“Russia Saved Us”: 28 years ago, a war came to the Transnistrian city of Bender

On Friday, the leadership of the unrecognized Transnistrian Moldavian Republic (PMR) visits Bender memorial sites in the early morning, paying tribute to the fallen defenders of the city in the summer of 1992. The mourning events did not begin to be canceled even because of the coronavirus, the outbreak of which forced the regional authorities to introduce severe restrictive measures in the spring.

In addition to laying flowers at the graves of the dead and the monuments in their honor, today in Bendery, the opening ceremony of the updated rowing base was held, where a traditional memory regatta was held, in which the current President of the PMR Vadim Krasnoselsky attended. During the event, participants lowered wreaths and flowers in memory of the dead defenders of Transnistria.

• © Press Service of the President of the Transnistrian Moldavian Republic

At 16:45, an electric siren was turned on throughout the city, its roaring alarming buzz repeatedly announced the city 28 years ago. After which a minute of silence was declared - it was at this moment 28 years ago that a real war came to Bender. 

In addition to officials on June 19, ordinary citizens come to the city memorials. Despite the thirty-degree heat and undefeated coronavirus, for residents of the older generation this date is one of the main dates of the year. As in all other local conflicts in the territory of the former USSR, the day that has become a point of no return for the entire region, the inhabitants of Transnistria and especially Bender will remember for a very long time.

"Suitcase - Station - Russia"

The plot of the conflict on the Dniester is well known. At the end of the 80s of the last century in the then Soviet Moldova, the Unionists gradually began to set the tone, proclaiming that the Moldavians were ethnically Romanians, and that Bessarabia was illegally torn away by the Soviet Union from Romania, with which it was necessary to reunite as soon as possible.

The sharp rise in pro-Romanian sentiments was accompanied by a worsening attitude towards representatives of other nationalities - discrimination on ethnic and linguistic grounds began to manifest itself to varying degrees in all spheres of life, and at the thousands of rallies of the Popular Front of Moldova the slogans “Suitcase - Station - Russia!” Sounded unthinkable. .

When the authorities of Soviet Moldova in 1989 decided to make the Moldavian language the only state language in the republic, the quiet discontent of the residents of five districts on the left bank of the Dniester, where Russians and Ukrainians predominated, came to light. In Chisinau, they could not but react to mass strikes and rallies, but for some time they tried to resolve disagreements by political means.

In 1990, shortly after the formation of PMR, blood was shed for the first time in the region.

The stumbling block was law enforcement agencies subordinate to Chisinau on the left bank, whose employees were ultimately demanded to either go under the jurisdiction of the Transnistrian authorities or go to serve on the other bank of the Dniester. The Moldovan security officials subordinated to Chisinau did not burn with the desire to agree with Tiraspol’s demand, and the degree of confrontation rapidly increased.

The first “hot spot” in November 1990 was Dubossary, located approximately in the middle of a narrow strip of the republic stretching along the Dniester. The confrontation between the local residents who took control of the bridge across the Dniester and the detachments of police sent by Chisinau turned into firing, as a result of which three local residents died.

• © Press Service of the President of the Transnistrian Moldavian Republic

In the following months, clashes began to occur more often. Grown passions and in society. Harassment began to be experienced not only by Russian speakers on the right bank of the Dniester, but also by Moldovans working or living on the left bank. In the Moldovan villages of the left bank, young girls were afraid to be allowed to go out on their own, fearing rape. There were also reprisals on ethnic grounds in relation to Moldovans - the facts of certain war crimes against civilians from both sides of the conflict are not denied in Transnistria either. 

The Bender Police Commissariat turned out to be the most “stubborn”, which, despite the increased pressure in 1992 from the Transnistrian guards and the almost complete lack of opportunities for normal work, did not want to curtail its activities. The situation here was aggravated by the fact that the city itself is on the right, “Moldavian” side of the Dniester and, unlike the rest of Transnistria, has always historically followed the same route as the whole of Bessarabia. But the overwhelming majority of Bender residents were Russian-speaking, many of them arrived in the city relatively recently and were categorically opposed, as they were sure, of their linguistic harassment and entry into Romania.  

Printing Shots

It was another armed incident involving Bendery police on June 19, 1992 that became the starting point for a full-scale massacre. 

Although a regular meeting of the country's parliament was held in Chisinau on June 18, at which, with the participation of deputies from Transnistria, who had previously been beaten and detained in the Moldovan capital, a resolution was adopted to resolve the situation peacefully and a high-level joint commission was set up, whose representatives immediately left for work in Bender.

