Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"Moldova, Ukraine’s tiny impoverished southwestern neighbor, was a Romanian province seized by the Soviets in 1940 and converted into a landlocked “Soviet Socialist Republic.” A half-century later, along with the USSR’s 14 other “republics,” Moldova gained independence when the Soviet Union disintegrated. Romanians remain in the majority among its 4.1 million people, but many of the Russians and Ukrainians (each about 6 percent) have migrated across the Dniester River to an industrialized strip of land between that waterway and the Ukrainian border, proclaiming there a “Republic of Transnistria” (see Fig. 4-27). This separatist movement constitutes only one of Moldova’s multiple problems. Its economy, dominated by farming, is in decline; an estimated 40 percent of the population works at jobs outside its borders because unemployment rates in Moldova typically hover around 30 percent; smuggling and illegal arms trafficking are rife. These many misfortunes translate into weakness, and Russia’s influence in the form of support for Transnistria’s separatists keeps the country in turmoil." [Geography: Realms, Regions, and Concepts, 17th Edition, p. 191-2]