov’s speech, Teodor Melescanu said:



    Teodor Melescanu: “It is obviously in line with the Russian Federation’s foreign policy but what he did was to transpose it in a speech, which was listened to with a lot of interest but did not have special impact on the audience.”



    The German media noted that in Munich the Romanian Foreign Minster firmly reiterated his country’s pro-European and pro-NATO stand.


  • The Republic of Moldova, 24 Years of Independence

    The Republic of Moldova, 24 Years of Independence

    Moldova, a former soviet republic that pulled away from Moscow after the failed coup of August 1991 when the Communist conservatives tried to oust Mikhail Gorbachev, is celebrating 24 years of independence. On August 27, 1991, the first Parliament in Chisinau adopted a declaration stating that “Moldova is a sovereign, independent and democratic state, free to determine its present and future without foreign interference, in keeping with the ideals and aspirations of its people, within the historical and ethnic space of its national development.



    Heirs of the previously Romanian territory between the rivers Prut and Dniester, taken away from Romania under a WW2 Nazi-Soviet pact, the Moldovans have tried to address the injustice by initiating a policy aimed at strengthening relations with the motherland: the national anthem identical to Romanias, the same national colours and so on.



    This trend, which might have led to the eventual union of the two states, came against the plans of the pro-Soviet hardliners in Moldova. In 1991, after a war supported by Moscow and which claimed hundreds of lives, they managed to have the mostly Russian-speaking eastern part of the country break away with Moldova and proclaim the Autonomous Republic of Trans-Dniester. The negotiations for resolving the conflict, in which the EU, USA, Russia, Ukraine and the OSCE are also taking part, are yet to yield a result. Years followed when Moldova was primarily headed by left and far-left parties. The Communists Party was in power for 8 years, until 2009, when it was replaced by a right-of-centre coalition, the Alliance for European Integration.



    Twenty-four years since proclaiming its independence, the young state is facing severe economic problems, massive emigration and an identity crisis. Some citizens still want to join Romania, while others would rather be united with Russia. In 2014, the Republic of Moldova signed the association agreement with the European Union, and secured a liberalised EU visa regime for its citizens.



    At present, Chisinau is also facing regional challenges, generated by the conflict in neighbouring Ukraine. Its main ally is Romania, together with which it is developing major economic and cultural projects. During his visit to Chisinau occasioned by Moldovas Independence Day, the Romanian PM Victor Ponta emphasised the importance of the joint energy and railway infrastructure projects, and promised that Romania remains a key supporter of the Republic of Moldova in its European integration efforts.

  • Independence Day in the Republic of Moldova

    Independence Day in the Republic of Moldova

    The President of Romania, Traian Basescu, wrote to his Moldovan counterpart Nicolae Timofti that Bucharest will always stand by the Republic of Moldova. The Romanian President’s message reads, among others, “Moldova’s European endeavours and the well-being of its citizens, to which we are tied by a long history and, more importantly, by great friendship, will always be the project the dearest to my soul.”



    This has been in fact a constant element of the post-communist Romanian foreign policy. Regardless of their political affiliation, all Romanian presidents, prime ministers and foreign ministers made the support for the Republic of Moldova a priority. When the Parliament in Chisinau complied with the will of the thousands of people gathered in the streets of the city and proclaimed the country’s independence from Moscow, on August the 27th, 1991, Romania was the first country in the world to recognise the new state. This put an end to half a century of Soviet occupation marked by suffering and tragedies.



    Today’s Republic of Moldova lies on some of the eastern Romanian territories annexed by Stalin’s Moscow in the summer of 1940. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Romanians took refuge in Romania, while other thousands were deported to Siberia. The arsenal of Stalinist repression included abusive arrests, summary trials and executions. The regime brought colonists from across the Soviet empire to replace the locals who had left. The Romanian community however survived, and the fall of the USSR found it prepared to break with Moscow.



    Proclaiming its independence was however just one step in a long and difficult journey. In 1992, the pro-Russian secessionist province of Transdniestr came out of Chisinau’s control, after an armed conflict that killed hundreds and was ended by the intervention of Russian troops on the separatists’ side. In the first decade of the new century, power in Moldova was held by the impenitent pro-Russian communist party headed by a former Soviet police general, Vladimir Voronin.



    It was only in 2009, when a pro-Western coalition of three parties came to power, that the Republic of Moldova was able to embrace and promote European Union accession ambitions. Having signed free trade and association agreements with the EU, Moldova is now viewed in Brussels as the success story of the Eastern Partnership. The courage and consistency with which both its politicians and the public implemented painful reforms entitle Moldova to hope that the independence proclaimed 23 years ago will soon be reinforced by the prosperity and the rule of law entailed by the European integration.