Outline of Transnistria

The Moldovan authorities extended the environmental certificate for a metal plant in the breakaway region of Transnistria after pressure from the separatist regime and its Russian backers.

Russia has indicated it hopes to clear a path through southern Ukraine to Transnistria, injecting new urgency to a long-term plan to overhaul and beef up Moldova's armed forces.

A few days after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, the Kyiv authorities closed all their border crossing points along the country's 400-kilometre boundary with the breakaway region of Transnistria.

Supply routes were disrupted and the prices of imported goods rose immediately.

President Maia Sandu said after a meeting of Moldova's Supreme Security Council on Tuesday that explosions in Transnistria for two days in a row "show that there are tensions between various forces" that are interested in destabilising the breakaway region, where Russian troops have been based since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The current leader of the breakaway region of Transnistria, Vadim Krasnoselsky, won so-called presidential elections on Sunday with 79 per cent of the votes, after most potential rivals were eliminated from the race and with few foreign observers.

Indeed, Viktor Gushan and Ylia Kazmalii have come to dominate the economy of Transnistria - the pro-Russian separatist region of Moldova where Sheriff is based - since it threw off rule from Chisinau in months of fighting in 1992 following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The breakaway region of Transnistria in Moldova on Sunday staged parliamentary elections for the seventh Supreme Council (local parliament) since 1992, in which only a minority of voters cast ballots.

The Moldovan Foreign Ministry on Monday evening criticised the Operative Group of Russian Troops, which is stationed in the breakaway region of Transnistria, for holding a ceremony to mark the recruitment of a new group of minors to the ranks of Russia's Yunarmia (Youth Army) movement. 

Moldova's breakaway region of Transnistria is to open a diplomatic office in the centre of Moscow on New Arbat Street alongside the "embassies" of other unrecognised similar entities such as Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

The mission will open this month, the chief of the Transnistrian diplomacy, Vitaly Ignatiev, said on Sunday.

Moldova's breakaway region of Transnistria celebrated the 28th anniversary from its so-called independence on September 2, 1990, on Sunday.