Instability has escalated in Moldova’s Russian-backed breakaway region of Transnistria following the murder last week of the region’s most prominent opposition politician, Oleg Khorzhan.

Khorzhan, the leader of the local Communist Party, was found murdered at his home on the outskirts of the Transnistrian capital, Tiraspol. He had been out of prison for less than a year.

The death of a man once called a “traitor” by the Transnistrian authorities has caused upset in the unrecognised territory on the eastern bank of the Dniester river, with Transnistrian and Moldovan authorities presenting different possible scenarios for his death.

Speculation over the fate of this separatist region – a narrow slip of land that shares a 400-kilometre border with Ukraine – has increased rapidly following Putin’s full-scale invasion last year.

Russia has long had a peacekeeping contingent as well as regular troops stationed in the region, and has expressed an interest in securing a “land bridge” linking Russia to Transnistria via Ukraine.

Ukrainian officials, meanwhile, have offered to “assist” Moldova in retaking the region by force. A series of unexplained drone attacks and explosions last year has only increased concern.

Transnistrian investigators suggest that Khorzhan, 47, could have been murdered as part of a robbery, but local activists, lawyers and opposition politicians are sceptical of this theory. Instead, they link Khorzhan’s death to his campaign against lawlessness, poverty and the ruling regime, which he resumed after being released from prison in December 2022.

The perception that political opponents of the regime, facing prison or worse, often have to leave Transnistria does not increase faith in the investigation.

“There is no freedom of speech, free media, free elections, competition in the economy. There is an absolute monopoly [on power] in Transnistria, which Oleg has been fighting for the last seven years,” said Yevgeny Shevchuk, the former president of Transnistria ousted in 2016.

‘Why are you still, in fact, alive?’

The year is 2021, and Oleg Khorzhan is spending his third year behind bars.

A full-throated critic of Transnistria’s “oligarchic power” – the dominant business interests that pervade every sector of life in the region – the MP had run for president of Transnistria on several occasions. In 2018, he was imprisoned for holding an allegedly unsanctioned rally in Tiraspol.

One attempt on his life nearly occurred in 2017, according to the local Communist Party, but it was stopped on the intervention of Moscow. At the time, Khorzhan was calling for dialogue with the Moldovan authorities – a radical move – even meeting personally with Igor Dodon, then president of Moldova.

Since civil war broke out in the 1990s, there has been no success in reconciling, or reintegrating, separatist Transnistria with Moldova. The status quo of quiet cooperation, whereby people move freely over the Dniester river, has suited both sides. Yet apart from formal negotiations, Khorzhan was the only Transnistrian politician who dared speak to his Moldovan counterparts.

So when a journalist asks him in prison: “Why are you still, in fact, alive?” – Khorzhan is ready.

“This question is not for me, but for our Transnistrian oligarch,” Khorzhan replies. “Those kinds of decisions [to kill an independent politician] in Transnistria are taken only by him today. I can only assume that the consequences of such a decision for him would be more than serious.”

He is referring to Viktor Guscan, head of the Sheriff holding company, which controls Transnistria’s supermarkets, gas stations, construction companies, hotels, a mobile phone network, bakeries, a distillery, a football team and a mini media empire of radio and TV stations. Locally, Sheriff is known simply as “the firm”.

Since Vadim Krasnoselsky, an ex-Sheriff employee and former interior minister, became president in 2016, Guscan is believed to wield unparalleled power. But everything happens behind the scenes; he rarely makes public appearances or statements

The changes happened quickly. Former president Yevgeny Shevchuk left Transnistria in 2017, and was later sentenced – in absentia – to 16 years in prison on charges of embezzlement, bribery and smuggling. He had criticised Sheriff extensively, and the Sheriff media and political empire hit back.

Shevchuk’s interior minister, Gennady Kuzmichev, was less fortunate. In 2018, he was allegedly kidnapped in Moldova by Transnistrian security service personnel and returned to Tiraspol, where he was sentenced to 13 years in prison. A string of other political opponents left Transnistria – or wound up dead.

