Transnistria’s leader, Vadim Krasnoselsky, said the Moldovan breakaway region will sue the Chisinau authorities for alleged crimes committed in the Dniester War in 1992, but did not say which court he intends to address.
Vadim Krasnoselsky told foreign diplomats on Tuesday evening that the breakaway region wants to launch an international lawsuit over “the aggression against the people of Transnistria”.
He said that Transnistria will ask for compensation.
Krasnoselsky argued that during the Dniester armed conflict between separatists and government forces in 1992, the Moldovan army committed “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity”.
He cited the case of the so-called ‘Ilascu Group’, four Moldovan soldiers who have been detained in Transnistrian prisons for many years.
“Those who shot Nikolay Ostapenko [a Transnistrian clerk] received state awards from Moldova. They were elected in absentia to the parliaments of Moldova and Romania,” said Krasnoselky.
However Krasnoselsky did not say which international court Transnistria intends to address with its claim.
He also announced at the meeting with the foreign diplomats that he has asked Moldovan President Igor Dodon to offer a legal and political appreciation of the 1992 armed conflict, which he said would be a step towards in “normalising Moldovan-Transnistrian relations”.
Dodon has not responded so far.
In January 2018, Moldova’s speaker of parliament, Andrian Candu, talked about the possibility that Moldova could sue Russia and ask for compensation due to the damage sustained by about 1,500 Russian soldiers stationed in the breakaway region of Transnistria.
On March 2, 1992, when Moldova was officially accepted as a member of the United Nations, a group of paramilitary Transnistrian forces, together with Russian Cossacks, mercenaries and members of the former Soviet 14th Army attacked a police station in the city of Dubasari.
Some Moldovan policemen were killed, and others were taken prisoner.
The head of the so-called ‘Ilascu Group’, Ilie Ilascu, and five of his colleagues were taken from their homes and imprisoned the same night over accusations that were responsible for “war crimes and terrorism”.
Ilascu was one of the Moldovan soldiers who fought in the Dniester War.
Official data says that during the war, about 280 people died and 300 seriously wounded, but experts believe that the conflict left more than 1,000 dead and over 1,500 wounded.
The Dnister War took place from March to July 1992 and became a ‘frozen conflict’ after Moldova and the Russian Federation signed a convention on the principles of peaceful settlement of the armed conflict on July 21, 1992.