Philip Remler joins Stewart to unpack the situation in Moldova and its relationship to the war in Ukraine.
Philip Remler is a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Prior to joining Carnegie, he served at the U.S. Department of State and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). His overseas posts included Ankara, Baku, Chişinău, Grozny, Iraqi Kurdistan, Moscow, and Tbilisi. His career included an extended involvement with the conflicts in the former Soviet Union and in participating in OSCE- and UN-led efforts to mediate them, including the Abkhazia, Chechnya, Nagornyy Karabakh, South Ossetia, and Transdniestria conflicts. He also authored Chained to the Caucasus: Peacemaking in Karabakh, 1987-2012 (International Peace Institute, 2016).
Philip Remler joins Stewart to unpack the situation in Moldova and its relationship to the war in Ukraine.
Russia has raised the prospect of using Transdniestria to open a second front against Ukraine and to pressure Moldova.
Despite relaxed relations between Moldova and Transdniestria, Russia has recently raised the alarm the frozen conflict might turn hot. Is it a serious threat or just a manufactured crisis?
Over the past decade, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe has been returning to its origins as a Cold War–era conference—a forum where states and blocs can air their frictions and hostilities. If the OSCE’s participating States want it to remain an organization, not a conference, they must take action to secure its executive autonomy.
As the battle between Armenia and Azerbaijan heats up, Russia struggles to contend with a vastly more complicated landscape in the South Caucasus.
Putin’s foreign policy goal has been Russia’s return as a world power. The UN is a positive platform for this, but Russia’s rejection of external norms has paralyzed the institution.
The playbook that Russia relied on to deal with European security institutions and their firm linkage of hard security to human rights no longer works—leaving Russia isolated.
Misunderstandings surrounding the Meseberg Memorandum on Transdniestria and EU-Russian security cooperation testify to the difficulties of Russian-Western communication.