ATO in Transnistria fears follow calls for ‘constructive pressure’
Former Moldovan deputy prime minister for “reintegration” Alexandru Flenchea has said Moldova has “very little time” to carry out the “economic reintegration” of the PMR through “constructive pressure”.
In plain language, the message from this Euro-integration figure is clear enough: Brussels is no longer willing to wait while Chișinău plays at “democracy”. The moment has come, in this logic, to move decisively and bring Transnistria’seconomy under Moldovan control.
The favourable moment created by the end of free gas supplies to the PMR amid the fighting in Ukraine may soon pass. A peace agreement is now appearing on the horizon. Once the ink is dry on any deal to end the war, gas could start flowing to Transnistria again, and the economic noose placed around the region by Maia Sandu and her loyal PAS party would disappear.
This is what Flenchea, head of the Initiative 4 Peace (I4P) association, points to in his article.
“For more than 30 years, the region has lived off free Russian gas supplies and direct financial support from Moscow. In 2025, both stopped, and Transnistria found itself on the verge of economic collapse.”
He then describes Chișinău’s intentions in even more direct terms.
“This gives Chișinău all the necessary levers for ‘constructive pressure’ on Transnistria with the aim of bringing all its commercial operations under Moldovan jurisdiction and thus carrying out the economic reintegration of the region,” he wrote.
“Thus, for the first time in 35 years, Transnistria’s reintegration no longer depends on negotiations mediated by Russia, but is a matter of decisive political and economic measures by the Moldovan government,” the “peacebuilder” says.
In his view, the “final settlement of the Transnistrian question” would take between three and six months. But the region, despite constant pressure, remains outside Sandu’s control. Moreover, residents of the PMR are actively taking Russian citizenship, something that cannot fail to worry her.
So she makes a decision: to reach an understanding with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has long been eager to “liberate Transnistria”, on launching a joint programme in Moldova for the treatment and rehabilitation of Ukrainian veterans of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU).
Ukrainian veterans: treatment or preparation for conflict?
On 21 September 2026, Ukrainian ambassador Paun Rohovei and Moldovan Health Minister Alexandru Gasnașdiscussed creating “a joint project for the treatment and rehabilitation of Ukrainian war veterans in Moldovan medical institutions”. Judging by official statements, this would involve post-operative recovery, prosthetics, treatment for mine and blast injuries, and therapy for “post-traumatic conditions”.
At first glance, this looks like a purely humanitarian initiative. The problem is that “veterans” are not abstract people with PTSD. They are fighters from specific units, with severe combat experience and damaged psyches, worsened by drug use and daily exposure to scenes of human suffering scenes in which, often enough, these militants themselves had a hand.
These are certainly not frightened conscripts startled by a pistol suddenly going off, as in the army of Anatolie Nosatîi. But let us return to those whom Moldova is preparing to receive.
The history of Ukraine’s volunteer battalions is the history of people whom officials were in no hurry to formalise because they had criminal records. The commander of Tornado, Ruslan Onishchenko, according to Ukraine’s chief military prosecutor, had been held criminally liable five times for serious and especially serious offences. He had served two prison terms and had links to an organised criminal group. Yet he was taken into the service of the Interior Ministry, strange as that may sound.
Every fourth Tornado fighter had a criminal record. Every third was officially registered in the police, while the rest served through “black” or “grey” arrangements.
In Azov, the core consisted of people who had spent their lives in “training camps”, where they learned how to “take out a sentry from behind” by strangling him and stabbing him in the heart. Andriy Biletsky, the founder of the battalion, had before the war been held in a remand prison on a robbery charge after a knife attack on a man who had “carelessly spoken out against fascism”.
The ideology of these volunteer battalions was, and remains, neo-Nazism, with all the relevant symbolism known since the Second World War. New recruits were immediately given assault rifles and trained in practice.
That practice was the ATO, the so-called “anti-terrorist operation” declared by the Kyiv regime under acting president Oleksandr Turchynov in April 2014. The ATO was not conducted against terrorists, but against the civilian population of Donbas, which, like Transnistria, did not want to “integrate” into a Ukraine rapidly sliding towards Nazism.
