U.S. urges Russia to withdraw troops from Moldova - Irony is dead

[NNN0LHI]

http://english.people.com.cn/200605/27/eng20060527_269060.html

The United States would ratify an adaptation agreement on the European arms treaty only if Russia withdrew its troops from Moldova unconditionally, reports from Moldova's capital Chisinau said on Friday.

As an explicit signal on the issue for the first time, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Paula DeSutter said Russia's withdrawal from the Dniester River region was a precondition for the U.S. ratification of the Adaptation Agreement on the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE Treaty).

The U.S. official, in charge of arms control, made the remarks after she held talks with Moldova's President Vladimir Voronin during her two-day visit to the country starting from Thursday.

DeSutter said the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) sided with Washington on the issue.

[Kagemusha]

1. Unfortunately satire is alive and quite well.

nt

[BrklynLiberal]

2. Were they actually serious??!!!! No one laughed in their face?

[Igel]

3. Link for background.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transnistria

If 'Chisinau' (or the more complete 'Chişinău'--but don't look for newspaper to get diacritics right unless the names/places are Spanish, or maybe French) means little, it used to be Kishinyov or Kishinev. That is, when it 'spoke Soviet' (which is to say, Russian).

I thought this was resolved a long time ago. Apparently not; too handy keeping Russian troops on Ukraine's western border, and making that nasty Moldova pay for rejecting what were claims to obvious Russian imperialist hegemony over the region.

It does help explain why I had so a few Moldovan Russian-speakers in my English class.

[DrDebug]

5. By the looks of things, it is not resolved, however they are not fighting

So it is probably a vulnerable status quo. It looks like Gagauzia has been resolved by giving it regional autonomy, however Transnistria is still an unrecognized self-proclaimed independent republic with no active violence since 1992.

The problem is that Iraq is a lot like this as well. It is also country where ethnic groups are chaotically interlocked, so by fueling ethnic differences you only end up with increasingly complex situations.

[ck4829]

4. Oh great. Are we going to go back to...

USA says "You put people in the Gulag."
Russia says "And you lynch black people."
"You put people in the Gulag."
"And you lynch black people."
"You put people in the Gulag."
"And you lynch black people."
"You put people in the Gulag."
"And you lynch black people."
"You put people in the Gulag."
"And you lynch black people."
"You put people in the Gulag."
"And you lynch black people."
Ad infinitum.

With Bush and Putin, that's very possible, perhaps even inevitable.