The term “Balkan” in political circles has to come to mean the fracturing into countless constituent parts a nation state or a group of people who become hostile to one another. The Balkan states, where the term originated, first showed their brittleness with the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the Russian empire after WW I. While the Balkans were mostly held together by Soviet rule, after the USSR’s dissolution the region turned into a free-for-all.

On this day, September 2, in 1991, with the Moldova republic declaring their independence, Transnistria, a 1,600-mile strip of land in Western Moldova declared their own independence from Moldova.

The incipient Pridnestrovian Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic then began a sometimes violent struggle with the Moldovan forces. With weapons and equipment donated by sympathetic Red Army officers, the Pridnestrovian workers threw out the Moldovan police, and despite a brief war Moldova was not able to reassert control of the area. The Pridnestrovian Republic still considers itself an independent state to this day, although recognized by only three other nations — all the their own independence in dispute: South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh.