August 2, 2025
The author, Artem Balabaka — a pseudonym for security reasons — is a Ukrainian left-wing journalist and peace activist in exile since 2018 from the repressive neo-Nazi regime currently governing Kiev.
Many who live in the region of the years-long U.S./NATO proxy war with Russia in Ukraine are closely watching events in Moldova’s Autonomous Territorial Unit of Gagauzia with alarm. Most people in the U.S. have never heard of Gagauzia, whose population is about 140,000, where 97% of voters voted for a socialist in Moldova’s 2024 presidential elections.
On Aug. 5, Gagauzia’s elected governor (or bashkan), Eugenia Gutsul, is scheduled to be sentenced by a Moldovan court. The sentencing follows what amounts to a political frame-up on bogus allegations of abetting Russian financing of Gagauzian-supported candidates. Working-class forces in Gagauzia, in Moldava and in the region are attempting to organize solidarity with Gutsul on Aug. 5.
In the war-ravaged region, the government’s case against Gutsul is seen as a provocation against Russia. This provocation could also raise natural and legitimate demands by the autonomous region to secede from Moldova. Such demands might be used as a pretext for NATO to make an imperialist intervention behind familiar far-right demands to “stop the separatists.”
Gagauzian autonomy
During the 1992 breakup of the USSR, people who did not support the exit of Moldova from the USSR formed The Republic of Gagauzia. The founders wanted to save the socialist system and the unity of the other republics of the Soviet Union. However, unlike Transnistria, another breakaway region of the Moldovan Republic bordering Ukraine, Gagauzia returned to Moldova as an autonomous region in 1994 when Moldovans began electing a series of leaderships under the Communist and Socialist Parties of Moldova.
Eugenia Gustul, elected governor of Gagauzia, then arrested and prosecuted by Moldavia’s rightist regime, here in court on March 28, 2025.
Despite coup attempts and rightwing-sponsored protests, the left held sway in Moldova until 2020. Then forces aligned with U.S. imperialism and NATO succeeded in putting Maia Sandu, a graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and advisor to the executive director of the World Bank, into the Moldovan presidency. Sandu won by utilizing the votes and thuggery of ultraright Moldovan-Romanian dual citizens living in other European countries.
Sandu’s campaign was largely funded by the International Republican Institute in Washington and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Berlin, instruments of U.S. and German imperialism, respectively.
Sandu immediately began a program of propaganda similar to the Ukrainian model used next door. Her rhetoric was anti-communist attacks on the predominant left forces in the republic and against the autonomy of ethnic minorities within Moldova, like the largely Turkish population of Gagauzia. Sandu pursued rapprochement with the European Union, including the far-right government of neighboring Romania, the Joe Biden administration in the U.S. and NATO, calling Vladimir Putin and Russia “enemies.” She has moved to have Moldova join the European Union and floated the idea of future NATO membership for Moldova.
In 2023 the people of Gagauzia soundly rejected this pro-imperialist program when they elected a governor who defends autonomy and supports peaceful relations with Russia, Eugenia Gutsul. Again in October 2024 some 97% of Gagauzians voted for the leader of the Party of Socialists of the Republic of Moldova, Alexandr Stoianoglo, a former state attorney of Gagauzia.
Stoianoglo received more votes than Sandu both inside Moldova (52%) and in autonomous Gagauzia, where his support amounted to a landslide. Sandu’s razor-edge “win” was due to the votes by dual citizens living in other EU countries, alleged fraud and strong-arm tactics against opponents and journalists.
With such a thin base, Sandu has used force to eliminate her opponents on the left. She targeted the popular Bashkan [Governor] Gutsul with phony frame-up charges of essentially bribing voters with Russian money. A mother of two young children, although not herself a socialist, Gutsul is threatened by prosecutors with nine years in prison. These threats have aroused demonstrations in her support throughout the region.
Sandu has also orchestrated large cuts to health care, education and other social services from Gagauzia’s meager budget serving the mostly poor population, in punishment to the majority working-class, rural and peasant residents’ votes for socialists and their desires for peace. In addition, Sandu’s ruling grouping has called for outlawing communist and socialist parties and an end to Gagauzia’s autonomous, semi-sovereign status.
The anti-communist ‘Ukrainization’ of the region
Sandu is following her imperialist sponsors’ playbook, which was established and practiced in Ukraine. A decade ago, at the green light of the U.S. State Department and U.S. envoy to Ukraine Victoria Nuland — a former U.S. Ambassador to NATO — the Kiev regime banned all left organizations. The Communist Party, Socialist Party, Progressive Socialist Party, Communist Party of Workers and Peasants, Union of Left Forces, Left Opposition, New Socialism and Borotba [Struggle] were all banned. There is literally no legal left-wing party in Ukraine.
Decisive actions to suppress both separatism and aspirations for any autonomy have been Ukraine and NATO’s parallel tactic against the anti-fascist People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk since 2014. Before 2022, these “separatist” regions of Donbass that had been parts of Ukraine suffered over 14,000 killed by Ukrainian neo-Nazi forces when the people of the republics refused to be governed by the Maidan coup that drew its inspiration from Stepan Bandera’s genocidal fascist forces of the World War II era.
Current President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky’s successes in the struggle for the approval of the West have inspired other far-right governments of countries of the former Soviet Union to also solve such problems by force. A recent example is the Azerbaijan regime, which used maximum military force against the Armenian enclave and practically expelled the Armenian population from Nagorno-Karabakh.
