Commentary
Strategic Communication
Too Little, Too Late: On Ukraine, Europe is in the Backseat
25 November 2025
My personal memories of Gorbachev, and how his plans led to today’s breakaway ‘republics.’
In the summer of 1991, a few weeks before the August coup d’état, I met the ‘president’ of the self-proclaimed Transnistrian Moldovan Republic, Igor Smirnov, in the lobby of one of the hotels of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Smirnov, who went on to head this ‘republic’ — effectively a Russian-occupied enclave of Moldova and turned it into a Klondike of smugglers — was encouraged and told me he had been received in the Kremlin by the Chairman of the USSR Supreme Council, Anatoly Lukyanov.
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Also in attendance at the time were the leaders of other self-proclaimed ‘republics,’ which were then being created with a straightforward objective — to stop the Soviet republics from seceding from the USSR and forcing them to participate in the ‘renewed’ state.
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