Journey to the Western Black Sea Coast

by Guy Mettan,* freelance journalist

(9 January 2023) While one hears a lot about the Baltic States and Poland in the Ukraine conflict, the countries in the South, on the other hand, are very discreet. A forum on peace and neutrality in Chisinau and various meetings organised on the occasion of the Bulgarian elections on 2 October allowed me to visit Moldova, Romania and Bulgaria earlier this month.

The least that can be said is that I returned with mixed feelings and was even quite overwhelmed by the climate of despondency in which the peoples of these countries seem to bathe.

Moldova

Cramped, landlocked, lacking natural resources, living mainly on agriculture and viticulture, sandwiched between its big neighbours Romania and Ukraine on the one hand and torn between the two giants European Union and Russia on the other. Moldova with its three million inhabitants is undoubtedly the worst off country of this trinity. But it is used to it and does not mind it too much.

Moldovans know that history and geography have placed them in an unfavourable place. As an advisor to pro-European President Maya Sandu notes, “it is only the second time in a thousand years that we have experienced three consecutive decades of independence and peace”. With Mongols, Turks, Poles, Cossacks, Russians, Romanians or Germans, Moldova has experienced a series of invasions, oppressions, deportations and wars between neighbours.

The country is deeply divided politically and geopolitically, he notes. Three camps confront each other: Maya Sandu’s current ruling pro-European Atlanticists, former president Igor Dodon’s Socialists, who are considered pro-Russian, and the conservative but also pro-Russian Equality party, founded by oligarch Ihor Shor, who has currently fled to Israel, and has been organising anti-government demonstrations in front of parliament for several months.

A recent poll showed that 43% of the population speak exclusively Russian on their mobile phones. “How are we supposed to find a majority that votes pro-Moldovan?” he wonders wryly.

He is well aware that he lives in a lovely but impossible country. He gives me as an example the notorious Transnistria, which is 200% Russophile and described as an enemy of the government, although the government could not live without this province, which supplies most of its gas and electricity.

Tiraspol, which (despite the war) is supplied with Russian gas via Ukraine, in fact sells it on to Chisinau and also burns some itself to run a steelworks, the production of which is bought up by the European Union! Only this gas has not been paid for by either side for the last 30 years, so that the accumulated debt to Gazprom amounts to 7 billion US dollars (60% of Moldova’s GNP) – debts that would become due immediately if the country were to join the EU.

With the new tensions triggered by the war in Ukraine, the country is faced with a choice between the two empires, the European and the Russian, which are engaged in a merciless struggle. All Western politicians, from Blinken to Macron, made a pilgrimage to Chisinau this spring to urge Moldova to impose sanctions on Russia, on which the country depends not only for energy but also for its food exports.

The country hosts hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees and, despite its constitutional neutrality, is suspected of serving as a hub for trade with Ukraine. The country has officially been named an EU candidate and is now being showered with arms supplies, offers of cooperation and media subsidies, while Brussels-backed NGOs are multiplying.

It is a race against time to disengage the Moldovan population from its Russophile mind set. The EU has sent its best influence agents, while the US has just acquired five hectares of land in the middle of the capital to build its new embassy, and demolishing the stadium built by the Soviets. A huge construction site for such a small country, but one that will make it possible to set up underground listening centres there and clean up the past ...

But no decisions have been taken yet. The president, who like Zelensky was elected on an anti-corruption platform, is gradually caught up in affairs despite a press at her service.

She, who holds a Romanian passport and, like most of her Baltic, Scandinavian or Georgian counterparts, was educated in the US, is accused of neglecting local affairs, travelling constantly and posing far too often alongside Western politicians, from the NATO secretary-general to the emperor of Japan to King Charles III.

Last September, a poll by the think tank Intellect found that 39% of the population supported the planned EU accession, while 38.5% opposed it. Only 20% supported the EU’s anti-Russian sanctions (59% opposed them), while 73% opposed Moldova adopting them. Neutrality was supported by over 50%, while about 20% would prefer to join the European Union or the Eurasian Union (18%). Help for Ukrainian refugees, on the other hand, is supported by three-quarters of Moldovans.