Both sides further assured that the events of the next day came as a complete surprise to them.

At 16:45, a car with four guards drove up to the city printing house to pick up leaflets made there in Tiraspol. Two went inside, and two police officers approached the two remaining, demanding to present documents. At the time of the proceedings on this group, dense fire was opened - policemen and guardsmen were able to take refuge in the nearby police department. The Moldovan side stated that the fire on them was opened from the position where the guardsmen besieging the police department were. In Transnistria, the Moldovan police provoked a conflict at the printing house.

The exchange of fire from automatic weapons began to intensify rapidly. This is not the first time that Moldovan police fired on all sides by telephone tried to get a ceasefire from the Transnistrians, but this time the negotiations did not help - the Kostenko guardsmen refused to stop shooting at the police, despite the demand of the head of the city, Vyacheslav Kogut. 

At this point, the head of the department, Victor Guslyakov, a native of Bender, Russian by nationality, was already requesting help from Chisinau. Around 20:00 after the start of the fighting, Kogut phoned the Moldovan Interior Minister Konstantin Antoch and persuaded him not to send troops into the city, assuring that the local authorities were doing everything to ceasefire, but this did not help - a decision in principle on the introduction of units of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the army by the leadership of Moldova has already been taken.

In the evening, armed formations of the Moldovan security forces and volunteers began to penetrate the city in various ways. Armored vehicles appeared. In Bendery, full-scale street battles began with the use of guns, mortars, and heavy machine guns - pretty quickly it became obvious to everyone that the Moldovan authorities were not going to limit themselves to the besieged police alone, deciding to take Bendery under their control.

Memories of the war

“I was then five years old, but I remember that day very well. We live in the city center, relatively close to the printing house. After lunch, we played with my elder sister in the courtyard of the house, suddenly there was a clap, then I still did not know that it was being fired. I remember the older guys thought that they were launching a salute. By evening, the shooting intensified and adults began to worry. When it got dark our whole house went down to the basement, ”Bender Dmitry Yagodkin recalls those days in an interview with RT.

Tiraspol photographer Valery Kruglikov is a famous person in Transnistria. For several decades, he has been trying to capture all the most significant events in the life of Transnistria. He followed the course of the conflict from the very beginning and on June 19, 1992, and when he learned about the battle in Bender, he immediately went to the epicenter of events.

“That day in the center of Tiraspol on the square, I was shooting a graduation party. In the early evening, when it all started, the Olvia-press news agency ran after me, said that shooting was in Bendery and that graduation certificates had been damaged at schoolchildren. We immediately went there. We arrived at the headquarters located in the House of Soviets on the main square, then moved to the nearby working committee, where the first wounded were already being received. I immediately realized that this was a serious matter, at that moment snipers were already actively working, ”he tells RT.

By midnight, the Moldovan units that entered the city from two directions, without any significant losses, managed to actually take it under control - the units with small arms in the city hardly resisted the Moldovan armored vehicles and heroically held only a few key buildings in the center.

The next few days turned out to be hell for the residents of the city - the Transnistrians, which in addition to the army units included Russian volunteers, and local Cossacks, and rescue units made more and more attempts to come to the rescue of the few defenders of the city.

As a result, it was possible to recapture the bridge, after which help poured onto the right bank and heavy fighting began with the use of armored vehicles and snipers and a constantly changing front line. In addition, from the dominant heights, the Moldovan units were supported by artillery and mortars.

“Having shot the first photographs on June 19, I was then forced to return with them to Tiraspol, and the next morning I again went to Bender. Then we somehow managed to slip over the bridge. On the way, I saw that a column of armored vehicles was coming from Chisinau. Hastened to headquarters, told them. They began to call, find out. I told them that while they will call, the equipment will be already here. And so it happened. While they called, the first infantry fighting vehicle arrived and fired at us. I asked the Cossacks who were there if they had anything stronger than the assault rifles. We found one grenade launcher and went outside. The first car was missed, and the second was knocked out. We got on board, immediately got in there, closed the driver’s window, broke the antenna, but their infantry was already nearby and had to retreat, ”the 69-year-old veteran of Transnistrian journalism tells about the events of those days as if they were happening the day before.

• © Press Service of the President of the Transnistrian Moldavian Republic

He himself emphasizes that he did not take up arms in those days, but actively helped defend the city.

