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Transnistria (Socor 1992a, 8). Having been trained and armed by the locally based Fourteenth
Army, Transnistrian Russian paramilitary units consolidated their strongholds in the heavily
Russian cities, and then took over police stations, administrative organs and mass media in towns
and villages throughout the East Bank region. This included the predominantly ethnic Moldovan
rural areas. Moldovan police and interior ministry units did not strongly resist until Transnistrian
forces crossed the Dniester to take Bendery on the west bank. But supply and direct participation
in the fighting was always forthcoming as needed from the Fourteenth Army, guaranteeing
Transnistrian victory. Transnistria also controlled the most important transport and energy links
from Moldova to the Soviet successor states, and no adequate alternative supply routes could
easily be developed in the short run. Recognizing the inevitable, the Moldovan government
agreed to a cease-fire in July 1992. This left the local ethnic Russian elite entrenched in
Transnistria, and sanctioned the continued presence of Russian forces as “peacekeepers.” A
similar series of Russian-backed local rebellions put Gagauz forces in control of their main
regions of settlement in the South.
Moldovan President Mircea Snegur (elected December 1991) and the ruling Agrarian
Democrats made repeated efforts to end the secessionist movements, offering all manner of
concessions short of independence. This worked with the Gagauz, who in 1994 agreed to
Moldovan sovereignty in exchange for constitutional guarantees of political and cultural
autonomy and of continued Moldovan independence vis-a-vis Romania. The Transnistrian
Russians, by contrast, long continued to demand some kind of state sovereignty, so no settlement
has been possible. Snegur and the Agrarian Democrats, and their various center and center-left
successors, have continued to form the controlling pivot of Moldovan politics. They always had
it in their power to restore some kind of neo-communist regime with the support of the ethnic
Convention