Transnistria

In this explosive environment, former socialist president Igor Dodon, who is under house arrest on corruption charges, sees only one way out to save his country from disintegration: an agreement between the great powers that recognises the country’s neutrality on the Austrian model of 1955.

A visit to Gagauzia, the stronghold of the small Turkish Orthodox minority in the south of the country, and to Transnistria confirmed that these two regions are ready to secede and follow suit with the Donbass provinces if the country joins the EU and NATO.

Vasily, a former communist deputy and chairman of the consistory of the Gagauz Orthodox Church in Komrat – a syncretism that is surprising in the West but quite common here – is categorical: accession is out of the question. The passers-by interviewed in Transnistria were of the same opinion: better to die than to come under Western control. They are impatiently waiting for the Russian army to break the siege of Kherson and knock on Moldova’s door.

Igor Dodon does not rule out this possibility. He believes that the Russians will respect the country’s legal borders and help resolve the conflict with Transnistria in exchange for the country’s actual neutrality.

At this stage, he sees three scenarios for a way out of the crisis. The first is that of chaos as in Libya: flight to the front, anarchy, political conflict, economic disintegration. The second scenario, which he prefers, is that of the “Congress of Vienna”: Europeans and Russians negotiate again, the country is reunited and declared neutral, government and opposition work together to revive the country on a new basis. The third scenario is a continuation of the current trend: covert accession to the EU and NATO will continue quietly until Russia decides to stop it, as in Ukraine, and bind rebellious Transnistria and Gagauzia to itself after an armed conflict (or not). The bets are open.

Romania

Now we make a stopover in Romania, where I have an appointment in Bucharest with my Romanian mentor Petru Romosan, who has offered to show me around his city. Petru is a poet, publisher and irrepressible graphic lover. He reads my books, translates and has been publishing my articles in Romanian for some time. His motto could be: “once a dissident, always a dissident”.

Winning the National Prize for Poetry at the age of 21 during the Ceausescu era, he finally clashed with a regime that had become paranoid. In the 1980s, he and his wife managed to get to the West and settled in Paris, where they worked in publishing until the late 1990s. After returning to Bucharest, they founded their own house there and published more than 300 titles in 20 years. In late 2019, just before the Covid crisis, the still-active Securitate set fire to the two neighbouring premises and devastated their archives, computers and book collections. He has been writing ever since.

Although he has returned to a country that is now considered democratic and belongs to the camp of the good guys, he has lost none of his critical verve. Like the two Russian Alexander’s, namely Zinoviev and Solzhenitsyn, he remained a dissident and continued to publish books critical of the new authorities. The reasoning? It can be summed up in two sentences: “the same bandits are still in power, the same clique. Only yesterday they took their orders in the Kremlin, while today they take their orders in Washington.” KGB or CIA, the slaves have changed masters but kept the same methods and vassal gangs.

And indeed, Romania – which for the rest of Europe is a world apart, opaque and impenetrable – serves as a faithful and discreet relay station for the EU and NATO in their war against Russia.

The Romanians, branded by history, do not like the Ukrainians. But they don’t like the Russians either and docilely supply the West with everything it needs. The West can put its troops and equipment there and use its military bases, ports and railways to transport weapons and wheat. A sign of the times: a new, equally monstrous cathedral is being built next to Ceausescu’s huge and much-maligned palace. Different times, same preferences for megalomaniac and useless buildings.

Bulgaria

I arrive in Sofia, the capital of the Land of the Rose, on the weekend of the national elections of 2 October, the second in ten months. Political life in Bulgaria, like that in Moldova and Romania, is an inexhaustible soap opera.

The political class there is even more discredited than elsewhere, with abstention breaking all records at 60.7%. Basically, five or six parties have been fighting for power for ages, one more Europhile than the other. All are pro-Europe and anti-Russia. But none agrees on who should rule the country. Therefore, personal and clan feuds – because whoever has power also gets to share in the European sinecures – are crucial.

