Marinuta: Moldova Cannot Afford Neutrality Even in Dreams

Former Defence Minister Vitalie Marinuta believes that maintaining neutral status requires huge investments, which Moldova does not have. In his opinion, the country needs to either invest in the army or look for allies. “The time of neutral countries, for whom neutrality somehow helped, has already passed. We need to be realistic and look at other countries, some of which have been neutral for 100 years, but have now realized that this neutrality will not help them with aggressive Russia,” Marinuta said in the programme “New Week with Anatolie Golea” on TV8. He said that Moldova’s economic development is impossible in principle without ensuring security. And it is desirable not to take on the whole burden of ensuring security, but to integrate into the security model that is currently being formed on the European continent amid disagreements with the US. Moldova cannot only receive grants from the European Union, be a part of the cultural, economic and social space without contributing to the European security. He added that being neutral does not prohibit to invest in own army, security and defense capability. “I have always favored being in a bloc with stronger allies like Romania and other EU countries. Than to remain almost on the border with Russia in the status of a ‘buffer zone’. And Ukraine was a neutral country, it only tried to think about the European Union, and maybe about NATO, nobody promised it. And this is how it ended up. Even if it had guarantees under the Budapest Memorandum from the USA, the UK and Russia, eventually one of these guarantors decided that it could grab a piece of territory, if not the whole of Ukraine,” Marinuta said. The former defense minister recalled that so far only one country has violated Moldova’s neutrality - Russia, which keeps its troops in the left bank. In his opinion, maintaining and, most importantly, ensuring neutrality is a luxury that Chisinau does not have. “If we want to be a neutral country, it is possible, but it costs a lot of money, we don’t have that luxury. We can’t afford it even in our dreams. Let’s look at the same dome, at air defense. Everyone wants us to have air security, but one Patriot complex alone costs almost a billion, and one missile costs a million, and not lei. Even if we now allocate 2 billion lei for the army, it is a drop in the ocean. If we want to ensure our own security, to be able not only to monitor drones but also to shoot them down, we need to either tighten our belts and provide the army, or join a coalition with those who have these capabilities. Our neighbors, Romania and Ukraine, have such capabilities, but we should not engage in demagogy, but work in this direction,” the former defense minister believes.