Kost Elisevich

A changing situation exists along coastal Ukraine, Moldova, its neighbor to the west, and Crimea in the east. It threatens the unwitting Russian intruder more than the nations it has menaced.

Russia escalated its aerial assault upon Ukraine’s major coastal city and seaport, Odesa, beginning in December, 2025 and continuing into 2026. The city has considerable strategic value as Ukraine’s major throughway for foreign trade accounting for 65% of its imports and exports. Its rail connections, in turn, extend nationally to provide for both the efficient concentration of goods for export and quick distribution of imported needs. In its usual fashion, Russia has destroyed residential buildings, hospitals, electrical and heating substations, water supplies and bridges, resulting in more than 60 casualties thus far along with protracted power outages and exposure to the current winter’s extreme cold.

Apart from attempting to weaken Ukrainian resolve, Russia aims to ruin Ukraine’s economy by destroying Odesa’s port infrastructure and threatening merchant vessels. It will fail as it has no proximate operational land or naval force to complete such a task. Added to this, over the past four years, Ukraine has shown considerable resilience by its adaptation, with Western aid, to rebuild and successfully resume operations of much of its functional infrastructure. So, why is Russia expending its increasingly limited ordinance and financial reserve on Odesa, when it has seen substantial military losses on the front in eastern Ukraine with negligible territorial gain to show for it?

On Ukraine’s southwestern border, marginally inland from the Black Sea, lies Moldova with its “breakaway” pro-Russian administrative region of Transnistria, a narrow strip of land along the left bank of the Dniester River. This region is approximately 1,600 square miles in size, comparatively little more than that of Rhode Island, and makes up about 280 miles of Moldova’s 760-miles-long border with Ukraine. It hosts a Russian military presence of about 1,000 or more troops composed largely of local recruits with a sizeable former Soviet-era weapons arsenal. It also serves as a local operational base for Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB). The economic situation here, as a barely subsidized Russian enclave, is tenuous enough that reintegration with Moldova might present a real prospect were it not for its nested Russian military presence.

That presence raises an issue regarding the potential threat it poses for neighboring Ukraine and, specifically, Odesa, which lies only 25 miles to the east of Transnistria. For some time, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has tried to undermine Moldovan politics, including an attempted coup using aligned foreign operatives to unseat the government in 2023. It has done so not only to further secure its presence in eastern Europe but to strengthen its position on Ukraine’s western border.

Despite ongoing Russian interference, Moldova’s pro-European ruling party won the September 2025 parliamentary elections underscoring President Maia Sandu’s continued efforts to bring Moldova into the European Union (EU). Worse still for Russia has been an ongoing debate regarding whether Moldova should consider joining with neighboring Romania for reasons of shared language and cultural similarities. This would ostensibly provide it not only EU membership but the security umbrella of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

The situation has only escalated the Kremlin’s efforts to intimidate Moldova and maintain its limited regional influence in Transnistria. Concern has been raised that Russian military seizure of Moldova or just that of Transnistria, would potentially strangle Ukraine’s economy by threatening Odesa and perhaps bring an end to the war. The downside of such an overly ambitious plan could result in the remaking of Russia’s disastrous “special military operation” in Ukraine but in yet another country. The objective would be to create an air corridor ostensibly from occupied Crimea to Transnistria for the purpose of troop transfer and armament to initiate an attack upon Odesa. The reality, under the current circumstances, however, is that the outlook for such a plan has begun to look bleak in the face of what has been occurring in Crimea.

The distance between Transnistria and Kherson Oblast lying directly north of Crimea spans about 130 miles. Russians occupy most of the oblast east of the Dnieper River or a total of about 70% of its territory. Very narrow land bridges pass from it into Crimea that can be easily targeted by artillery fire or drone and missile attack to destroy both road and rail transport. The Crimean Peninsula marks the easternmost extent of Ukraine’s Black Sea coastline and accounts for about 620 miles of it; the rest of the coastline extends westward another 300 miles or so to meet the border of Romania.

Of all the territory currently occupied by Russian forces in Ukraine, Crimea remains Vladimir Putin’s prize possession in his ongoing pursuit to claim the entirety of Ukraine as his legacy. The occupation and hurried annexation of Crimea in 2014 secured for Russia a strategic military base of operations with access to the Mediterranean Sea until Ukraine destroyed more than a third of its Black Sea fleet and caused the rest of it to flee to mainland Russia’s eastern Black Sea naval port of Novorossiysk. There, it continues to be targeted albeit from a greater distance.

Ukraine has since undertaken a methodical assault upon Crimea itself, targeting Russian air defense systems, airfields, military installations, munitions facilities, fuel depots, and command and control centers as well as in neighboring territories. This has degraded Russia’s ability to defend itself both within Crimea and from nearby Russian territory. Under these circumstances, connections by rail via the land route through occupied Ukraine and via the Kerch bridge from Russia’s mainland look to be increasingly vulnerable to attack, trapping tens of thousands of Russian military personnel and civilians on a peninsula that can be effectively choked for lack of adequate supplies.

As the situation in Moldova and Ukraine changes and as Russia continues to feel the burden of its war weigh more heavily domestically, its imperialist plans may have to be abandoned as its ambitions become thwarted in the fog of its adventurism in too many places. Moldova is proceeding to soon formally extricate itself from the Russia-led Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) established in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the time, it was a desperate attempt to maintain control over some of Russia’s near abroad sphere of influence. It is now straining to secure cohesion among its nine remaining member states because of the Kremlin’s declining territorial influence. Georgia withdrew in 2009 following Russia’s 2008 invasion of its territory while Ukraine never ratified its membership and left in 2018 after Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea.

While current trends may see, before long, ascendency to the EU for both Moldova and Ukraine, the collapse of Russian occupation of Crimea, and a breakdown of the Russian front in eastern Ukraine, a black swan may yet alight elsewhere that could finally unhinge the Kremlin’s love affair with itself. The world has watched the failure of Russia’s patronage unfold with its muted responses to the fall of Syria’s Assad regime, Armenia’s loss of Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan, the destruction of Iran’s air defense system and the kidnapping of Francisco Maduro from Venezuela along with confiscation of its oil industry. It should give pause to those nations seeking security by alliance with Russia’s failing regime and to look elsewhere. It might even inform the Kremlin that its future in this protracted war is in question as the EU and other parts of the globe – Japan, Australia, Canada, among others – escalate their support while its own financial prospects are in freefall.

Copyright @Kost Elisevich, MD, PhD 2026. All rights reserved. Any illegal reproduction of this content will result in immediate legal action.