Moldova

Moldova, officially the Republic of Moldova, is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe covering 33,843 square kilometers with a population of 2.38 million, bordered by Romania to the west and Ukraine to the north, east and south, with the unrecognized breakaway state of Transnistria lying across the Dniester river on its eastern border, and Chisinau as its capital and largest city. Most of Moldovan territory belonged to the Principality of Moldavia from the fourteenth century until 1812, when the Ottoman Empire ceded it to the Russian Empire as Bessarabia; the region briefly became autonomous during the 1917 Russian Revolution, declared independence in February 1918 and integrated into Romania later that year, a decision Soviet Russia disputed by establishing a Moldavian autonomous republic within the Ukrainian SSR in 1924, and the 1940 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact forced Romania to cede Bessarabia to the Soviet Union, creating the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. The Moldavian SSR declared independence as Moldova on 27 August 1991 during the Soviet Union's dissolution, though the strip of territory on the Dniester's east bank has been under the de facto control of breakaway Transnistria since 1990; Moldova adopted its constitution as a parliamentary republic in 1994. Under President Maia Sandu, elected in 2020 on a pro-Western, anti-corruption platform, Moldova has pursued European Union membership, gaining candidate status in June 2022 and beginning accession talks in December 2023, while Sandu has condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine and proposed ending Moldova's constitutional military neutrality in favor of closer ties with NATO.