Russia has intensified its contacts with the political elites of Gagauzia against the backdrop of the prolonged crisis regarding the organization of elections for the Popular Assembly of the autonomy. According to some sources, the visit to Comrat of the non-grata ambassador of the Russian Federation to Chisinau, Oleg Ozerov, and his meetings with representatives of the local leadership were perceived in Comrat as a signal of Moscow’s dissatisfaction with the agreements reached between Chisinau and Comrat regarding the electoral process.
Sources close to the Disinfo discussions claim that the Kremlin views attempts to normalize relations between the central authorities and autonomy as a threat to its own influence in the region. During the meetings, the same sources maintain, the Russian side would have conveyed that Chisinau’s direction of distancing from the CIS and approaching the European Union does not correspond to the interests of Gagauzia, and the agreed compromises regarding the elections are not a priority for Moscow.
Ozerov’s visit took place a few days after the launch of the simplified procedure for granting Russian citizenship to the inhabitants of the Transnistrian region by the Russian Federation’s embassy. In parallel, Ozerov publicly referred to the recently adopted mechanism in Moscow regarding the possibility of using armed forces to protect Russian citizens abroad.
In this context, Moscow’s contacts with the Gagauz elites are seen in Chisinau as an attempt to demonstrate the maintenance of influence over a part of the regional political class.
According to sources, Moscow is thus trying to show that it can influence the pace and configuration of the electoral process in autonomy through political actors close to the Kremlin. The actions of the Russian Federation are evaluated by our sources in Chisinau as an attempt to simultaneously amplify pressure on the Transnistrian and Gagauz direction.
The interlocutors also claim that, at the end of April, the acting president of the Popular Assembly of Gagauzia, Nicolai Ormanji, visited the embassies of Belarus and the Russian Federation in Chisinau, where he allegedly had consultations regarding the situation in the autonomy. The organization of these contacts would have been facilitated by the co-chairman of the Joint Control Commission on behalf of Russia, Airat Abdullin, a worker at the embassy in Chisinau. After these meetings, the process of coordinating mechanisms regarding the organization of elections in the APG would have visibly begun to stall.
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