Moldova is no exception. Moldova’s conflict with the Gagauz autonomous region is growing sharper, as is its conflict with the separatists in Transnistria [another region in Moldova]. In Chisinau, Moldova, as in Bucharest, Romania, there are increasing calls to put the separatists in their place using “Ukrainian methods.”
An attack on Transnistria is also being discussed in Kiev — the Ukrainian military hopes to destroy the Russia-supported military group there, thereby dealing Moscow a serious military blow. And if the escalation in Gagauzia threatens to draw Turkey into the conflict, then the conflict over Transnistria will push the Kremlin to take emergency measures — meaning an attempt to cut a corridor to Transnistria as quickly as possible, using the harshest of military tools.
Czech anti-communism
While in the early 2000s (during the presidency of Viktor Yushchenko in Ukraine), Kiev’s statements about a possible ban on the Communist Party of Ukraine were met with sharp criticism from the European Parliament, the recent ban on the Communist Party in the respectable Czech Republic provoked no complaints from Brussels.
The example of the Czech Republic, which banned the Communist Party and all “communist propaganda” as of July 25, 2025, clearly demonstrates how “Ukrainization” is spreading to neighboring countries. And the Czech Republic is not alone. Post-Soviet countries are becoming “Ukrainianized” much more rapidly — news from Ukraine is perceived not as something happening abroad but as almost in their own territory.
The return of this Cold War mentality is not only about the desire of EU nations to arm but also about ideology, and especially the struggle against the left. After all, Europe, which is no longer afraid of becoming a toy in the conflict between the U.S. and Russia, behaves more aggressively in military games. So, changes will inevitably affect ideological issues as well. The ideology of “Drang nach Osten” [19th and 20th century German nationalist intent to expand Germany into Slavic territories of central and eastern Europe] is inextricably linked to anti-communism.
Romanian ultra-nationalism
Nowhere has the Cold War returned with more of a vengeance than in Romania. For a decade there, the National Liberals, in alliance with the ultra-nationalistic Greater Romania party, undermined the center-left government with mass protests. As in Moldova, the diaspora who came to overthrow the Romanian social-democratic government led by Sorin Grindeanu became the striking force behind the protests. It was citizens from the EU diaspora who raised the level of violence by using the practice of tying police officers to trees with shrink wrap. In 2022 a similar practice was used during the state-provoked pogroms directed at pro-Russian Ukrainians.
Earlier this year, after the resignation of President Klaus Iohannes (originally a representative of the Democratic Forum of Germans in Romania but who later defected to the National Liberals), another National Liberal Party (NLP) representative, Ilie Bolojan, became acting president. The National Liberals are the oldest party in Romania. The NLP was banned in 1945 for organizing armed pro-monarchist resistance to socialist construction. Following the 1989 counter-revolutionary coup, legality was restored to the NLP.
The new National Liberals’ first leader was Radu Ciuceanu, ideologue of the 1997 coup, with the blood of the Ceausescu family on his hands. The NLP positions itself as a right-conservative party and is even a member of the European People’s Party alliance, but its entire history shows that the NLP masks its radical anti-communism as conservatism.
In 2024, Bolojan lost the election to another right-wing politician, Călin Georgescu. Unlike the NLP, independent candidate Georgescu represented a different type of right-wing politician — focused on national sovereignty rather than on Brussels. During the election campaign, the world media quite rightly labeled Georgescu as a fascist, but forgot to add that he was opposed by a representative of a party allied to the fascist dictator Ion Antonescu during World War II!
Romania, a beacon for the current Moldovan state, is famous for the execution of its last communist leaders on Christmas day in 1989 by a swift decision of a kangaroo tribunal made from anti-communist protesters. In 2025 the National Liberal Party, which led the 1989 coup, returned to power in Romania, where communist ideology is also legally banned, despite an absolute majority of Romanians (67% by recent polls) having positive opinions about former communist leader Nikolai Ceausescu.
Many in Moldova’s ruling class, including Sandu, have dual Romanian citizenship and support the far-right’s call for “Anschluss” or annexation with Romania, already a member of the EU and NATO.
Gagauzians and the majority of the working class in Moldova remember how they were treated during WW II by occupying Romanian fascists and the contrast with the liberators of the Soviet Red Army.
‘Eugenia is our hero!’
Considering politics in this Moldova-Romania-Ukraine triangle (with Russia, Türkiye and the EU in the background), the most dangerous of the tendencies of the “Ukrainianization” of Moldova is a new round of a national “fight against separatism” in Gagauzia. Populated mainly by non-Romanian peoples, Gagauzians have been subjected to calls for ethnic cleansing — to send all non-Romanians “beyond the Dniester” and even “into the Dniester [river].” (Those slogans were extremely popular among Romanian nationalists in 1989-1990 during the overthrow of the socialist state.)
On Sept. 28, Moldova will hold its next parliamentary elections. As Maia Sandu’s popularity drops, the population’s anti-NATO and anti-EU sentiment rises. While Sandu is attempting to clear the election battlefield of opponents by frame-up trials and outlawing them, thousands of people regularly take to the streets to show their distrust of the current government. (YouTube, ‘Evgenia Is Our Hero!’ Crowds Rally for Gutsul against Sandu’s Crackdown, July 3, 2025) However, the government has begun using the most ruthless means of repression against those who dare to criticize Maia Sandu.
There has been much lip service in Washington and Brussels about “ending the war in Ukraine.” But what they are creating on the ground with their relentless attacks, often voiced in anti-communist rhetoric, are conditions for war spreading at new flashpoints like Gagauzia.
