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has been - that's not something you often hear and to be frank it hasn't featured that widely with all the other things going on from the latest to to the ongoing .

But The World Tonight has covered events there where which were won by the governing Communist Party, but the opposition said were rigged, despite international election observers giving the vote a largely clean bill of health.

I am often asked why The World Tonight devotes considerable attention to events in the former Soviet Union and the Balkans - more often by colleagues than members of the audience.

My answer is that the area has several unresolved conflicts left over from history - disputed borders; minorities who claim the right of self determination from larger states; as well as an unsatisfied desire to catch up with the consumer societies of Western Europe - and these can erupt into violence as we saw and threaten to draw in other countries including the UK, so audiences need to know what is going on to make sense of events when they do become headline news.

In fact, on 20 April The World Tonight is co-hosting a , on the tension between territorial integrity and self determination, chaired by our presenter, Robin Lustig.

Moldova is one of the lesser known former Soviet republics that became independent when the USSR broke up in 1991. It was part of Romania before World War II, but with the border changes in Eastern and Central Europe that followed the war, it became part of the Soviet Union.

When it first became independent, we called it Moldavia for a while - making it sound more reminiscent of the of the Victorian novels of Anthony Hope - and it has attracted little mainstream interest since it achieved independence. Yet it has all the makings of being another flashpoint between the EU and Russia, along with Ukraine and Georgia.

The majority of Moldovans are Romanian speakers while in the east there is a Russian speaking breakaway region - called Transdnistria - where Russian peacekeepers have been stationed since a brief conflict between the Transdnistrians and the Moldovan authorities in 1992.

Following the protests after the election on 5 April, many demonstrators were arrested and allegedly mistreated by the security forces which led to protests from Romania which has called for the EU to launch an investigation into the conduct of the Moldovan government.

The EU is reluctant to get involved as it is keen to establish better relations with Moldova and not to give Moscow more grounds to suspect the EU is trying to encroach on what it sees as its sphere of influence.

But Romania has gone further. Earlier this week, its president promised to reform Romanian citizenship laws to allow greater numbers of Moldovans to get Romanian passports. If you remember, Western critics of Moscow have accused it of interfering in the internal affairs of its neighbours, Georgia and Ukraine, by granting Russian speakers in those countries Russian passports.

On Wednesday's programme (listen here), we interviewed the Romanian Foreign Minister and he denied Moldovan accusations that Romania had fomented the opposition protests, but accepted the international verdict of the conduct of the election itself.

But as our Europe correspondent, Oana Lungescu, made clear on the programme, there is no appetite in the EU for another confrontation with Moscow. And perhaps the complication of Romania as an EU member, with what it sees as a direct interest in the fate of fellow Romanians in Moldova, makes this potentially a serious problem for the EU and its attempt to project what it sees as the values of rule of law and democracy further east, while rebuilding a constructive relationship with its main energy supplier Moscow.

Alistair Burnett is the editor of The World Tonight.