Dramatic video of a man claiming to be a Moldovan citizen is going viral on social media.
“I’m a citizen of Moldova, you are a Russian citizen. Are you going to detain me on the territory of my country?” says the man shooting the video, confronting Russian soldier at a checkpoint going into Transnistria.
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The so-called Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (Transnistria) is a Moldovan territory bordering with southwestern Ukraine, but de facto controlled by Russia since 1991.
The video opens with a man filming himself driving as he approaches a checkpoint before entering Transnistria.
“This is how you have to go through checkpoints into Transnistria,” he says in Russian. “First you have to lower the windows, then play your favorite music.”
He opens the window and blasts a version of the Ukrainian song “Oy u Luzi Chervona Kalyna,” (Oh, Red Guelder Rose in the Meadow) which was written in the early part of the 20th century and became a hymn of Ukrainian national resistance. Since the full-scale invasion the song has taken on a new life and redoubled its power to inspire.
After the driver is stopped by soldiers bearing a patch of the Russian flag for filming a military check point, he proceeds to berate them for daring to stop a Moldovan citizen in his own country.
Kyiv Post has not be able to conclusively geolocate the footage or determine a date. But a linguistic assessment concludes with reasonable certainty that the soldier and driver were both native Russian speakers. Moldova is a bilingual country with Romanian as official language, although as many 15 percent of the population are Russian speakers.
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