Transnistria’s Order of Friendship: Legitimacy Through Diplomatic Practice

Abstract

What strategies do de facto states employ in conducting their diplomacy? This article examines Transnistria’s Order of Friendship, a state award that primarily targets foreigners, by analysing the profiles of all known award recipients. The Order is found to be a political tool to enhance Transnistria’s domestic and external legitimacy in the absence of recognised sovereignty. The findings confirm the literature on Transnistria’s ‘bandwagoning’ with Russia, indicate that a patron’s support must be actively sought rather than taken for granted, and—since many awardees are from jurisdictions other than the patron state Russia—point to the need to examine the foreign policy of de facto states more holistically.

When, in 2012, Transnistria established the Order of Friendship as its only state award primarily aimed at foreigners,¹ there were good reasons to doubt that the de facto state² still enjoyed a strong commitment from its patron state Russia. In the preceding year, Russia had backed a defeated candidate in the Transnistrian presidential election, pressuring the newly elected de facto government under the leadership of Evgenii Shevchuk to ‘convince his Russian ally of the continuity of Transnistria’s devotedness’ (Istomin & Bolgova 2016, p. 12). The cooling of relations between Russia and Transnistria was indicated by, inter alia, the eruption of a dispute on gas prices in Transnistria, the closure of the Russian quasi-consulate in Tiraspol, and investigations regarding the son of a former Transnistrian de facto president for allegedly embezzling Russian aid (Devyatkov 2012, pp. 57–8).

The accumulation of such signals was potentially grave for a political community whose population overwhelmingly—97.2%, according to a referendum in 2006—supports not only independence, but also a ‘subsequent free accession of Transnistria to the Russian Federation’ (Rogstad 2018, p. 6). The loss of Russian backing would thus endanger the de facto government’s domestic legitimacy. Even worse, with no international recognition other than by three entities without externally recognised sovereignty themselves—Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh—Transnistria lacks external legitimacy as well. In the absence of formal membership of international society, it relies on eliciting informal shows of outside support through diplomatic relationship management (McConnell 2017; Wille 2019).

It is in light of this delicate political context that the framework of legitimacy enables us to make sense of the Transnistrian Order of Friendship. The quest for (both domestic and international) legitimacy has been repeatedly identified as a valuable research agenda with regards to contested polities (Pegg 1998; Caspersen 2015; Dembińska & Campana 2017). This article seeks to answer the following questions with regards to the Order of Friendship: ‘What strategies do the ruling elites [in de facto states] employ in order to foster identity formation and self-legitimation … [and] how do these efforts influence the chances of attaining international awareness or even recognition?’ (von Steinsdorff & Fruhstorfer 2012, p. 118). Despite a growing literature on legitimacy-building efforts of de facto states (Broers 2013; O’Loughlin et al. 2014; Comai 2018), especially on the significance of informal patron–client networks in post-Soviet politics (Aliyev 2015; Polese & Rekhviashvili 2017), the actual diplomatic practices of legitimacy-building remain understudied (Dembińska & Campana 2017).

The present study shows that Transnistria employs the Order of Friendship strategically as a means of legitimacy promotion. The award seeks to co-opt individual recipients—mostly from the Russian elite, but also from Abkhazia, South Ossetia, the Catholic Church and the Transnistrian elite—into a relationship with the Transnistrian regime by conferring honours for past deeds. Since award recipients are presumed to feel psychologically impelled to reciprocate by using their resources to the benefit of the Transnistrian de facto state, this article hypothesises that the Order of Friendship is instrumental in building legitimacy. The reason is that the award bestowals draw on resources commonly regarded as legitimacy-enhancing, that is, they communicate, through the high-level profiles of the recipients, that Transnistria enjoys external support, that it appreciates the importance of democratic practices, and that its foreign policy remains aligned with the population’s preferences.

