A Gas Cutoff Sends Shivers Through a Russian-Backed Breakaway Region

The shop used to sell flowers and gardening gear to visitors from just down the road, where a tiny breakaway region of Moldova has for more than 30 years stood defiantly apart, with support from Russian troops.

Since the halt of gas from Russia on New Year’s Day, however, the store has been selling mostly electric heaters to freezing residents of Transnistria, the self-declared microstate in eastern Moldova.

The cheaper models have already sold out, a saleswoman said, but higher-end heaters are selling fast, as 350,000 inhabitants of Transnistria endure an energy crisis that has shut down factories, left Soviet-era apartment blocks without heating and hot water and raised questions about the survival of their go-it-alone, Russian-speaking enclave.

The situation is so bad that the region’s president, Vadim Krasnoselsky — who leads an entity unrecognized by all other countries, including Russia — tried to reassure his people on Thursday: “We will not allow a societal collapse.”

“It is difficult,” Mr. Krasnoselsky said, enumerating thousands of businesses, schools, farms and homes that were struggling without heat. Citizens had shown “great responsibility,” he said, by “going out into the forest to collect dead wood” to burn at home.

The crisis began on Jan. 1, when Russia’s energy giant Gazprom stopped pumping natural gas through Ukraine, its remaining major export route to Europe, after Ukraine refused to a renew a five-year gas transit deal.

In most places once dependent on Russian gas, like Hungary, the shutdown’s consequences were softened by alternative suppliers from the West. But Transnistria, a tiny sliver of territory built on unswerving loyalty to Russia, faces an existential crisis.

Dorin Recean, the prime minister of Moldova, which has long demanded that the region give up its claims of statehood, accused Russia of inducing an “impending humanitarian crisis.”

“By jeopardizing the future of the protectorate that it has backed for three decades in an effort to destabilize Moldova, Russia is revealing the inevitable outcome for all its allies — betrayal and isolation,” Mr. Recean said on Friday.

Distracted by the war in Ukraine and more cautious about investing resources, Russia has shown an increased willingness recently to cut its losses, most notably in Syria, where it stood on the sidelines last month as rebels toppled Moscow’s closest ally in the Middle East.

Alexandru Flenchea, a former deputy prime minister of Moldova who was responsible for trying to reintegrate Transnistria, said that Russia was not yet ready to abandon the region, valuing its use for exerting military and political pressure over Moldova.

Russia’s desire for leverage, Mr. Flenchea said, grew more acute in October when Moldovan voters narrowly endorsed changing the Constitution to lock the country’s exit from Moscow’s sphere of influence, aligning more closely with the West.

But, Mr. Flenchea added, Russia’s readiness to let Transnistria freeze without gas or its major source of revenue — the sale of electricity to Moldova from a gas-powered power station — suggested that the region was in serious trouble.

“The whole model in Transnistria relies on free Russian gas. No free Russian gas, the whole thing collapses,” he said. “But I don’t think Russia will let this happen soon. It still needs them.”

Others see Transnistria’s travails less as a sign of Russian retreat than of its determination to divert Moldova from its pro-European course.

Also cut off from Russian gas, Moldova has over the past week shifted to more expensive alternatives, including electricity from Romania. This saved Moldova from going cold but doubled the price of electricity for consumers, which could carry a heavy political price for the pro-Western government in elections this year.

Russia’s goal, said Vladislav Kulminski, a former government official now with the Institute for Strategic Initiatives, a Moldovan research group, “is to keep us in a gray zone by getting an election result that will bring to power a different government.”

”Everything has been thrown up in the air,” he said. “We don’t know what shape it will take when all the pieces fall to the ground.”

A retro police state with its own currency and passports — and a successful soccer team financed by local tycoons — Transnistria has an expansive security service, reinforced by Russians, and it has worked hard to control what people hear about.

Transnistria’s media outlets, echoing Russian talking points, blame Ukraine, the United States and Moldova’s government for the gas cutoff. Whispers that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia might also be to blame are taboo.

The media blitz seems to be working.

“Putin would never abandon us,” said Grigory Kravatenko, a resident of Bender, an industrial town bordering Moldovan-controlled territory.

Asked whether Transnistria might be better off less aligned with Moscow, he added: “We are not for Russia. We are not for Moldova. We are not for Ukraine. We are for ourselves and we are all suffering.”

Cooking stoves kept working for a while after the Jan. 1 cutoff, thanks to gas that was still in the pipes. But now they, too, are spluttering.

A Transnistria resident who gave only her first name, Yulia, walking on Friday with her infant daughter down an abandoned railway track, said she was sure that Russia would soon come to the rescue. “Of course they won’t let us die,” she said.

Victor Ceban, an Orthodox Christian priest responsible for parishes along the zigzagging border, said he avoided talking about who was responsible. “Whatever you say to one person you become somebody else’s enemy,” he said.

In some places, the border is marked with concrete barriers manned by Russians in fatigues. But it is so unclear in other places that it is easy to stray into Transnistria. Waved through a checkpoint this past week by a soldier with a Russian flag on his shoulder, journalists asked people at a bus stop if they knew of Transnistria’s problems.

“Of course we do. This is Transnistria,” an elderly woman said.

Mr. Ceban, the priest, walking from home to home on Friday through the Moldovan-controlled village of Varnita, offered blessings ahead of Orthodox Christmas and prayers that his mostly geriatric flock would not suffer long without heat.

When Transnistria, the most prosperous part of Moldova when both were part of the Soviet Union, first broke away to form a renegade state in the early 1990s, the region boasted it would become a Russian-speaking version of Switzerland — a proudly independent haven from the turmoil gripping Moldova, which was deeply impoverished.

The breakaway region became a template for what has since been a drive by Russia to keep its influence in former Soviet lands by supporting separatists: first in Moldova, then in Georgia and in eastern Ukraine. In all three countries, local militants backed by Russian muscle declared their own microstates.

The deployment of Russia troops in Transnistria, originally as peacekeepers but still there decades after the fighting stopped, ensured that Moldova could never retake the territory by force and doomed diplomatic efforts.

Just as important to Transnistria’s survival, however, has been Russian gas, provided virtually free to keep a steel plant and other industries working — and to fuel the power station selling electricity to Moldova.

Moldova’s secretary of state for energy, Constantin Borosan, said that, before the current crisis, electricity generated in Transnistria had met about three-quarters of his country’s demand and provided about half of the separatist region’s budget.

“These people lived on subsidized gas from Russia,” he said. “Now it looks as if Russia has abandoned them.” He noted that Gazprom had ignored suggestions from Moldova that it could, using an alternate export route under the Black Sea, still get gas to Transnistria — if the Kremlin wanted.

“I don’t know what is going on in the head of Putin,” he said.

Whatever Russia’s intentions, it is causing widespread pain not only in Transnistria, but also to residents of Moldovan-controlled territory.

Alexandru Nichitenco, the mayor of Varnita, a village surrounded by Transnistria and dependent on its energy, said that most of its 5,100 inhabitants could no longer heat their homes. They faced disaster, he said, especially if the usual winter temperatures — typically many degrees below freezing — grip the country.

He said he did not blame Transnistria: “They can’t do anything. Moscow controls everything over there.”

Veronica Ostap, a mother in Varnita struggling to keep her family fed without a working stove, said she was waiting for her pay next week to buy an electric kettle. She was keeping one room warm with an electric heater so that her three young boys can sleep.

A Baptist Christian, she thanked God for keeping the temperature around zero, at least during the day. “The Lord is trying to help us,” she said.

Ruxanda Spatari contributed reporting from Chisinau, Moldova, and Nataliya Vasilyeva from Berlin.