Moldova

From the principality of Stephen the Great to a partitioned borderland on the road to Europe.

Moldova's history is that of a borderland repeatedly divided between empires. A principality founded in the fourteenth century reached its golden age under Stephen the Great, who held off the Ottomans, Hungarians and Poles before Moldavia settled into long centuries of Ottoman vassalage and the venal rule of Phanariot Greek princes. In 1812 the Russian Empire seized the eastern half of the principality, Bessarabia, between the Prut and the Dniester, beginning more than a century of Russian and then Soviet rule broken only by a brief union with Romania between 1918 and 1940. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact delivered Bessarabia to Stalin in 1940, who forged the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic and visited deportations and a man-made famine upon it. Independence came on 27 August 1991, but war soon broke out in the Russian-backed breakaway region of Transnistria, where Russian troops remain to this day, while the Gagauz minority secured autonomy by negotiation. Moldova was granted European Union candidate status in June 2022 and opened accession negotiations in 2024.