December 18, 2024 around four o’clock a Russian strike drone hit a bridge across the Dniester near the village of Mayaki in Odesa region. The bridge — the only land connection between Odesa and historic Bujak — ceased to function after Russian missile strikes disabled the city in the Zatoka area in April 2022.
The world saw another attack on the civilian infrastructure of Ukraine, but the real threat is much wider. And many hints can be gleaned from the experience of geopolitical processes of the past, the object of which was the Danube Delta.
It is an imperial takeover strategy that has been running on an unchanged script for almost 170 years. About how Russia uses control over the mouth of the Danube to systematically destroy the subjectivity of the Danube states, and about Transnistria and Gagauzia as security risks to the South, which Ukraine chronically underestimates.
The key to the humiliation of the empire in the Danube Delta
The logic of Russia’s behavior in the Danube Delta was born almost 170 years ago. In March 1856, after three years of the grueling Crimean War, a peace treaty was signed in Paris, which became the greatest geopolitical humiliation of the 19th century for the then Russian Empire. Then Russia lost to the coalition of Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Sardinia not just a war, but the status of a great power that dictated the conditions in the Black Sea region.
The Paris Peace Treaty of 1856 took control of the Danube estuaries from the Russian Empire, prohibited Russia from having a military fleet in the Black Sea, and most importantly, created the European Danube Commission, the first international organization to control navigation on Europe’s largest river.
For the empire, which for decades strangled its neighbors economically due to the monopoly on the water artery of the region and which was used to single-handed control, this was not just a territorial loss, but a strategic verdict that all subsequent generations of Russian strategists sought to correct, including today’s attempts to block Ukrainian exports in this way.
85 years after the Paris Peace Treaty, the Romanian hydrotechnical engineer, specialist in Danube navigation, Grigore Vasilescu, in his 1941 report addressed to Marshal Ion Antonescu, wrote that Since the beginning of the last century, the mouths of the Danube have been a natural way for Romanian and Moldavian grain to go to the sea, and because of this, they seriously competed with the export of Russian grain, which was carried out through Odessa.
In addition to Russia’s purely economic motives, Vasilescu also cited specific examples of Russia’s sabotage of navigation, which was used even during the Turkish domination over the Danube principalities (proto-Moldova and Wallachia — author).
Under the Turks, certain works were carried out to increase the depth at the mouth of Sulin, by driving rows of piles between which special dredges were pulled to deepen the channel. But the Russians all the time tried to capture the mouths of the Danube and do anything to hinder navigation both in the channel and on the branches of the river, sinking schooners filled with stones., – Vasilescu wrote in the conclusions for the European Danube Commission.
That is, Russia did not just seek control, it systematically tried to make it unsuitable for use by other states, in the event that it itself lost this control. This logic has not changed even today, when Russian drones are hitting Ukraine’s Danube infrastructure.
The Peace of Paris lasted for about two decades and ended with another revanchist campaign of Russia precisely because of the intentions to restore the status quo in the Black Sea region and, accordingly, in the Danube region. King Carol I of Romania, in his speech to the Parliament in 1881, declared that it was the sacred duty of his state to not to agree to any combination that would lead to the fact that the navigation from the Iron Gates (i.e. the Danube ports – author) to Galati will remain under the dominant influence of one state (Russia – author). We do not wish to harm anyone, but we want – we are forced to want – the absolute freedom of the Danube, at least in our waters, and are ready now and in the future to make all necessary sacrifices to ensure complete ease of navigation.
But almost 50 years later, in 1940, it became clear that these principles only work as long as there is power to protect them.
Between disaster and disaster
On September 27, 1940, a meeting of the Council of Ministers of the Kingdom of Romania took place in Bucharest. At that time, already in June 1940, the Soviet Union issued an ultimatum to the Romanian government with the demand to leave Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina within a few days – a step directly conditioned by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed in August 1939. Despite this, the transcript of the meeting clearly demonstrates that the systematic underestimation of threats on the periphery eventually leads to the political capitulation of the state.
