Comments by "" (@GWNorth-db8vn) on "Russia Threatens To Launch Special Military Operation in Moldova | Breaking News With The Enforcer" video.

Transnistria was in an interesting spot during the Cold War. It was the edge of the actual Soviet Union with a buffer zone of virtual puppets between it and NATO. It's also a thin strip of land at the south end of the Carpathian mountains, and the only real passage between East and West until the Great European Plain in the north of the continent. The Soviets stored their equipment and supplies there in massive amounts, enough to support their entire southern front in a hot war. Not much of it has gone anywhere, and that might be what Russia's counting on. It's also been marked on NATO targeting maps for fifty years.
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@puraLusa - Russia wants it to feel secure. It's the only chokepoint between Moscow and southern Europe. They don't need it for anything.
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The Belarusian coup thing seems like the old commie revolution strategy turned against them. If you want to take over a country, you force the government to react to you by cracking down and repressing large numbers of people. This makes them angry, and they join the revolution. When enough people are against the government, you storm the government buildings and declare yourself the new government. Russia recognizes you and sends forces to help you hold the territory. The Soviets and Cubans did this everywhere.
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@us - Russians still act like commies in a lot of ways. It it's on the books, it's ready for service. Money is budgeted for maintenance and it disappears a bit at a time as everyone reports to his superior that all norms have been met and no one actually does anything. The people on top pay wages to people who don't exist, the next step down get kickbacks from the people who are supposed to do the work, and they sell any supplies they receive to do it to pay off their boss. When it becomes disastrously obvious that required materiel no longer exists, one person from each rank up to major gets arrested and charged with corruption. The colonel is safe because he has an ally among the generals. He wouldn't be a colonel if he weren't greasing a few palms higher up.
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@Newfoundlander1916 - It's what the Russians like to call "borderlands". It was part of the country, but the people were still slightly suspicious foreigners. Moldova was an internal buffer strip, and Transnistria would have been the chokepoint for either side in an East-West battle. The Soviets ethnically cleansed the people in the borderlands and replaced them with ethnic Russians loyal to the Rodina. The Moldovans weren't replaced as so many were because the land was meant to be the glacis to protect the entire country from the south western flank, and the local population wouldn't be much help or hindrance in a battle of that scale. They cared about what the people in Ukraine would do and their loyalty because it was an important agricultural/industrial area and valuable in its own right, not simply because of its location. That's why so many genocides and mass deportations gave it so many areas with majority Russian populations. Straight out of Machiavelli. The USSR was simply the Tsarist empire renamed, and the subject peoples weren't treated as equal citizens, all propaganda to the contrary.
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