The Gas That Was Never Free
For three decades Russian gas arrived on the left bank of the Nistru, was burned in a Soviet power station there, and came back to the rest of Moldova as electricity no European supplier could undercut. The bill went to a company in Chișinău that never paid it, and on 1 January 2025 it stopped arriving.
The road south out of Tiraspol runs down the left bank of the Nistru through vineyards and villages to a town called Dnestrovsc, which exists because of what stands next to it. The Moldavskaya GRES is a Soviet thermal power station with an installed capacity of about 2,520 megawatts — roughly twice everything the rest of Moldova draws at peak — built in the 1960s to feed the southern grid of a country that no longer exists. It has been in Russian hands since 2005 and belongs today to the utility Inter RAO. It sits inside a territory no government recognises, and for most of Moldova's independent life it is the reason the lights worked in Chișinău.
The arrangement that made that possible was not a treaty and was never written down as one. Gas came down the pipeline from Russia. What crossed to the left bank was billed to a company in Chișinău which never paid for it, burned by a plant that charged its own customers and kept the money, and sold back across the river as cheap electricity to the government that was being invoiced. Both halves of a divided country were subsidised by the same unpaid account. It ran, in one form or another, for thirty years, and it ended in a single night.
What the arrangement actually was
The mechanism sits inside the ownership of Moldovagaz, the national gas company: half of it is Gazprom, about a third the Moldovan state, and a little over thirteen per cent the Transnistrian authorities. Gas delivered to the left bank was booked to Moldovagaz's account with Gazprom. Transnistria billed its own households and factories for it in Transnistrian roubles, retained the proceeds, and remitted nothing. Gazprom did not cut the supply; it simply kept adding to the invoice held against a company registered in Chișinău. By the 2020s the accumulated left-bank arrears were being put at figures of the order of nine billion dollars — around half of everything Moldova produces in a year. Nobody on either bank ever expected them to be paid. What they bought was leverage, and everyone involved understood that.
The audit
The separate, older question was the debt Gazprom claimed from the right bank — roughly 709 million dollars in historic arrears, which had been leaned on in every gas negotiation since the 1990s. Then the Moldovan government did something no previous one had: it commissioned an independent forensic audit of the claim, hiring the Norwegian law firm Wikborg Rein and the specialists Forensic Risk Alliance to go through the documentation. Their findings, published in September 2023, confirmed about 8.6 million dollars as properly evidenced. A further sum of roughly 276 million could not be excluded but had passed the statute of limitations. For the remainder there was no supporting evidence at all. Parliament then legislated on the basis of that finding. Gazprom rejected the audit and continues to reject it.
A debt is a claim until somebody checks it. Moldova spent a few million dollars checking, and it was the cheapest piece of energy policy the country has ever bought.
Two wires and a pipe
The audit only answered the accounting question. The physical one needed steel. A 43-kilometre pipeline from Iași in Romania to Ungheni on the Moldovan side was inaugurated in August 2014 and then sat almost unused for six years, because it stopped at the border town and there was nothing to carry the gas the further 120 kilometres to Chișinău. That section was finally completed in 2020 and gas flowed through it from 2021. In March 2022, days after the invasion of Ukraine, the Moldovan and Ukrainian grids were disconnected from the post-Soviet system and synchronised with continental Europe in an emergency operation that engineers had expected to take years. From December 2022 the right bank stopped buying Russian gas altogether, procuring instead on European markets through the state trader Energocom. The last piece is a 400-kilovolt line from Vulcănești in the south up to Chișinău, financed by the EBRD, the European Investment Bank and the World Bank, which is what lets Romanian electricity arrive in the volumes the country actually needs.
The first of January
Ukraine declined to renew the five-year transit contract signed in 2019, and it expired at the end of 2024. Moldova's parliament had approved a sixty-day state of emergency in the energy sector that December in anticipation. On 1 January 2025 the gas stopped. On the left bank the effect was immediate and total: central heating and hot water were cut to apartment blocks in the middle of winter, rolling blackouts began, schools closed, and most industry — which is to say most of the Transnistrian economy — simply stopped. The power station switched to its coal reserve and ran it down. On the right bank the lights stayed on, because by then the grid was buying from Romania at market prices.
What it cost
Neither bank got through it cheaply. Right-bank tariffs rose steeply once the cheap electricity from across the river disappeared, and the government spent the winter paying compensation to households that could not absorb the increase — the price of independence turned out to be a line in the budget, payable annually. On the left bank, people who had paid almost nothing to heat a flat for thirty years spent January in their coats. Supplies resumed within weeks, arranged through a European trading intermediary and financed from Moscow, at reduced volumes and on terms renegotiated month by month. That is a different thing from the old arrangement, and everybody in Tiraspol knows it.
What the winter of 2025 exposed is that the frozen conflict on the Nistru had a balance sheet, and that the free gas was the largest item on it. An unrecognised statelet with almost no export earnings could pay pensions and run factories because its fuel cost nothing; a recognised government could keep tariffs low because its electricity came from those factories' neighbour. Remove the subsidy and both propositions have to be re-argued from the beginning. Moldova has spent a decade building the pipes and wires that let it decline the offer, which is an unglamorous achievement and a real one. The harder question is the one now sitting on a desk in Chișinău: what a reunification actually costs, in euros, once nobody is giving the gas away.