Currently, the struggle is monopolised by two Atlanticist Euroturbos: Boyko Borisov, who began his career as a bodyguard to the last communist president Zhivkov, and Kiril Petkov, the incumbent prime minister. Three other parties serve as complements to form coalitions and divide the spoils from EU subsidies among themselves.

The outcome was no more decisive than in previous elections: Borissov’s party became the strongest party, Petkov’s party the second strongest. However, since both have ruled out cooperation and the others are not sufficient for a majority, the power vacuum seems to persist. Remarkably, only the Turkish Party, a small conservative party, and the two sovereignist parties Renaissance, which doubled its number of seats, and Bulgarian Wake-up Call, which entered parliament for the first time, made gains. These two formations, which demand national independence, are naturally labelled as pro-Russian by the state press and the private media, which are unanimously European and Atlanticist.

However, public opinion is strongly divided here as elsewhere. The latest American Yougov poll from May this year found that 44% of Bulgarians believe that the war in Ukraine is primarily the fault of NATO and the West, while only 23% believe that the Russians are primarily to blame! The rest believe that the blame lies on both sides. And all this despite massive propaganda.

Old sympathies persist. Bulgarians have not forgotten that they were liberated from the Ottoman yoke by the Russian army in a bloody war in 1878 and that the Soviet Union prevented the dismemberment of the country sought by the British in 1945.

An area of retreat for the war in Ukraine

Meanwhile, the country also serves as an area of retreat for the war in Ukraine. Since its surprise entry into NATO in the wake of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, four US military bases have been opened there, that is, one for every 1.5 million inhabitants. It is rumoured that no major political decision can be taken without the approval of the US embassy in Sofia, as is the case in Montenegro and neighbouring northern Macedonia.

In fact, Bulgaria’s real challenge lies elsewhere. It is demographic, as in most Eastern European countries, including the Baltic States.

An economic and ecological disaster

Bulgaria has been breaking all European records in terms of depopulation since 1991, when it moved closer to Western Europe. In the last 30 years, Bulgaria has lost more than one million inhabitants, equivalent to 15% of its population, and has fallen below the seven million mark. It remains a very poor country whose agriculture, an important economic sector, is slowly being killed by European regulations.

The transition to intensive industrial agriculture, the privatisation of land and the expansion of monocultures for export are contributing to the desertification of rural areas. An example: a European study on the living conditions of wild snipe showed that in 2008, shortly after the EU accession, a few hectares of land could support 1300 snipe with 69 different seed species, while in 2018, ten years after the introduction of EU standards, the same area could only support 300 snipe with only nine different seed species. An economic and ecological disaster.

Who benefitted from this?

Is it the destiny of these countries to serve as adjustment variables, exploitation basins and reservoirs of cheap labour for a Europe that has turned into a neoliberal and warmongering juggernaut?

This question deserves to be asked. The career that best embodies the tragic fate of the countries in the Balkans and on the Black Sea front – to take up the image from the beginning again – is undoubtedly embodied by Kristalina Georgieva, the former EU Commissioner and current head of the IMF, whose biographical profile has been carefully cleaned up to fit American and European “values”.

She was born into a family of the communist nomenklatura in August 1953, shortly after Stalin’s death, and was actually named Stalina or Stalinka (little Stalin) to honour the late great man. By a clever and harmless change of her personal status at the right moment, she was able to forget this shameful name and change it to Kristalina. Neither seen nor known. A great professional career in the Western governing bodies was open to her. Who benefitted from this?

* Guy Mettan is a political scientist and journalist. He started his journalistic career with Tribune de Genève in 1980 and was its director and editor-in-chief in 1992–1998. From 1997 to 2020, he was director of “Club Suisse de la Presse” in Geneva. Nowadays he is a freelance journalist and author.

(Translation “Swiss Standpoint”)