The breakaway region opened the celebrations with a flower laying ceremony and a military parade on the main square of the capital, Tiraspol. More than a 1,000 servicemen, police officers and Black Sea Cossacks participated in the parade.
Transdnestr, which has a predominantly Russian-speaking population, proclaimed its independence from Moldova in the early 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Armed clashes between Moldova and Transdnestr ensued. Russia retains a military presence in the breakaway region.
A Russian delegation headed by Sergei Baburin, a deputy speaker of the lower chamber of the Russian parliament, attends the festivities in Tiraspol.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Moldovan counterpart, Vladimir Voronin, met in Moscow August 8 to discuss the resolution of the Transdnestr conflict.
The presidents had not held official talks on resolving the Transdnestr conflict since fall 2003, when Moldova refused to sign the Kozak Memorandum on the issue, proposed by Russia.
The memorandum proposed a united 'asymmetric' federal Moldovan state, and had an attached proposal to locate a Russian military base on Moldovan territory for the next 20 years. Moldova refused to sign the memorandum without coordination with European organizations.
In 2005 Voronin said the memorandum contradicted the Moldovan Constitution, which defines Moldova as a neutral country, and forbids the presence of foreign troops on its territory.