“In the evening of June 20, I came under sniper fire in the area of ​​the clinic. We lay down, crawled into the yard, lay there for about an hour. Then one woman opened the door and we crawled into the building. He began to call the headquarters and report on their movements, but communication soon broke off - on the night of June 21, Moldovan troops occupied the telephone exchange. As a result, they sat for a day without a break, the battle was on, and only when they began to retreat, I went out and continued to shoot everything that was happening. "

Alle Kolot in 1992 was 22 years old. On June 18, she went to her parents in a village in the south of Moldova, and found out about the battles for the city from television news - along with news about the battles, Moldovan residents addressed June 20 to President Mircea Snegur, who announced that “constitutional order was taking place in Bender.”

“I remember that then I reacted a little frivolously to these news about the shooting, they thought they were exaggerating. I went back on June 20, but the train did not reach Bender, stopping just before entering the city literally in the field. I had to walk home along the paths. Everyone was light, but I had heavy bags of food and I quickly fell behind. I remember there was another thought - whether to throw these trunks with fruits and feta cheese, so as to get home as soon as possible. I lived in the Leninsky microdistrict on the outskirts; it was not so far to go.

When I reached the railway crossing to turn towards the house, I first saw the trenches along the railway and many armed men in civilian clothes and white bandages on their foreheads (fighters who fought on the Moldovan side used them to indicate their belonging to the advancing. -  RT ). One of them shouted in Moldavian so that I could go faster from here.

So I realized that the Moldovan units captured our neighborhood, and in the following days it was under their control. While walking home, came under fire, and then ran to the entrance to the run.

In our five-story building in the next entrance lived a Moldovan, a member of the Popular Front of Moldova. He shot people from the roof at his own neighbors. He killed a very young guy about 18 years old, right at the entrance. He was buried right outside the house. And this shooter himself almost immediately left for Chisinau, he was given an apartment there and he didn’t show up with us anymore.

Because of the fighting in the homes of many residents, electricity and gas disappeared, shops stopped working, and in the absence of the media, neighbors became the main source of information for people.

“There was nothing, all the stores were looted, by whom exactly I won’t tell, but the food problem was serious. Had a risk to life to go to the gardens for potatoes. I remember that Moldova brought humanitarian aid, it was distributed to residents in our area. On the other hand, I remember that among them there were a lot of looters. My father in the village for a long time could not contact me and went on the road to find out from the drivers of minibuses about the situation in the city. He saw a lot of Moldavian cars loaded with various property, ”recalls Kolot.

Independent observers later confirmed information about the mass looting and robbery of the abandoned apartments in those days, and such facts were also noted in areas controlled by the Transnistrian troops.

At the same time, the media began to flicker about the export of valuable equipment from Bendery enterprises to Moldova or even the targeted destruction of industrial facilities, but later it turned out that the looters with whom the Moldovan military was not very successful, but tried to fight, were interested in the property of citizens, and not industrial equipment.

Damage to industrial facilities and the fires that occurred on them were mainly due to accidental hits - to extinguish a fire at the Bender oil extraction plant, which could provoke a powerful explosion, firefighters from neighboring Moldavian cities and even Chisinau left in constant fighting.

On June 22, during the conflict, combat aircraft was first used. Moldovan pilots on the MIG-29 aircraft inherited from the 14th Army’s property tried to bomb the bridge across the Dniester in order to cut Bender from the left bank. Two fighters dropped three bombs, one of which fell into the Dniester, and the other two to the nearby Transnistrian village of Parkany - without any luck, there were no casualties.

The incident caused great resonance and indignation, including among the command of the 14th Army. When on June 26 the same two MIGs tried to attack a large oil depot in the Tiraspol region, air defense units of the 14th Army opened fire from air defense systems, hitting one of the targets.

By June 23, when the bloody battles subsided a bit, the parties agreed on the unhindered cleaning of numerous corpses from city streets, which in the previous days were simply no one to pick up and which quickly decomposed in the heat. Because of this, and also because of the general confusion and crowded morgues, many of the fallen were buried right on the city streets.

By this time, the densely populated, life-enhancing Bendery, which in Soviet times was considered a resort and attracted residents of Moscow and Leningrad, was a terrible sight. A beautiful, old city, surrounded by roses, with excellent infrastructure and industry, in a matter of days almost turned into a ghost town - after the battles, hundreds of high-rise buildings and private houses with broken glass and broken facades, broken mountains and damaged military equipment on the streets remained frightened and hiding in the basement people.

The exact number of deaths on both sides over the several days of fighting is unknown, the numbers range according to various estimates from 300 to 500 people, including civilians. The number of wounded exceeded 1200 people.