Khorzhan, however, remained and continued his campaign, calling for the Transnistrian government’s resignation over its subordination to Sheriff. “Neither the president nor our MPs decide anything anymore,” he said at an opposition rally in Tiraspol in June 2018. “All decisions in the country are taken by Sheriff.”

Days later, he was stripped of his parliamentary immunity and detained – for holding an “unsanctioned” protest. An alleged scuffle at the police station only made matters worse. He was sentenced to four and a half years in prison (conditions in Transnistria’s prison are notoriously bad).

The Moldovan authorities, human rights activists from both Moldova and Transnistria, the US embassy, and the EU mission in Moldova’s capital Chișinău all repeatedly called for his release.

Even while in prison, Khorzhan spoke out. “90% of the residents of Transnistria hate the people in charge, and the company [Sheriff],” he said in a media interview. “People can barely survive, yet a small group of so-called official representatives and Sheriff-linked people get fat at the people’s expense. They have turned Transnistria into a tool for making a few bad people rich.”

Khorzhan did not see Russia as an enemy. He approved of Transnistria’s “established ties with Russia” and supported the operation of the Russian peace-keeping forces. In a recent interview, he said: “The overwhelming majority of Transnistrian residents consider the Russian peace-keepers to be their defenders. We have had 30 years of peace – and this is why residents of Transnistria see Russia, the Russian peace-keepers, this way.”

He also had ties with politicians from other Russian-controlled breakaway territories, such as South Ossetia and the self-proclaimed ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’ in eastern Ukraine.

At the same time, Khorzhan believed that Transnistria could be reintegrated with Moldova if the latter pursued a pro-Moscow diplomatic policy. A week before his murder, he even signed an agreement of cooperation with a Moldovan political organisation, the Civic Congress Party, led by another communist politician, Mark Tkachuk.

The agreement said the union of Transnistrian opposition power (a coalition of opposition politicians of which Khorzhan was a member) and the Moldovan Civic Congress Party would work to “overcome deepening systemic poverty, the exodus of the population... through a joint struggle against the oligarchic clans and the colonial aristocracy, which have been parasitising on people’s misfortunes for decades”.

Calls for investigation

That joint struggle, at least with Khorzhan’s participation, will not happen. On 17 July, he was found in his office by his ex-wife, apparently stabbed to death. The door to the building was open, and there were no signs of forced entry. The office safe was open and empty. Surveillance footage stored on a hard drive was gone.

The same day, Transnistrian investigators claimed that what had happened was “murder for the purpose of robbery”. Yesterday they named one of the suspects in the case as Andrei Duminike, a Transnistrian resident who had previously been convicted of robbery and extortion, and who knew Khorzhan from prison.

Speaking to this reporter, Duminike denied any involvement in the murder, claiming he was in neither Transnistria nor Moldova at the time of Khorzhan’s death, showing passport entry stamps to Romania and then Hungary in mid-May 2023. That Duminike was not in Moldova at the time of the murder was confirmed by the vice speaker of the Moldovan parliament on 25 July. Duminike said that he had communicated with Khorzhan by phone on the evening of the murder.

Civic and opposition activists, in Transnistria and outside, have expressed scepticism of the “robbery” theory, and have little faith in the veracity of any investigation. The region has seen many politicised prosecutions over the years. Tiraspol has since requested official assistance from the Moldovan authorities.

“Is the legal, judicial and political system of Transnistria capable of providing an objective investigation? I think the answer is obvious: no,” said former Transnistria president Shevchuk.

While Transnistrian prosecutors claimed Khorzhan’s body had been found with cuts and that he had been tortured, possibly to get him to open his safe, the Moldovan police have opened their own criminal investigation and have reported instead that Khorzan was shot dead. That information has not been confirmed by either Transnistrian officials or Khorzhan’s colleagues, who have been in touch with his relatives.

Moldova’s Bureau for Reintegration, which is responsible for Moldovan government policy on Transnistria, has proposed setting up an independent investigation as part of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s (OSCE) mission to Moldova. The OSCE mission itself has joined the US embassy and the EU mission in demanding an honest and objective investigation.

26 July: article updated to reflect statement by Vice Speaker of the Moldovan Parliament regarding the location of Andrei Duminike on 17 July.