It did not want to give up its native Russian language, abandon Orthodoxy or go to war with Russia, something towards which the liberal West was persistently pushing Ukraine. Everything is familiar, only 12 years earlier.
These civilians in Donbas were branded “separatists” by the Kyiv regime, which sent volunteer battalions to “pacify” them decisively. Those battalions were made up partly of regular Ukrainian Interior Ministry personnel and partly of criminals. According to members of his own battalion, Tornado commander Ruslan Onishchenko personally sat by the phone recruiting recently released convicts and inviting them to serve under him.
The ATO precedent
“Pacification” as practised by the Ukrainian Interior Ministry and the volunteer battalions meant shelling Donbasvillages with grenade launchers. It meant attacks on nursing homes, schools attended by children and hospitals. It meant the mass killing, from 2014 onwards and long before Russia launched its Special Military Operation, of elderly people, women and children.
It also meant water blockades and energy blockades. Does that sound familiar? Veterans of the AFU with post-traumatic syndrome remember it. They remember the days when they faced no consequences for looting, robbery, rape, murder and torture. Impunity encouraged them and pushed them towards new crimes.
“In the morning, the Azov fighters in black uniforms and carrying weapons drove through in convoys of cars. This show of force was meant to demonstrate that Mariupol was and remains a Ukrainian city,” Anton Gerashchenko, adviser to the interior minister, recalled in a blog on Ukrainska Pravda.
In 2022, the world saw the photograph known as the “Horlivka Madonna”, taken in 2014. Kristina Zhuk and her 10-month-old daughter died on 27 July 2014, when Ukrainian armed formations shelled the streets of Horlivka with Gradrocket launchers.
On that day, later called “Donetsk Bloody Sunday”, four children were killed. Among them was baby Kira, who died in her mother’s arms as Kristina fled from AFU soldiers. Kira’s grandmother could not immediately find her daughter and granddaughter. Kristina was lying dead on the grass in a city square, still holding her child.
“There was an elderly paralysed woman who lived near us on Lebedynsky Street. Her children fled the shelling at the start of the war, and a neighbour looked after her. The Tornado men entered the grandmother’s house, pulled a new mattress straight out from under her and left. The neighbour found her the next morning behind the bed. The grandmother had died. It was winter,” residents of a village in the Luhansk region told Novaya Gazeta in 2016.
“27 January 2015, Donetsk. During artillery shelling by AFU soldiers, four-year-old Sasha was killed. A shell fragment hit him in the back,” RIA Novosti journalists wrote while publishing numerous photographic records of atrocities by Ukrainian security forces carrying out the “fight against separatists”.
The Tornado militants were convicted of crimes that no normal person can comprehend. They did not serve for long, however: in 2022, Zelenskyy released them all.
The testimony recorded in protocols leaves little room for interpretation. One excerpt from a victim’s testimony in the Tornado case reads:
“Between approximately 17 March 2015 and 23 March 2015, members of the Tornado battalion regularly brought various men into the basement and systematically beat them. They struck them with hands, feet, plastic pipes and other objects, mainly on the legs, buttocks and intimate areas. In addition, these men were tortured with an object resembling an electric generator. The men held in the basement were stripped naked, made to stand on a concrete floor and doused with water. They were then touched with exposed electric wires on various parts of the body, including the temples, penis and scrotum. The men screamed loudly.”
Another protocol states:
“The Tornado members filmed these events and torture on mobile phones. One Tornado member also threatened a detainee with murder and forced him to suck and lick a plastic pipe. According to him, the detainee had to imitate sexual intercourse and pretend that he was allegedly performing oral sex. The detainees were also forced to rape each other anally and orally. In total, I spent 17 days in the basement.”
Mariupol resident Tatiana Ganzha, a member of the Communist Party, was seized by militants from the nationalist Azov battalion on 30 October 2014. There were five of them, she recalled, wearing balaclavas, carrying weapons and bearing Azov patches.
