Glauco D’AGOSTINO

Abstract. The USSR and Warsaw Pact breakup led to a new situation, with Romania and Bulgaria joining NATO and the EU, Ukraine and Georgia aspiring to, and Moldova urged by both European and Russian pressures. Meanwhile, a security barrier against NATO has emerged, with the establishment of secessionist independent states, such as Transdnestrija, Abkhazija and South Ossetia, and Crimea reverting to Russia. The other regional player is Turkey, which welcomes millions of Circassians and hundreds of thousands of Abkhazians. Today, Moscow fears the growing nationalism to a Circassian national entity within the Russian Federation. Even the Crimean Tatars trust in the Turkish protection. The most controversial issue in the whole Black Sea region concerns Bessarabia, a region belonging to Romania prior to 1944 and today politically divided between Moldova, Ukraine and Transdnestrija. The Kingdom of Romania was born in 1881 as a development of the Union of the Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, and in 1918 the Great Union of Romania was born. Then, in 1940 the establishment of Moldova as a USSR federal state until its 1991 independence. Today, Romania looks to Moldova with the eyes of an ethnic homogeneity and its own historical configuration, and the shadow of a Russian annexation of Transdnestrija weighs on Romanians, as they fear a progressive Russkij Mir entrapment, especially after the Crimean record. Then, there are supposed Russian interferences in the Moldovan Gagauzia, which doesn’t sympathize to the Romanian nationalism and itself eventual absorption into a Greater Romania. The counterbalance to Russia in Gagauzia would be Turkey. Meanwhile, Chişinău rejects the proposals for a Moldovian ”asymmetric federation” with Gagauzia and Transdnestrija, but its concerns resided in the Russian military presence in the breakaway state. A Moscow current tendency is to create a transmission chain of Russian power over the Black Sea, where Crimea is already part of the Federation territory, and the remnant is an informal complement. The other political axis, the western one, seems to be no longer working because of the changed geo-political conditions. A new regional character has come on stage: it’s Turkey.
Keywords: Black Sea, Russia, Turkey, Moldova, Romania, Bessarabia, Gagauzia, Transdnestrija, Greater Romania, Russkij Mir, Crimea, Ukraine, NATO