Bessarabia

Few borders in Europe have been redrawn as often as the ones around Bessarabia, the wedge of rolling steppe, vineyards, and orchards between the Prut and Dniester rivers. The Russian Empire gave the whole region that name when it took it from the principality of Moldavia, an Ottoman vassal, in 1812. Romania ruled it between the world wars, the Soviet Union seized it in 1940, and its core became the independent Republic of Moldova in 1991. The arguments it left behind, about language, identity, and whether Moldovans and Romanians are one people, still run through Moldovan politics, and the old province explains why a strip of Ukraine separates Moldova from the Black Sea.

Bessarabia covers about 45,600 square kilometers, bounded by the Prut on the west, the Dniester on the north and east, and the Danube delta and Black Sea coast on the south. The north is hilly farmland, the center is the wooded Codri uplands around Chișinău, and the south opens into the dry Budjak steppe, settled in the 19th century by Bulgarians, Gagauz, Germans, and others. Today about two-thirds of the territory, holding most of its people, forms the core of Moldova. Ukraine holds the rest: the Khotyn area in the north, now in Chernivtsi Oblast, and the Budjak in the south, now in Odesa Oblast, with Izmail on the Danube. Transnistria, the strip east of the Dniester administered by its own unrecognized authorities, lies mostly outside Bessarabia.

The name comes from the Basarab dynasty of Wallachia and first applied only to the southern coastal strip. Russia annexed the whole region by the Treaty of Bucharest in 1812, returned its southern districts to Moldavia after the Crimean War in 1856, and took them back in 1878. As the Russian Empire collapsed, a local assembly, the Sfatul Țării, voted for union with Romania in April 1918, a step the Soviet Union never recognized. After the secret protocol of the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Moscow issued an ultimatum in June 1940, annexed the land, and split it, giving the north and south to Soviet Ukraine and the center to the new Moldavian SSR. Romania held it again from 1941 to 1944. The 1940 lines became the borders of independent Moldova and Ukraine in 1991.

• Romania
  The Carpathian arc, the Danube delta, and a Latin island in a Slavic sea formerly part of
• The Russian Empire
  The tsarist state that stretched from the Baltic to the Pacific and, for a time, into North America formerly part of
• The Soviet Union
  The world's largest state for seven decades, spanning 11 time zones and 15 republics formerly part of
• Black Sea
  A vast, near-landlocked sea with a lifeless deep located on
• Transnistria
  A sliver of land on the Dniester that broke from Moldova and recognizes itself neighbor
• Bukovina
  The beech-forested Carpathian land divided between Romania and Ukraine neighboring region
• Moldova
  A landlocked country of vineyards between the Prut and the Dniester today part of
• Ukraine
  Europe's breadbasket of black-earth steppe, the Dnieper, and the Black Sea today part of