The then Minister of Foreign Affairs Mihai Sturdza reported that in the east, Russia disputes our border, which existed stably from 1877 to 1918. They claim that the Kiliya branch can no longer bear its historical name of “Old Istanbul” and have sent us a new boundary line located five kilometers further south, covering almost one-seventh of the total water flow of this branch. The problem is that we will be deprived of the opportunity to use the canal near Kilia for our economic needs. Thanks to this new demarcation, the Soviet side gets a physical opportunity at any moment to block our only (it is meant on the Danube – author) full-fledged port of Sulin.
General Ion Antonescu, the prime minister with dictatorial powers, then replied that, in his opinion, the USSR was trying to implement two large-scale — nowadays we would say “hybrid” — maneuvers: to infiltrate the International Danube Commission (which continued to function, despite the collapse of the Paris Peace Agreement), that is, to gain control over the international navigation regime as far as Bratislava, which would actually mean the dominance of the USSR over the entire economy of Central Europe and to deprive Romania of the possibility of navigation on the Danube arm of Kilia.
By that time, Romania had already ceded Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina due to the Soviet ultimatum (on June 28, 1940, the third day after the ultimatum – author), on August 30, 1940, it was forced to cede Northern Transylvania to Hungary (the Second Vienna Arbitration under the pressure of Germany and Italy – author), on September 7, 1940, according to the Craiova Agreement transferred Southern Dobruja to Bulgaria. Thus, in three months, the country lost a third of its territory and population.
Danube phantoms
In the same year 1940, on October 25-26, international consultations on the Danube navigation regime were held in Bucharest with the participation of the Romanian delegation as part of the discussion of future shipping arrangements. In parallel with this, the Soviet side carried out unilateral military operations in the Danube Delta without warning, gradually occupying the Romanian islands on the Cilicia arm – in particular Dinara Mare and Salangic, and later Tetara Mare, Tetara Mic and Maican. In November, Antonescu was informed that the Soviet troops had also occupied the island of Limba – right next to the exit of the Danube into the Black Sea.
Despite the territorial collapse and deep internal political crisis, the Romanian government until the last tried to interpret these actions as local incidents that can still be settled diplomatically, hoping for the effect of international law and the authority of the European Danube Commission.
In the end, Romania took the desperate step of siding with Nazi Germany in the hope of stopping Soviet expansion. This decision was not so much an ideological choice in favor of fascism, as an attempt to revise the territorial losses inflicted on the USSR. In June 1941, Romania entered the war on the side of Germany.
An interesting irony of fate is the fact that just these days, December 10-12, in Budapest, at the headquarters of the Danube Commission, the 104th session was held, at which the resolution “On the violation of the Belgrade Convention of 1948 caused by the military actions of the Russian Federation” initiated by Ukraine was adopted. Austria, Germany, Croatia, Moldova, Romania and Slovakia joined the document – in fact, all the European countries along the Danube, except for Russia itself (it voted against) and Serbia (abstained).
Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Andriy Sybiga welcomed this decision, stressing that the resolution provides creating a register of losses in the Lower Danube region, caused by Russian aggression, as well as the systematic collection of data on damage that prevents free and safe navigation. According to him, this is “another diplomatic victory of Ukraine in one of the oldest international organizations.
This is exactly what happened in October 1940, when the Romanian delegation was discussing legal details at a conference in Bucharest, while Soviet boats were landing landings on the Romanian islands. Romanian diplomats prepared notes of protest, referred to international treaties, appealed to the European Danube Commission, while one by one the islands came under the control of the USSR, and none of the “great powers” were ready to take real steps.
The Romanian government continued to believe in the power of law and agreements – until it had to sign the capitulation in February 1948, formalizing the annexation as a “voluntary transfer for the sake of friendship.” Then, after the defeat of Germany, Romania found itself completely dependent on the USSR and was forced to sign a protocol with Moscow on “clarification of the passage of the state border line”, officially handing over to the Soviet Union five islands on the Danube branch of Kilia.
The then Prime Minister of Romania, Petru Groza, a communist who came to power with the support of the Kremlin, said at the time that the decline of friendship between Romania and the USSR poses a much greater strategic danger to the existence of the Romanian state than any territorial or economic losses. The Romanian people are primarily interested in preserving and strengthening this friendship with the great Soviet state. The Soviet Union has an objective need for these islands in order to have the technical and strategic ability to effectively control all the mouths of the Danube.
