Romania Takes a Legislative Step Toward Uniting With Moldova

Moldovan President Maia Sandu and Romania's Nicusor Dan have cultivated a close, friendly relationship, and both favor unification. Sandu, herself a Romanian citizen, backed Dan in the last presidential election, and the two have each built reputations as anti-corruption reformers. Romania has also helped Moldova sharply reduce its dependence on Russian energy.

Support for unification stood at more than 40% among Moldovans in a March 2026 poll, up sharply from 26% in a poll conducted in the summer of 2025. Romanians are even more enthusiastic: over 70% say they would vote in favor of a union with Moldova.

In January, Sandu said she would vote yes if Moldova, with a population of 2.4 million, held a referendum on reuniting with Romania, population 19 million. She explained that her position rests on both historical and pragmatic grounds, speaking on the British podcast The Rest Is Politics.

Independence Has Its Limits

Despite the international border between them, which doubles as a Schengen frontier, ties between the two countries have traditionally been warm. Citizens of Moldova and Romania are fighting together in Ukraine as part of a single Romanian volunteer combat group, "Getica", made up of Romanian-speaking citizens from both countries and working closely with the Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK).

Asked why she would vote for unification with Romania, even at the cost of her own presidency, Sandu said that defending democracy and independence is growing harder for small countries like Moldova, as is withstanding Russian influence.

Dan supports Moldova's European integration, which Moldovans backed by a narrow majority in a 2024 referendum. Joining Romania, however, would speed up that accession process considerably. Some Moldovan politicians argue that it is precisely the delays in Moldova's EU accession that could ultimately drive a merger with Romania.

The Republic of Moldova, like Georgia and Serbia, exists on paper (de jure) as a larger country than it does in reality (de facto). Between the Dniester River to the west and the Moldovan-Ukrainian border to the east lies a long, narrow strip of territory: the disputed region of Transnistria.

Although recognized internationally as part of Moldova, the territory has stood as an unrecognized state with ties to Moscow since the 1990s, when Russian support helped the separatists there. Russia continues to station a garrison of about 500 "peacekeepers" in the region.

One of those who fought alongside the separatists during that period was Igor Vsevolodovich Girkin, a war criminal who would later become defense minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, better known as Igor Ivanovich Strelkov.

On 16 March 2022, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe passed a resolution designating the self-proclaimed republic's territory as Russian "occupied territory", a status that replaced its earlier designation as being "under the effective control of the Russian Federation".

The Long History Behind a Divided Region

The western part of historic Moldavia (Moldova) is currently part of Romania, along with Wallachia (Tara Romaneasca) and Transylvania (Transilvania), while the eastern part of this historic region has its own statehood.

Today's borders took shape during a turbulent 20th century. After the Bolshevik Revolution and the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1918, the eastern part of Moldavia joined the Kingdom of Romania, a status confirmed internationally in 1920 by the Treaty of Paris, much as Czechoslovakia gained recognition under the Treaties of Trianon and Versailles.

The secret protocol attached to the 1939 Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact addressed more than just the partition of Poland and the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states. Its terms also handed the eastern part of Moldova to the Soviet Union. The Kremlin established the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic on that territory in 1940.

Shortly after the German attack on the Soviet Union began on 22 June 1941, Romanian troops succeeded in driving the Red Army out of Moldova. However, by the summer of 1944, the country was once again under Moscow's control, and even after the end of World War II, the Kremlin retained the territory of eastern Moldova for itself, upholding the 1940 borders.

As the Soviet Union disintegrated, Chisinau declared independence in 1991. The Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, originally Ukrainian territory before becoming part of the Moldavian SSR in 1940, saw its ethnic composition and national identity significantly transformed under Soviet rule. That territory is today occupied by Russia once again, now known as Transnistria.

Moldova's official language was renamed from Moldovan to Romanian in 2023. The Moldovan variant retains a small number of words borrowed from Russian, a holdover from the Soviet Union's Russification policy, which also reshaped the regional identity of Moldovan Romanians into a separate Moldovan national identity.

Following passage of the law renaming the state language, Cristian Cantir, a Moldovan associate professor of international relations at Oakland University, observed that pro-Russian forces in Moldova and the Kremlin had consistently disputed the notion that the majority population is ethnically Romanian and speaks Romanian.

As German sociologist Max Weber aptly put it, the whole of history shows how easily political will can awaken a belief in blood kinship, provided that major anthropological differences do not stand in the way. In the end, though, the decision rests with the Romanian Senate, along with Moldovan and possibly Romanian citizens, who may one day cast votes in a referendum on whether to unite or remain separate.

Many Moldovans, however, would scarcely notice the potential end of Moldova's state independence through annexation by Romania, given that roughly 60% of them already hold Romanian citizenship alongside their Moldovan citizenship.