NATO leaders meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania, this week have a full agenda of issues critical to the alliance’s future, notably Russia’s continuing war in Ukraine. That war’s outcome, however, affects all now-independent states of the former Soviet Union, perhaps none more directly than Moldova.

Moldova’s geography alone should have made it a far higher NATO priority, particularly after the Kremlin’s unprovoked aggression against Kyiv. Straddling the Dniester River and surrounded by Romania and Ukraine, Moldova embodies one of the still-unresolved “frozen conflicts” that emerged in 1991 upon the USSR’s collapse. Soviet troops on the Dniester’s eastern bank tried to prevent Moldovan independence, engineering the pretend country of “Transnistria,” comprising the sliver of land between Moldova proper and southwestern Ukraine.