Comments from Sergey Lavrov, the long-serving foreign minister of Russia and ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, have raised concerns from some on social media about a possible future invasion by Moscow of another European nation.
Lavrov’s comments come in the wake of a major meeting on Wednesday among “deputies of all levels” in Transnistria, a breakaway region of the former Soviet republic of Moldova. At the meeting, officials formally asked Russia for aid in their ongoing conflict with Moldova, with the region’s top leader accusing the nation of “genocide” against residents of Transnistria.
Russia has long maintained considerable tensions with the independent nations that it once controlled as territories of the Soviet Union. In the wake of its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, fears have been renewed of potential invasions of other former territories with the goal of reclaiming them, with Moldova being considered a highly likely target of such a plan.
In comments made following the meeting of officials in Transnistria, Lavrov, who has served as the foreign minister for Russia since 2004, raised alarms for many as he spoke of Moldova in notably similar ways as he and other Russian officials did for Ukraine prior to the invasion, heightening fears that they might be setting a pretense for their next attack. During the comments, shared to X, formerly Twitter, by Ukrainian official Anton Gerashchenko, Lavrov accused the Moldovan government of attempting to purge Russian culture from Transnistria, explicitly linking it to the Ukrainian government in Kyiv.
“The regime that has settled in [the Moldovan capital of] Chisinau and that follows in the footsteps of the Kyiv regime,” Lavrov said, as translated by Gerashchenko. “Cancelling everything Russian, discriminating against the Russian language in all spheres, and, together with the Ukrainians, also organizing serious economic pressure on Transnistria.”
Newsweek reached out to Moldovan officials via email on Saturday for comment. Any responses received will be added to this story in a later update.
In reaction to these comments, numerous users on X noted that the implications of such similar rhetoric were clear.
“Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov saying all the things about Moldova that he did about Ukraine just before Russia invaded,” X user “Jay in Kyiv” wrote in a post.
“Grim yet not unexpected,” Russia historian Oleksandr Polianichev wrote in an X post. “Lavrov threatens Moldova with the fate of Ukraine and calls its government the ‘Chisinau regime.’ We know what this means.”
“Lavrov threatens Moldova. He calls their government the ‘Moldavian regime’, which ‘follows in the footsteps of the Kyiv one,'” a military news blogger going by “Albina Fella” wrote in a post. “We have already heard this and see how it ended.”
A representative for the Russian ministry of foreign affairs told Russia’s state-run news agency RIA Novosti on Wednesday that Moscow would “carefully” consider Transnistria’s request for protecting Russian “compatriots” in the region.
Moldova was granted European Union (EU) membership candidate status in 2022, with plans to become a member by 2030. The Russian government has strongly opposed its regional neighbors joining organizations such as the EU and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the expansion of which Putin cited as an additional reason for invading Ukraine.
In February 2023, Moldovan President Maia Sandu accused the Russian president of plotting a coup to overthrow her country’s government, a scenario that some Western analysts warned could be achieved with the help of approximately 1,500 troops that remain stationed in Transnistria following the war that led to it becoming an unrecognized state in the 1990s.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.