• © Press Service of the President of the Transnistrian Moldavian Republic

After an intense massacre, Russia urgently intervened in the situation. Immediately arrived in the region, Alexander Lebed replaced the former commander Yuri Netkachev, who had not intervened in the confrontation before, and began to act more decisively. In early July, a powerful pre-emptive artillery strike was launched on various positions of the Moldovan troops, after which it became clear to everyone that the Russian military would no longer be staring blankly at what was happening. Although the attitude towards Lebed is ambiguous in Transnistria, for many residents of the region he is a real savior even today, and joining Russia is a cherished dream.

“When Russian peacekeepers entered the city, they were also located not far from our house. People plucked roses and carried them to soldiers. We were greeted as liberators, because then everyone understood that it was Russia that saved us, stopped this horror. I remember my mother-in-law boiled a young potato, cooked pickles and sent me to hand it over to the soldiers. I refused, it was somehow embarrassing, but she persuaded me. I came, and the guys say that they have plenty. As a result, they took this lunch from me, but for this they poured a full bag of cans with stew for me, ”recalls Alla Kolot.

By the end of June, Bender only exhaled a little, but local skirmishes continued, and the general tension remained due to the unstable situation.

Final stabilization had to wait another month. Only on July 21, 1992 in Moscow, Boris Yeltsin and Mircea Snegur in the presence of the head of the PMR Igor Smirnov signed a ceasefire agreement, which is still being observed. This is followed by the peacekeeping contingent of Russia, Ukraine and Moldova, which is based on the Russian military deployed in the region.

Thin world

In Transnistria, where it is still very careful about the Soviet legacy, symbols and military feat, the view on the events in Bender for almost 28 years has not changed.

“Aggression”, “invaders”, “fascists” - in describing those events, these are far from the toughest epithets heard from the lips of local residents. Many of them are convinced that the attack was pre-planned, and the destruction of the city and the shooting of civilians - conscious and targeted.

Even the Transnistrian researchers, restoring the chronology of the events of those days, paint a slightly different, more complex picture. At the same time, when talking with Bendery, it becomes obvious that the version of the events of the Moldavian or at least the neutral side is not only unknown to anyone, but also uninteresting to people - people have already formed their own truth and their ideas, with which even in the face of obvious facts they are not parted.

All this applies to older people. Young people have a slightly different attitude towards these events.

“I didn’t really see the horrors of war with my own eyes. After spending several days in the basement, my mother and sister went to our relatives in Odessa. With difficulty we reached the Tiraspol station, where there were a lot of refugees. I had to drive part of the way to Odessa while standing in a freight car — the entire train was packed with people, ”recalls Dmitry Yagodkin.

“I remember that for the first time I was afraid then at the moment when I had to return to Bender. I also remember the sound of the terrible loud sound of a siren all over the city, from which I have been at ease every time since then. But we were children - we climbed into the still uncleaned wrecked equipment in search of cartridges and cartridges, without thinking that someone had died there before. The father, who fought in the militia, categorically refused to tell us anything about those days, so I can’t even imagine what he experienced, ”he said.

• © Press Service of the President of the Transnistrian Moldavian Republic

At the household level, there was no hostility between the inhabitants of both banks of the Dniester River as there was then, so it is not now. Passing the Transnistrian border for Moldovans is a minute formality, many Transnistrian students go to study in Chisinau, and Tiraspol Sheriff is the hegemon of the Moldavian football championship for the last two decades. And there are many such examples of quite successful coexistence in virtually the same space in the two regions.

However, despite the peace and the absence of hostility between people, in practice the Transnistrian conflict is still very far away, and this is well understood on both banks of the Dniester. 

The settlement can not only hit the economic interests of the elites on both sides of the Dniester, but also invariably provoke more global tectonic shifts in the field of geopolitics - it will be necessary to solve the problem of the presence of Russian troops, to do something with extremely pro-Romanian and pro-Russian masses. Nobody is ready for such shifts in the region and everyone is happy with the status quo: Russia helps Transnistria under the conditions of an economic blockade, and in Moldova’s bustling political life, everything is so complicated that the Transnistrian factor can finally complicate the situation.

Well, the police commissariat in Bendery, because of which 28 years ago a war broke out in the city, as well as two Moldovan subordinate prisons in the city, are still functioning.

From year to year, the Transnistrian authorities continue to seek their withdrawal, which is why conflict situations constantly arise between the parties. Fortunately, at the cost of a lot of blood and thousands of broken fates, they have now learned to settle them at the negotiating table.