MOLDOVA Sweden joined NATO. We did so because we understand, better than most, what it means to live next to a neighbor that treats your sovereignty as a negotiable concept. That experience shapes how I look at Transnistria – and why I believe Europe is dangerously close to misreading both the threat and its own responsibility toward it.
The dominant narrative calls Transnistria a “frozen conflict.” The label is comforting. Frozen things don’t move. They don’t threaten. They wait. But on 15 May 2026, Vladimir Putin signed a presidential decree establishing an expedited pathway to Russian citizenship for residents of Transnistria – waiving mandatory residency, language proficiency, and civic testing requirements. Nothing about that move is frozen. It is deliberate, legally codified, and consistent with a pattern Moscow has applied before.
The precedent is precise. On 24 April 2019, Presidential Decree No. 183 introduced exactly the same mechanism for residents of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine – the same waived requirements, the same legal architecture. We know how that chapter ended. By 2026, an estimated 220,000 residents of Transnistria – approximately half the region’s population – already hold Russian passports, the result of two decades of parallel investment: citizenship grants, social payments, educational quotas, economic ties, and a continuous military presence under the Russian Operational Group. President Zelensky described the new decree plainly: it is Russia’s way of staking a territorial claim. He is right. And Europe should listen – not as a spectator, but as a party with obligations it has not yet fully honored.
What makes the May 2026 decree more than a migration measure is what accompanied it. Amendments passed in parallel in Moscow expanded the legal grounds for deploying Russian armed forces abroad to protect Russian citizens – including against actions by foreign or international judicial bodies. Passportization and force projection are being connected by explicit legal architecture. Europe knows this script. The question is whether it will act before the next act begins.
The Instrument, Not the Obstacle – and the Complicity That Sustained It
There is a tendency in Western policy circles to treat Transnistria primarily as a complication for Moldova’s EU integration path. That framing gets the causality backwards. The conflict is not an obstacle to stability – it is the instrument of instability. Russia created it, weaponized it, and has sustained it at minimum cost and maximum leverage for over three decades.
But Russia has not been the only party with an interest in keeping it unresolved. This is the uncomfortable truth that a serious collective strategy must confront.
For decades, Transnistria’s grey-zone status served a remarkably broad coalition of interests – many of them far closer to home than Moscow. Pre-2022 Ukrainian networks exploited the region’s porous borders for arms flows, stolen vehicles, and contraband. Oligarchic structures within Moldova itself found the enclave’s unregulated economy a convenient parallel channel, beyond the reach of Chișinău’s courts and the EU’s compliance frameworks. And certain European actors – in finance, logistics, and trade – were not entirely displeased by a jurisdiction that asked no questions. Everyone denounced the status quo in public. Enough of them benefited from it in private to ensure it was never seriously dismantled.
This is not moral equivalence with Russia. But it is a call for collective honesty: the persistence of this conflict has had more beneficiaries than Moscow alone. Any resolution strategy that ignores this fact will fail – not because Russia will resist it, but because too many other actors will find quiet reasons to obstruct it.
Shared Responsibility Means Shared Action
The question before the European Union, the Republic of Moldova, and their strategic partners is not whether they recognize the pattern. It is whether they are prepared to act on that recognition – together, and with the honesty that collective action requires.
That means the EU must apply sanctions coherence specifically and consistently to Transnistrian enablers – including where those enablers operate through European financial and logistical networks. Instruments exist. Political will has not. If European actors have benefited from Transnistria’s grey-zone economy – and the evidence suggests some have – closing that enclave requires closing those channels too. Selective pressure that targets only Russian actors while leaving adjacent networks intact is not a strategy. It is merely optics.
It means Moldova itself – its institutions, its political class, its civil society – must complete the difficult work of closing the channels through which the enclave’s grey economy has historically connected to the Moldovan mainstream. EU accession is not only a geopolitical aspiration; it is the structural lever that makes this internal reform both necessary and possible. The economic case is increasingly clear: since 2025, Transnistria’s economy has deteriorated sharply – the loss of subsidized Russian gas, factory closures, extended emergency economic regimes, pressure on pension and wage payments. The region’s viability outside reintegration is diminishing. Moldova’s convergence fund and the withdrawal of legacy privileges are accelerating that calculus.
