As Chișinău steadily draws Transnistria into Moldova’s fiscal, legal, and European orbit, Putin’s latest passportisation decree may look like a familiar act of neo-imperial overreach, the quiet, manufactured expansion of Russian citizens inside another state’s recognised borders, ready to be invoked as compatriots in need of protection. Writing for the German Marshall Fund of the United States and Europinion, Will Kingston-Cox and I read the measure differently: not as proof of Kremlin strength, but as passportisation under pressure, exposing how Moscow is converting its weakening material grip over Transnistria into a renewed legal and symbolic claim, precisely at the moment it can least afford to lose the region entirely.

https://www.gmfus.org/news/passportisation-under-pressure-why-russia-expanding-citizenship-transnistria