Romanian toponyms on the war map | Moldova | DW
How easy it is to turn a spa into a pile of ruins! After four months of war, I kept seeing entire blocks of flats and neighborhoods in Ukrainian cities smashed by Russian artillery, as if they were images from Stalingrad (1943), Warsaw (1944) or Dresden (1945). Horrible, nightmare sequences that send the human species into prehistory. But because they are relatively far from us, we do not allow ourselves to be relaxed. Or relatively relaxed. Mariupol is at the other end of the Black Sea, Kharkov is located in the east, on the edge of the Donbas, where fighting has been going on since 2014, after the annexation of Crimea.
But when you hear that Russian missiles have hit a block of flats in a city in southern Bessarabia, Bilhorod-Dnistrovsky, our perception is on alert. Because, one: it is confirmed that the Russians do not give up attacking the western coast of the Black Sea, Odessa and Mykolaev, to break through to the “allied” Transnistria, and two: because it is the area bordering the Republic of Moldova, only 35 kilometers of border between us and Ukraine, drawn by Stalin after the second world massacre. The tyrant took care to treacherously cut strips from various historical regions, to sow seeds of hatred and territorial conflicts between the conquered peoples. This was a Stalin visionary, let’s face it.
The Romanian name of the city of Bilhorod-Dnistrovskii, from the Dniester estuary, is the White Fortress, founded by the Greeks in antiquity and renovated by the Genoese in 1315, who also named it: Moncastro – White Fortress. Every Romanian has heard of it, read in the history books. Hotin, Soroca, Tighina and Cetatea Albă were the four strategic outposts of the eastern border of the Principality of Moldova, which protected it from the desolate Tatar and Ottoman incursions. There, trying to recapture the White Fortress, says the chronicler, Stephen the Great was wounded by a Turkish arrow, a wound he could not heal until death… And if we mentioned the brave Romanian ruler, let’s remember that on 2 July we commemorated 518 years since his passing into eternity.
But these are old stories. Much closer to us, on Friday, July 1, the rockets fell on a block of flats in the city that grew up around the legendary fortress. On the same day, Sergheevka was attacked, a well-known spa resort, loved by Moldovans, and also known and frequented during Greater Romania, when it was called Sabolat-Serghiești. Russian missiles killed 18 people, including about 40 children. A treatment and rehabilitation center for children belonging to the Ministry of Health in Chisinau also suffered, five of its employees were injured and one died.
“They were not Moldovan citizens,” they specified, but what if they were? What was the difference? From a human point of view – none. What about politics? Would it mean that we are entering a state of war with Russia? Would there still be a rag from Moldovan “neutrality”? … It is a gloomy scenario, very possible, and I am convinced that many of my fellow citizens have asked this question with reluctance.
The barbaric attack on Belhorod-Dnestrovsk and Sergheevca was a gesture of “goodwill” by the Russians, after the Ukrainians recaptured Snake Island a day earlier. Russia, as usual, has perverted the meaning of what happened, because it does not admit in any case that it can be defeated. She just doesn’t know how to lie and in fact she doesn’t care if she’s believed or not, she “persuades” by killing. Who is not convinced – even worse for him.
The Island of Snakes, ceded in 1948 by the communist government in Bucharest to the Soviet Union, at the request, became a legend from the first days of Putin’s aggression, it is today a “product” of oral popular creation.
What I wanted to say is that the Romanian toponyms (with equivalents in Ukrainian) have settled on the map of the Russian-Ukrainian war. And not just the toponyms of southern Bessarabia. Romanians from Chernivtsi, Noua Suliță, Mahala, Culiceni-Herța and other localities, Ukrainian soldiers from northern Bukovina gave their lives in the battle with the Russian occupiers. They are both the heroes of Ukraine, but also our heroes, because they defend both Moldova and Romania, they defend the whole of Europe from barbarism in the East. We very much hope that the Romanian topography of the war will not be completed with other localities, with other proper names.
The government in Chisinau must take urgent measures to strengthen national security, to have handy solutions in case the Russian missiles, old, outdated, and drunk, would fall “by mistake” on our territory.
Putin’s artillerymen care little about the “neutrality” of the Republic of Moldova, instead they would worry if we had an anti-aircraft defense capable of giving or retaliating, as the brave Ukrainians manage.