Groz’s position best illustrates the final act of the tragedy of the state, which systematically underestimated the Soviet threat in 1940–1948. Every step of the Soviet advance seemed to Bucharest a “local incident”, a “temporary provocation”, a “subject for negotiations”, until the moment came when the only choice remained was unconditional surrender, decorated with rhetoric about “friendship”.
Romania, Ukraine and Delta
When the USSR pressed Romania in 1940, maneuvering the border and control over the Danube arms and delta islands, Ukraine was already occupied and existed only as an administrative unit within the Union, in fact, as a tool through which Moscow projected its imperial power.
A fundamental change, which Moscow still has not accepted, occurred in 1991: on August 24, Ukraine declared independence and became a subject of international law. It passed from the category of “instruments of imperial policy” to the category of “targets” of this policy, in particular in the Danube region.
At the beginning of June 1997, Ukraine and Romania signed the Agreement on Good Neighborliness and Cooperation in Constanta, which established the principles of territorial integrity and inviolability of borders between the two states.
In Romanian political opinion, this treaty meant more than a protocol “normalization”: Romania, as a state that itself experienced the loss of Northern Bukovina, Herza and Southern Bessarabia, recognized the inviolability of the borders established by the results of the Second World War and the post-Soviet reality, in which control over critical nodes of the Danube Delta was transferred to Ukraine. The continental shelf around Zmiiny Island remained a separate nerve, however, unlike the imperial practice of forceful pressure, Ukraine and Romania settled the dispute in a civilized manner – by a decision of the International Court of Justice of the United Nations in 2009.
For Ukraine, this meant not only new opportunities for economic development, but also a new role: the state, which gained control over its own access to the sea and over the Danube arteries, inevitably became a target of Russian revisionism. This manifested itself especially clearly after 2014, and from 2022 – already in the form of a full-scale war: the blockade and systemic pressure on Odessa ports made the Ukrainian Danube infrastructure one of the critical export arteries – and, accordingly, a strategic target of Russia.
The approach itself is structurally repeated: the struggle is not only for territory, but for control over waterways, navigation nodes, and “oxygen tubes” of the economy. In the 1940s, the USSR tried to gain leverage on the Danube through the border and islands; today, Russia seeks the same effect on Ukraine — to deprive an independent state of control over its access to the sea and make it economically vulnerable and politically doomed.
Underestimated threats at arm’s length
It is here that we approach the flanking threats, the secondary nature of which against the background of the great war, various actors convince Ukraine. According to the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, on the eve of a new wave of shelling in Odesa, Russia intensified work in the Transnistrian enclave: in particular, Ukrainian intelligence warned about the mobilization of local reservists, who began to be called up to military structures, about the deployment of drone production and the creation of training centers for the training of UAV operators.
The Minister of Defense of Moldova, Anatoliy Nosatiy, called this information an exaggeration. “Reports about large-scale mobilization in Transnistria, which appear in some media, are a significant exaggeration. We are closely monitoring the situation and today we do not see any signs of mass conscription in this region,” he said.
The Speaker of the Moldovan Parliament, Ihor Grosu, also called the GUR’s warning an exaggeration, despite the fact that a number of unprecedented episodes from the Transnistrian territory had been known for a long time and without intelligence assessments. For example, the penetration of spy elements from the PMR into the territory of Odesa, drone courses, the opening of which was announced by the Transnistrians themselves as early as 2023, not to mention provocations at the beginning of a full-scale invasion.
The distance from Tiraspol to the bridge over the Dniester near Mayaki is 30 kilometers. This is the distance at which sabotage groups can actually operate in the “tourist raid” mode. And it is at this distance that, after the closure of the bridge across the Bay, the only road between Odesa and Bujak is located – a region that is key to the functioning of the Ukrainian part of the Danube Delta.
Ukraine’s position sometimes resembles the Romanian trajectory of the 1940s due to the chronic underestimation of Transnistria’s potential. During the Munich Security Conference in February of last year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi, answering a question from LB.ua, said that before the full-scale invasion, there were “five and a half or six thousand Russian troops” in Russian-controlled Transnistria, while now there are significantly fewer of them. According to him, a significant part of this contingent was transferred to the main fronts – most likely, by military transport aircraft via Chisinau, since there are practically no other routes in Russia.