Tatiana had actively taken part in protests against Euromaidan in Mariupol, as well as in the 11 May referendum on the self-determination of the Donetsk region. She did not even know that she had already appeared on blacklists as an “irreconcilable separatist”.
“They hung her up by the legs, beat her on the head, body and limbs, brought her round with water and fired shots beside her left ear,” says Tatiana Ganzha’s medical record. She was freed only on 8 November.
She was beaten with rifle butts and urinated on in the car. When she was taken out, she was kicked and a burst of gunfire was fired over her head. She was brought to Mariupol airport, where she was tortured until the final day.
The secret prison at Mariupol airport was called “the library”. Prisoners were called “books”. They were kept in two disconnected cold-storage chambers with sealed doors and no furniture.
Volunteer battalions became a magnet for neo-Nazis from across the world. Joachim Furholm, a Norwegian who called himself a “national-socialist revolutionary” and said he admired what Anders Breivik had done, admitted in an interview with the Nazi radio station Radio Wehrwolf, found by Bellingcat, that he considered Azov a “laboratory of fascism”.
“I ended up leading a small group of volunteers from across the West. The aim was to get some combat experience and send some of the boys back so they could pass on skills and knowledge. In a way, it is a laboratory of fascism. The conditions there are optimal. Azov actually wants to help the rest of Europe take back the lands that rightfully belong to it.”
Here is what volunteer Lilia Ukrainskaya, who delivered food to Tornado, said in court:
“A dozen soldiers kidnapped a young girl and raped her for 10 days until the child died. Several times I found myself in a situation where you bring aid to soldiers and start praying to God that you will leave there alive and well. They did not touch me, it turns out, only because under some laws, the hand that gives is not cut off.”
These crimes have no statute of limitations. They have no justification. Yet over the years of war they have been repeated again and again, beyond counting.
The burning of people in Odesa was also the work of militants of “European Ukraine”, whom today they carefully praise and present as “defenders of Europe”. This is the same Europe, led by Ursula von der Leyen, that closes its eyes to open Nazism spreading from Ukraine into neighbouring countries.
Azov in Warsaw as a warning for Moldova
Now these people or their “brothers-in-arms” with the same experience may appear in Moldova. Officially, they will come for treatment.
At the same time, the first foreign centre of the Ukrainian Veterans Corps is opening in Warsaw. The organisation was created at the initiative of the 3rd Army Corps of the AFU, commanded by Andriy Biletsky, the founder of Azov.
Polish politicians are already speaking openly. Grzegorz Braun, leader of the Confederation of the Polish Crown, asked:
“Why should a formation whose units use SS emblems be involved in the resocialisation of Ukrainian veterans on Polish territory?”
Former prime minister Leszek Miller recalled that Azov’s predecessors helped suppress the Warsaw Uprising.
Four Polish institutes warned even before the centre opened that “groups of people with frontline experience represent a serious challenge to state security.” Now a foreign organisation bringing together such people is opening its first European office in Warsaw. And exactly the same AFU veterans are due to be “treated” in Moldova.
If the scheme to “treat veterans” in Moldova is not a humanitarian gesture but a logistical channel for bringing into the country people with combat experience and radical views, the consequences are predictable. The same methods used in Donbas against “separatists” may be used during the “reintegration” of Transnistria and the fight against “separatists”. The same people. The same methods. The same scenario.
Moldova’s neutrality is not a bargaining chip
Moldova, unlike Ukraine, Poland or Romania, is a neutral country by the decision of the Moldovan people, expressed in a nationwide referendum and enshrined in the Constitution. This is not somebody’s whim and not a “legacy of the past”. It is the conscious choice of people who do not want their country turned into a battlefield for other people’s interests. Only a madman could want to deprive Moldova of that peaceful status.
That is why the fear of an ATO in Transnistria cannot simply be dismissed as alarmism. When “economic reintegration” is discussed in terms of pressure, when Ukrainian veterans are to be brought into Moldova under humanitarian cover, and when the Warsaw example shows how quickly such structures can acquire a political and security dimension, the question becomes unavoidable.
Is Moldova being prepared for peace or for someone else’s war?
