Between Putin and Brussels: Moldova Weighs the Unthinkable

In an hour-long episode of The Rest Is Politics: Leading podcast, Moldova’s President Maia Sandu stated that, given the option, she would vote to unite her country with its neighbor, Romania, and effectively eliminate her own elected position. The remark made waves inside and outside Moldova, generating confusion and sparking intense debate. Was this a policy shift? A political blunder? Or a carefully calibrated signal to Brussels?

The answer is more complex than it appears. While Sandu’s statement was framed as personal opinion, not government policy, it touched the third rail of Moldovan politics. Reunification with Romania is an issue most politicians avoid unless they have a political death wish. Small political parties have built their entire identities around the union, but mainstream figures recognize it is too divisive and too unlikely to discuss openly. Sandu has answered this question before in Romanian-language interviews, always in the same way: honestly, personally and without making it part of her political project. The fact that she is not running for reelection may have played a role in her willingness to speak more freely.

Yet there may have been more calculation behind the answer than simple honesty. When asked by hosts Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell to clarify why she would support reunification, Sandu said: “Look at what’s happening around Moldova today, look at what’s happening in the world. It is getting more and more difficult for a small country like Moldova to survive as a democracy and a sovereign country … and of course to resist Russia.”

This is where context becomes crucial. Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine has unsettled every security assumption between the Baltic and Black Seas. Moldova, wedged between Ukraine and Romania, finds itself in an especially precarious position. The once-marginal issue of reunification has moved from the political margins into parliamentary debates, media studios and chancelleries across Europe. What used to be dismissed as romantic nationalism is increasingly framed as a contingency plan — a security insurance policy of last resort.

A unique relationship in Europe

Moldova and Romania share a language, history and a relationship that has no clear parallel elsewhere in Europe. In the Middle Ages, what is now Moldova was part of the principalities that would later form the Kingdom of Romania in 1881. But Moldova — historically called Bessarabia — was left out of this new nation because it had been annexed by the Russian Empire in 1812. When that empire disintegrated in 1917, Moldova declared independence and, a year later, voted to unite with Romania. The countries remained united until the Soviet Union re-annexed Bessarabia as part of its secret deal with Hitler in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.

Today, Romania allows anyone with Romanian ancestors who were citizens before 1940 to reacquire their lost citizenship. While there are no precise public estimates, it is likely that between a third and a half of Moldova’s population holds dual citizenship, including President Sandu, Prime Minister Dorin Recean and many other politicians in the pro-EU camp. Around 1.5 million Moldovans already hold Romanian passports, yet this dual status has not translated into majority support for reunification.

Opinion polls consistently show that support for unification in Moldova fluctuates and remains below a stable majority, with 61.5% opposing reunification according to August 2025 polling. In Romania, sympathy for Moldovans and a shared identity narrative coexist with ambivalence about the financial, political and security costs that rapid unification would entail. What has changed is not the baseline probability of reunification, but the legitimacy of openly debating it.

Security, not nationalism

To understand why Sandu’s remarks resonate beyond personal opinion, we need to look back to 1918. Contrary to what many modern unionists claim, the union of Bessarabia with Romania was not principally a nationalistic or ethnically driven process. At that time, Moldova was substantially more ethnically and linguistically diverse than it is today. Urban centers largely spoke Russian, and while the majority of the population was Romanian-speaking, they were spread out in smaller towns and agrarian communities. The first parliament, the Sfatul Țării, actually debated and ultimately chose to join Romania while conducting proceedings in Russian, underscoring how little nationalism drove the decision.

Instead, it was a decision based on national security. As the Russian Civil War raged to the east, Bolshevik units — often acting as rogue raiding parties — made incursions into the new Moldavian Democratic Republic. They burned estates and villages, occupied rail links and attempted to overthrow the Sfatul Țării to replace it with revolutionary committees. In January 1918, the Sfatul Țării requested military support from Romania, and the Romanian army quickly restored order. This led to a debate about what ultimate political settlement would ensure security and resulted in the vote for union in April 1918.

This historical parallel is critical for understanding Moldova’s current situation. Both in 1918 and in 2026, there is no mass political movement for unionization. The option is popular with a segment of the population, but nowhere near a majority. At the same time, a vast majority of the country would look for almost any solution rather than rejoin a Russian sphere of influence. That was true in 1918, and it is true today.

EU integration as the primary path

For Moldova, the primary strategic project remains EU integration as a sovereign state. Candidate status and the opening of accession negotiations anchor the country’s political class and civil society in a long-term framework that promises institutional reform, economic modernization and a firmer place in the European legal and security space. Sandu herself acknowledged that most Moldovans do not share her personal support for reunification, stating that EU integration is a “more realistic objective.”

Reunification with Romania is not a substitute for this trajectory. It is framed as a backup option in case that path becomes blocked beyond repair — by Russian pressure, internal destabilization or a breakdown of Western political will. Whether or not it was intended, Sandu’s comments can be read as an implicit warning to the EU: while we are standing at the front door waiting to get in, if you don’t open it, we might just climb through the window.

The security logic behind this contingency thinking is straightforward. If Moldova were to unite with Romania, its territory would, at least in principle, become part of a NATO member state and thus fall under NATO’s collective defense umbrella. At a time when Russia has demonstrated a willingness to use force and coercion against its neighbors, the promise of collective defense has obvious appeal. But this line of reasoning quickly runs into hard legal and political realities.