At the same time, in addition to the directly Russian military, Transnistria has its own de facto power structures — the “army,” the “Ministry of Internal Affairs,” the “Ministry of National Security,” etc. That is, at a minimum, there are more than enough paramilitary formations in the region, which can be quickly reoriented to perform special tasks if necessary.
And such short-sighted assessments of the Ukrainian authorities are very similar to the hopes that were cherished by the Romanian leaders at the time when Soviet boats landed on the Danube islands: “these are isolated local incidents”, “diplomatic settlement continues”, “there is no large-scale threat”, “the issue will be resolved through negotiations”. And then 1948 came and Petru Groza signed the capitulation, talking about “friendship more important than islands.” Therefore, underestimation of local flanking threats, which seem insignificant against the background of a great geopolitical drama, can lead to disaster.
Gagauz base of destabilization
If Transnistria is at least a pseudo-state entity with local power structures, about which there is at least some limited information, then Gagauzia represents a different type of threat. The autonomous territorial formation of Gagauz Yeri within the Republic of Moldova is less than 5% of the country’s population, but it can be a much bigger problem for national security, both for Ukraine and for Moldova itself, and, importantly, it borders the Odesa region directly: the villages of the two countries literally pass into each other. And we know even less about what is really happening in this autonomous territory than about the closed PMR.
In an interview with the Austrian newspaper Der Standard in July 2025, the President of Moldova, Maia Sandu, described the situation as follows: We will do absolutely everything to prevent Russia from controlling Moldova and from using our territory as a springboard for aggression against Ukraine or EU countries. Illegal financing of political parties through hidden channels is one of Moscow’s key methods for undermining our democracy. Direct intervention in the affairs of autonomous regions, especially Transnistria and Gagauzia, through the creation of parallel structures of influence is another, no less dangerous method of hybrid aggression against the sovereignty of Moldova.
The fundamental difference between Gagauzia and Transnistria, which makes this region potentially even more unpredictable, lies in its legal status. Gagauzia is not a self-proclaimed “republic” with its own army and “MDB”. Gagauzia is an official autonomy, its population votes in national elections, and is formally subject to the constitution and laws of the Republic of Moldova. There are no Russian military bases or contingents on the territory of Gagauzia (at least openly), there is not even the fictitious “independence” that Transnistria has had since 1992.
It is this legal certainty and lack of control on the part of Chisinau that makes Gagauzia a bridgehead for “undefined” threats. In recent years, Moscow has in fact freely financed political parties, public organizations, media in autonomy — and all this remains in a “gray zone” that cannot be unequivocally interpreted as provocation or aggression.
The region directly borders the Odesa region. The distance from the capital of Gagauzia, the city of Komrat, to the bridge in Mayaky is about 50 km. From the nearest Gagauz villages to Ukrainian territory – zero.
Romania in 1940, according to historical sources, also did not have information about what was happening in the USSR-occupied territories of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina after the annexation by the Soviet Union. Bucharest relied on speculation. And this informational uncertainty, which Romanian politicians interpreted as the “absence of a major threat,” allowed Moscow to methodically implement its takeover strategy.
Each separate move by the Soviets—occupying one island, then a second, then a third—seemed like a “minor incident” that shouldn’t be seen as an existential threat. And in sum, these “small incidents” led to a complete loss of sovereignty in 1948.
In July 2022, when the full blockade of Ukrainian Black Sea ports began, UN Deputy Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths called the situation critical: The Bystre mouth of the Danube-Black Sea shipping channel is an extremely important, without any exaggeration, a vitally critical transport channel that can and should become a real “road of life” for countries that are at risk of starvation due to the disruption of global food supply chains. During the period from July 2022 to February 2024, 2.2-2.3 million tons of grain were exported every month through the Danube ports of Ukraine.
And it is on this “road of life”, on this last functioning export route, that two chronically underestimated flanking threats are locked. 30 km from Mayaki to Tiraspol with its unknown exact number of Russian troops and the production of drones at closed factories. Direct border with Gagauzia, where Russian influence is documented to be growing.
Two zones of fundamental uncertainty, where we do not know the real scale of Russian presence, plans and potential for sabotage or even local attacks. But from where at any moment new threats can arise, materializing suddenly, like the Russian drone over the bridge in Mayaki on December 18.
