(Reuters) -More than 51,000 households were left without gas and 1,500 apartment buildings had no winter heat in Moldova’s Moscow-backed separatist enclave, authorities said on Monday, as Moldova and Russia traded blame for an escalating energy crisis.
Transdniestria, a mainly Russian-speaking breakaway region along the Ukrainian border, had received Russian gas via Ukraine for decades, using it to generate electricity also sold to the rest of Moldova, providing 80% of the country’s power.
But that gas was cut off along with flows to Central and Eastern Europe that stopped on New Year’s Day, after Kyiv refused to extend a transit deal that had persisted through nearly three years of all-out war between Russia and Ukraine.
The Moldovan government blames the energy crisis on Russian gas export giant Gazprom, which it said refused to supply contracted gas to Transdniestria via an alternative and tested Transbalkan route.
Gazprom said it would suspend exports to Moldova on Jan. 1 because of unpaid Moldovan debts that Moscow says total $709 million. Moldova disputes that debt and says its position is backed up by an international audit.
The Transdniestrian separatist authorities said on Telegram that a total of 122 settlements had lost gas supplies as of Monday morning, and only small amounts were being supplied to some apartments for cooking. Authorities ordered schools not to reopen after the winter holidays, with at least 131 schools and 147 kindergartens left without heat.
“There is not a single person in Transdniestria who is guilty of this situation – it’s all an external factor,” the president in the region’s administration, Vadim Krasnoselsky, said on a televised statement.
Gas piped via Ukraine has long been the main way Russia supported the separatist region, which broke free of control of Moldova’s central government, fought a brief war against government forces in 1992 and still hosts 1,500 Russian soldiers.
Russia’s foreign ministry said in a statement it was following the deteriorating situation with alarm, blaming the gas cutoff on Ukraine and accusing Moldova of deliberately ignoring the problem.
MOLDOVA SAYS RUSSIA STIRRING INSTABILITY
Moldova said it had summoned a Russian diplomat and accused Moscow of falsely blaming it for the crisis, which it said Moscow had artificially stoked to undermine Moldova’s government before parliamentary elections this year.
Moldova, which has a pro-European government that seeks membership in the European Union and has been at odds with Moscow for several years, has alternated between pro-Western and pro-Russian governments since it gained independence during the 1991 break-up of the Soviet Union.
“The meaning of all of this is for Russia to create instability in the region but also very importantly to influence the results of the parliamentary elections in Moldova… They want to achieve a pro-Russian government…,” Moldovan Prime Minister Dorin Recean said during an online briefing.
Disruptions of water supply in Transdniestria had begun on Monday, he added.
Since Russian gas was halted with the new year, Moldova has met its power needs by importing about 60% of its energy requirement from neighbouring Romania.
The government says it has offered to assist the separatists, but that the offer was rejected. Krasnoselsky has said Moldova’s goal is the “strangulation” of the enclave and has urged residents to use firewood.
Recean said Moldova’s objective was to “reintegrate the country and this should start from the fact that Russia has to withdraw its troops, so that we can properly administer it. We are here to offer a peaceful solution to this conflict.”
Transdniestrian separatist authorities said late on Monday that their daily regime of rolling power cuts would be doubled to two four-hour stints on Tuesday.
(Reporting by Pavel Polityuk and Tom Balmforth; editing by Peter Graff, Mark Heinrich and Lincoln Feast.)