The Transnistria complication

The first hard reality is Transnistria, the breakaway region on the left bank of the Dniester River, where a small Russian military presence and a frozen conflict have persisted since the early 1990s. NATO has traditionally avoided importing unresolved territorial disputes into the Alliance. Any attempt to extend collective defense automatically to territory that includes a Russian military footprint would force allies to confront the question of whether they are willing to underwrite, with their own security guarantees, a conflict they did not create and do not control. In practice, a reunification scenario would almost certainly require some form of legal or territorial clarification that excludes Transnistria from the area covered by collective defense, at least initially. Otherwise, the very thing that makes unification attractive from a security perspective could end up blocking it.

The second constraint lies not in eastern Moldova, but in Western capitals. Even before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, debates on burden-sharing and diverging threat perceptions had revealed tensions within NATO. Recent crises have deepened doubts about the long-term reliability of US security commitments, not only through rhetoric but via concrete standoffs — such as the recent Greenland crisis caused by US President Donald Trump’s annexation threats — that forced Europeans to confront how vulnerable the Alliance can be to domestic political swings in Washington. Collective defense remains the cornerstone of European security, but its credibility is no longer treated as an unshakeable constant.

Why Article 42(7) matters more

This is why, in discussions about Moldova’s long-term security, the EU’s mutual assistance clause — Article 42(7) of the Treaty on European Union — has become more salient. On paper, its language is more categorical than NATO’s Article 5, obliging EU member states to provide “aid and assistance by all means in their power” if one of them is the victim of armed aggression.

Unlike NATO, this obligation extends to EU member states that are militarily neutral or nonaligned, such as Austria, Ireland or Cyprus. A Moldova–Romania union would therefore not only tie Moldova’s fate to NATO; it would insert Moldovan territory directly into the EU’s legal and political framework for mutual defense.

Why this is not German reunification

The inevitable comparison is with German reunification in 1990, but the differences are more instructive than the similarities. German reunification took place at the end of the Cold War in a permissive international environment, underpinned by the comprehensive Two Plus Four Treaty with all major powers and by clearly defined borders once the relevant treaties were signed. There were no unresolved territorial conflicts on German soil, Soviet troops withdrew under negotiated terms and popular support for unification was overwhelming and clearly expressed through the March 1990 elections, which functioned as a de facto referendum on unification.

Moldova faces none of these conditions: Russia is an active spoiler, not a cooperative partner; Transnistria remains unresolved; and public opinion on unification is deeply divided. German reunification succeeded because international law, great power consensus, popular will and territorial clarity aligned. In Moldova’s case, all four are absent or contested. The comparison serves less as a roadmap and more as a reminder of how rare and contingent successful peaceful unification actually is.

Internal obstacles remain

Even so, reunification would not magically erase Moldova’s internal and regional complexities. Transnistria is only one of several pressure points. Gagauzia, an autonomous region in southern Moldova with a predominantly Turkic and Orthodox Christian population, has consistently exhibited stronger pro-Russian political and media orientations than the rest of the country. In a 2014 referendum, which has no constitutional or international legal standing, Gagauz voters overwhelmingly backed closer ties with the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union and signaled that, in the event of Moldovan unification with Romania, they would prefer a different geopolitical alignment and become independent.

For Moscow, both Transnistria and Gagauzia are less about direct annexation than about political leverage: tools to fragment public debate inside Moldova, complicate decision-making and constantly threaten to turn any major strategic choice into an internal legitimacy crisis.

The identity question

The domestic dimension matters at least as much as the geopolitical one. Unification is not only a foreign policy decision; it is an identity project. Many Moldovans hold overlapping or ambivalent identities — Moldovan, Romanian, European, post-Soviet — shaped by family histories, language, education and media consumption. A rushed or elite-driven unification process that disregards this diversity would risk destabilizing the very democracy it aims to protect. Conversely, an honest, pluralistic debate about unification can serve as a barometer for how Moldovan society understands its past and imagines its future.

From a Romanian perspective, the calculus is equally complex. Reunification would entail extending social, infrastructural and security commitments to a significantly poorer neighbor with unresolved territorial issues and a volatile security environment next door. While parts of Romanian society and sections of the political class are emotionally and historically invested in the idea of a “second union”, governing elites must weigh this against fiscal reality, EU-level politics and the risk of becoming a front-line state in an even more direct way than today.

Europe’s test case

Seen from Brussels, Berlin or Paris, Moldova’s potential reunification with Romania is less a question of historic justice and more a test case for the flexibility and resilience of the European order. If the EU and NATO are unable to provide small, vulnerable democracies with credible paths to security and prosperity, alternative scenarios — however risky or imperfect — gain salience. The unification debate is therefore as much a mirror of European uncertainties as it is a reflection of Moldovan and Romanian aspirations.

Anyone paying attention to events of the past few years cannot help but conclude that when this ends, there will be no small, neutral countries between the EU and the new Russian sphere of influence. Unlike Ukraine and Belarus, Moldova does have this extra option to find itself on the right side of that divide — a kind of geopolitical “pull in case of emergency” lever.

For now, Moldova’s most realistic and most democratic path remains the one it is already on: gradual EU accession as a sovereign state, combined with efforts to strengthen resilience, reform institutions and reduce vulnerabilities to Russian coercion. Reunification with Romania is unlikely in the near term, but Sandu’s podcast remark has moved it from the realm of the unthinkable to the realm of the discussable. That shift, in itself, is politically significant. It signals that in an era of war and systemic competition, even long-settled questions of borders and statehood in Europe are being quietly reopened — not by nationalist dreamers, but by those looking for ways to keep fragile democracies alive.

[Kaitlyn Diana edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Between Putin and Brussels: Moldova Weighs the Unthinkable appeared first on Fair Observer.