Since the dissolution of the USSR, the European Union has pursued an unwavering commitment to extend its influence eastward, pulling state after state into the orbit of Brussels. This project of expansion reached its peak in 2004. That year eight former socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, alongside Malta and Cyprus, joined as the EU10. Three years later, Romania and Bulgaria were also absorbed. The narrative presented consistently during these expansions was one of ‘returning to Europe’, of sloughing off the decay of communism and back to a more natural future, sharing prosperity with their new German and French partners.
Yet for ordinary workers these transitions often brought deindustrialisation, mass privatisation, and the flight of millions in search of employment abroad. The celebrated accession into the EU’s fold has not created prosperity in these countries, but rather fed a supply of cheap labour into the economies of the wealthiest European countries, at the expense of domestic development and welfare systems.
However, not every post-Soviet republic has been successfully integrated. One state continues to sit uneasily on the EU’s frontier: the Republic of Moldova. A small, landlocked nation of 2.3 million people, Moldova is geographically squeezed between Romania and Ukraine. It is, in many ways, the last piece of the puzzle in the EU’s eastward march. But Moldova’s admittance to the EU faces a fundamental obstacle in the unresolved status of Transnistria.
A narrow strip of land east of the Dniester River, officially known as the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, declared independence in 1990 in response to rising Moldovan nationalism and the push to align with Romania. The region’s majority Russian-speaking population resisted incorporation into a state whose leadership increasingly turned toward Western integration. A short but bitter conflict in 1992 in which local militias, supported by elements of the Russian 14th Army, defeated Moldovan forces, ensured Transnistria’s de facto independence. To this day, the PMR functions as an unrecognised but stable republic, albeit one heavily reliant on Russian support.
For the EU, Transnistria represents far more than a frozen conflict. It is the single greatest impediment to Moldova’s accession, since Brussels insists on territorial integrity as a precondition for membership. Whilst the EU has overlooked a superficially similar dispute to admit Cyprus, Transnistria is instead seen as intolerable because of its alignment with Moscow. The PMR acts as a symbolic barrier to the EU’s expansion into the post-Soviet space, a reminder that integration is neither inevitable nor uncontested.
The EU presents its enlargement strategy as a story of ‘democratisation’ and ‘modernisation.’ Yet what they meant in practice is neoliberal restructuring: privatisation of state assets, fiscal austerity, and the reorientation of economies away from domestic production toward dependence on Western markets. The accession of the Eastern Bloc states in 2004 is a clear illustration of this.
In Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, EU membership coincided with the dismantling of heavy industry and the mass sell-off of national enterprises to foreign investors. Romania and Bulgaria, were compelled to introduce sweeping austerity packages and liberalise their markets as conditions of membership. For ordinary workers, this meant declining real wages, crumbling healthcare and education systems, and an explosion of emigration, particularly of young and skilled workers who sought livelihoods in Western Europe.
Moldova sits on the edge of this process. EU accession has long been held out as the country’s path to ‘modernity’, but the Moldovan working class has every reason to be sceptical. As one of the poorest states in Europe, Moldova already suffers from mass emigration, with an estimated one-third of its population working abroad. Its domestic economy is fragile, heavily reliant on agriculture, foreign loans, and remittances from their workers abroad. The EU offers little more than the prospect of further dependency, Moldava relegated to yet another market to exploit and another reserve of cheap labour.
Here, Transnistria becomes crucial. For as long as the PMR remains unresolved, Moldova’s accession cannot move forward. Transnistria is thus not simply a separatist enclave, but a structural impediment to the EU’s project in the region.
Its continued survival would suggest much of the population have rejected the EU’s promised rewards for those who join. For over three decades, the PMR has operated as a functioning state outside both Brussels’ and Washington’s sphere. Despite international non-recognition, it has developed its own political institutions, security structures, and economy. It conducts elections, issues passports, and maintains a sense of sovereignty that flies in the face of Western definitions of legitimacy.
What is particularly striking is that Transnistria has managed to preserve elements of its Soviet past. The republic retains Soviet-era monuments and symbols, but more importantly, it sustains large-scale industrial capacity through enterprises like the Rybnitsa Steel Plant and the Cuciurgan power station. In contrast to the deindustrialisation imposed by EU integration on neighbouring states, Transnistria has kept alive forms of economic organisation that do not fit neatly into Brussels’ neoliberal framework.
Transnistria demonstrates that resistance to the European project is not only possible but enduring. Its very existence undermines the EU’s ideological claim that all former socialist states will inevitably integrate into the Western capitalist order.
The importance of Transnistria is not merely symbolic, however. The region plays a material role in shaping Moldova’s position vis-à-vis the EU, particularly through energy.
The Cuciurgan power station, located in Transnistria, is the largest electricity producer in Moldova. Historically fuelled by Russian gas, it has provided around 75% of Moldova’s electricity needs. This means that Chișinău, despite its political hostility to Tiraspol, remains dependent on a separatist region it does not control for its energy supply.
The Russo-Ukrainian war has further exposed these contradictions. When Russian gas supplies were cut or reduced, Transnistria was the first to feel the effects, leading to reduced electricity exports to Moldova. The EU has attempted to step in with emergency energy packages, including connections to the Romanian grid, but these come at far higher costs and tie Moldova more closely to Brussels’ sphere of influence. The EU have utilised this gas crisis to control the Moldovan state and hike the price of much-needed energy making the average Moldovan continuously worse off at every turn. In this way, the EU exploits the energy crisis to leverage deeper integration but Transnistria’s role continues to complicate and undercut this strategy.
For Brussels, the existence of an unrecognised, Russian-aligned state that holds the keys to Moldova’s energy security is intolerable. It undermines the EU’s vision of an energy-secure, Western-oriented Moldova and keeps alive Russian influence in the region.
The EU claims that enlargement is a democratic process, guided by the will of the people. But Moldova’s recent political trajectory highlights the contradictions at the heart of this narrative. In referendums and elections, Moldova’s electorate has often displayed ambivalence or outright scepticism toward EU integration. Within Moldova itself, pro-Russian candidates and parties have consistently performed strongly, with voters wary of the austerity and instability that EU membership has brought elsewhere in Eastern Europe. By contrast, the Moldovan diaspora, many of whom work in EU states and are exposed daily to Western narratives, have often voted decisively in favour of pro-EU candidates. In the most recent election, diaspora votes tipped the balance in favour of the pro-EU camp, despite the domestic electorate leaning differently.
This reveals a fundamental contradiction: the EU justifies its expansion on the basis of ‘democratic choice’, yet the reality is a process shaped by emigration, economic coercion, and external pressure. Meanwhile, the people of Transnistria, who have consistently expressed their desire for independence or closer ties with Russia, are denied recognition altogether. Here, the EU’s selective understanding of sovereignty is laid bare: self-determination is permitted only when it aligns with Brussels’ strategic interests.
Transnistria is far more than a frozen conflict or a marginal separatist region; it is a structural challenge that exposes the contradictions of the European Union’s eastern expansion. By blocking Moldova’s accession, maintaining energy leverage, and preserving a Soviet-era industrial and political strucutre, the PMR highlights the limits of EU power and the selective application of democratic principles. For Brussels, the thorn in its side highlights the fractures beneath the surface of Europe’s integration project and that true sovereignty and local agency continue to resist external imposition.
Cole Thomson is a member of the Young Communist League of Britain