It means Ukraine, Romania, and NATO partners must treat the Transnistrian question not as someone else’s problem but as a node in a shared security architecture. And it means the United States must sustain engagement beyond crisis moments. As long as Ukraine continues to resist Russian force projection westward toward Odesa, a narrow but real window exists for coordinated pressure. Waiting for the conflict to “thaw naturally” means waiting for the strategic environment to deteriorate.
The Population Is Already Choosing
The people living in Transnistria are not the enemy of this strategy. They are its potential constituency – and they are already signaling their direction.
Since February 2022, the trend has moved clearly toward Moldovan citizenship: it provides visa-free access to the EU and access to European financial institutions – practical assets that a Russian passport – the passport of a state that has been designated by the European Parliament, PACE, and the NATO Parliamentary Assembly as a sponsor of terrorism – cannot offer. Many residents already hold multiple documents simultaneously: Moldovan for travel and economic access, Russian for legacy administrative ties, Transnistrian for internal status. Increasingly, they also cross to the right bank for work, higher wages, healthcare, and social services. The assertion that right-bank Moldova has become more financially and socially attractive – despite its own economic difficulties – is no longer a projection. It is an observable reality.
Putin’s passportization drive is, in part, a response to precisely this drift – an attempt to re-anchor a population that is already turning away. The residents of Transnistria have watched, in real time and for over four years, what Russian “protection” produces: cities destroyed, populations displaced, entire Russian-speaking regions – the very communities Moscow claimed to defend – reduced to rubble. Bombs and missiles did not check passports. European mobility, economic access, and a credible accession path are not soft tools. They are the most powerful counter-offer available.
Sweden’s Stake – and What It Demands of Us
As a member of the Parliamentary Friendship Group for Moldova in the Swedish Riksdag – one of the largest such friendship groups ever formed in the Swedish parliament, with 25 members from six parties – I speak not as an outside observer but as a representative of a country that has made a concrete political bet on Moldova’s future.
That engagement has produced measurable results. Sweden and its Nordic partners channelled nearly €200 million to Moldova over a two-year period – equivalent to 1.3% of the country’s GDP. The “FromAid2Trade” strategy, developed by Moldova’s Ambassador Liliana Gutan and presented directly to Swedish authorities and the Riksdag, reframed Moldova’s positioning from aid recipient to resilient trading partner on the EU integration path. Sweden became the second-largest EU importer of Moldovan organic apples. Over 100 Moldovan officials and economic agents participated in Swedish trade and governance programmes through the National Board of Trade Sweden and the Folke Bernadotte Academy.
That investment was not charity. It was a strategic bet – one that a Transnistria permanently held in grey-zone status directly undermines. Every euro invested in Moldovan institutional reform is devalued as long as a fifth of the country’s territory operates outside the rule of law, used to circumvent sanctions, launder influence, and sustain Russian leverage.
Sweden’s stake in this outcome is the reason we must also be willing to demand more – of ourselves and of our partners. Solidarity with Moldova is not only about resources. It is about the willingness to name what has sustained this conflict and to act accordingly.
A Call for Collective Resolve
Romania, Ukraine, the EU, NATO partners (including the United States) all have equities here. What has been missing is not awareness but sustained, structured commitment – a proactive political strategy built around the window of opportunity that Ukraine’s resistance has created, and organized around a shared acknowledgment of collective responsibility.
Dismantling Transnistria as a security threat means dismantling the grey-zone economy and the political complicities that kept it alive – across borders, and including our own. It means the EU applying to its own networks the same standards it demands of others. It means Moldova consolidating the political courage to break with the structures that profited from ambiguity. It means all of us treating this not as a residual problem from the 1990s but as an active threat that we have collectively under-addressed.
Europe has too long treated frozen conflicts as facts of geography. They are not. They are facts of political will – Russia’s will to sustain them, and our will, or lack thereof, to dismantle them. But they are also facts of political convenience – one whose costs have now grown too large to defer.
Sweden chose not to be a bystander to its own security. The collective “we” – the EU, Moldova, and our strategic partners – must now make the same choice. The question is whether we have the resolve to use it.
BJÖRN SÖDER
Member of the Swedish Riksdag, Head of the Swedish Delegation to the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, Member of the Swedish Delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, and Member of the Parliamentary Friendship Group for Moldova.
