ambassador rudolf v. perina - Association for Diplomatic Studies and ...

assets fell to the republics where the assets were located when the Soviet Union
dissolved.
Q: We were doing a lot to help the Russians dismantle weapons in many parts of the
former Soviet Union. Were we doing anything of that nature?
PERINA: Yes, we were. The background to this is that at the 1998 OSCE Summit
meeting in Istanbul where there was agreement on an adapted CFE treaty, we prevailed
on Yeltsin to make public commitments that Russia would withdraw all its remaining
troops from Moldova and Georgia, where there was a similar problem. These became
known as the Istanbul commitments and were quite controversial later because Moscow
tried to weasel out of them and we refused to ratify the adapted CFE treaty until they
were fulfilled. In any case, we wanted to help the Russians withdraw or destroy these
armaments because they were destabilizing, and destroying weapons is in fact very
expensive if done safely. The experts who came told me that it costs far more today to
destroy a Soviet tank then it cost to build it. So the OSCE created this voluntary fund to
help with the arms withdrawal, and the U.S. was the major contributor to the fund. We
made several million dollars available for this, and the fund was administered by the
OSCE Mission in Chisinau. Well, to make a long story short, there was some limited
destruction of tanks and one or two trainloads of weapons and ammunition were
withdrawn but then the withdrawals stopped, and the Russians and the armaments are in
Moldova to this day. It became pretty clear to me that the Russians did not really want to
withdraw all this materiel because it provided a pretext for them to stay militarily in
Moldova, even if with just a token force.
Q: Were these weapons being sold? Were they being shipped off to someplace like Syria
or Iraq?
PERINA: There were many rumors to this effect but I never saw any evidence of sales.
The fact is that most of the armaments were not worth much and were dangerous.
Smirnov, of course, argued that they were very valuable. He once told me that he would
sell them all to the U.S. for four billion dollars. This is probably more than all of
Transnistria was worth. We once had reports that the Transnistrians tried to sell some of
these stockpiles, as did the Russians, but no one was interested. The materiel was all old,
unstable and dangerous. I think the Russians thus concluded that its greatest value came
from providing a pretext for an indefinite Russian presence in Moldova.
Q: What were the Russian troops doing? Were they isolated on bases or visible on the
streets?
PERINA: Occasionally you would see some on the streets of Tiraspol but for the most
part they were on the bases, which were ostensibly still under Russian control. Some of
the Russian troops had been there for so long that they had basically gone native. They
married spouses in Transnistria, acquired families and were pretty well settled in. They
also did not want to leave for some new posting in Siberia.
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