Romania should ditch its NATO membership and help Russia carve up Ukraine to return the country to its former glory and reunify its territories, the leader of Romania’s right-wing nationalist party has said.
In a speech delivered in the northern Romanian town of Iasi on Friday, Claudiu Tarziu told his supporters that Romania would never be “truly sovereign” until it claws back its historical natural borders.
The Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) leader said that sacrificing the country’s membership of the Western defense alliance was a price worth paying to retain its sovereignty.
Tarziu, whose party is currently polling second in Romania, listed Ukrainian regions he was interested in annexing from Kyiv.
“Northern Bukovina cannot be forgotten! Southern Bessarabia cannot be forgotten! Hertsa region, Transylvania, everything that belonged and belongs to the Romanian nation must return to the borders of one state!” he told the crowd.
Tarziu called for closer relations with Russia whom he said he was ready to “shake hands with” after a tumultuous relationship in recent years.
“I believe that there is a need for a resolution of the relations between Romania and Russia, I recognize the need for good cooperation between Romania and Russia. I am ready to take a stand in this respect, but only after Russia proves that it wants it,” he said.
The AUR’s official position on NATO is that it is just one of the “empires” standing in the way of the realization of Greater Romania and that Romania’s membership of the alliance came at great cost to the country.
Romania has an ethnic minority in Ukraine of about 200,000 people and there are also recurring political trends asking for the re-unification with the Republic of Moldova, whose majority population (82 percent) is Romanian and which declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.