This research adds new empirical and theoretical impetus to the literature on the external relations of de facto states, and to (public) diplomacy in general. First, showing how Transnistria pursues diplomacy-cum-legitimacy-promotion using the Order of Friendship illuminates some of the strategic rationales that guide the international engagement of de facto states (Ker-Lindsay 2015; Ker-Lindsay & Berg 2018). The findings of this case study demonstrate that the external relations of de facto states should be examined more holistically. So far, most research has focused on de facto states’ ties to their patrons and ‘parent states’, that is, the de jure states from which they have broken away (Deudney & Ikenberry 2009; Souleimanov et al. 2018), or on structurally determined interactions with great powers such as the United States (Coggins 2011; Pegg & Berg 2016). While the list of recipients of the Order of Friendship confirms that Transnistria’s main external reference point is Russia (Gnedina 2015; Nitoiu 2018), it also indicates that de facto states regularly foster ties with each other (Isachenko 2012; Kosienkowski 2012; Toomla 2016) and with other international actors, including the Catholic Church (Comai 2017; Pacher 2019). Secondly, state awards, despite their pedigree and ubiquity, have never received focused attention in International Relations scholarship. This research demonstrates how an obscure political instrument can reveal underlying governmental strategies in interactions with foreign publics, thus contributing to a greater understanding of the ‘making of world politics’ through diplomatic practices (Adler-Nissen 2008; Bueger & Gadinger 2015; Sending et al. 2015; Bouris & Fernández-Molina 2018; Cornut 2018).

This article will proceed with a brief outline of the relevant understandings of legitimacy and public diplomacy before formulating a hypothesis on the Transnistrian Order of Friendship. It will then present the methodology and empirical data, and analyse the legitimacy-building strategy behind the Transnistrian Order of Friendship, before the article concludes.

Framework

Legitimacy

Traditional conceptions of statehood assessed political communities in strictly binary terms: they were either states or they were not; either sovereign or not; either legitimate or not (Grant 1998). International recognition—based on the fulfilment of normative criteria of ‘statehood’—was the key criterion that marked a polity’s status. However, recent analyses have found that recognition is not a straightforward ‘reward’ for norm-abidance. Recognition patterns rather occur through quasi-mechanistic structural patterns that often follow the interests of great powers (Kinne 2014). The actual dynamic of state recognition seems therefore devoid of clear legal rationales (Onuf 2013; Griffiths 2017).

The scholarship has thus come to embrace Max Weber’s (non-legal) understanding of legitimacy, according to which a political community is legitimate when it gains its members’ support and acceptance to such an extent that it enables the polity’s endurance (Weber 1972, p. 122; Koller 2009, p. 310). This view informs definitions of a legitimate political authority as ‘one that fosters, among its subjects, an obligation to obey or comply with its rules, predominantly through consent’ (Bakke et al. 2014, p. 592). With this understanding revolving around the need to achieve approval among its subjects, a polity’s legitimacy is ultimately rooted in a ‘collective’s belief in rightful rule’ (Lake 2010, p. 31; emphasis added). The strategic construction of legitimacy is processual and relational (Jeffrey et al. 2015, p. 179) because it does not occur binarily, as in the traditional view, but rather by attaining gradual ‘degrees of legitimacy’ (Caspersen 2015) in ongoing efforts.

Further disaggregations commonly identify the following sources of legitimacy (Berg & Mölder 2012; Bakke et al. 2014, p. 593): external security and support; democratic responsiveness; the provision of material goods; and nation-building efforts. It is assumed that a government that performs well on these four grounds will most likely enjoy acceptance.

The first component, external security and support, is satisfied when perceived threats from the outside are mitigated through military, political or diplomatic means. This not only refers to the abatement of imminent threats of war. Any powerful support from outside is significant, even in the form of reassuring gestures without immediate tangible benefits. The promotion of a favourable stance towards the de facto state among other countries’ elite actors also induces a sense of external security and support. Gestures of outside acceptance nourish a feeling of certainty, which is fundamental to at least a minimal level of ontological security (Mitzen 2006). In most cases, contested entities rely on the support of a patron state. With regards to Transnistria, for example, Russia has, despite the occasional emergence of bilateral tensions, generously provided political assurances, military help, pension payments, subsidised resources, and economic loans and investments. In line with Nina Caspersen’s (2009, p. 53) observation that contested states are well-advised to access alternative sources of support so as to achieve greater autonomy from the patron state, it should be mentioned that this component of legitimacy can also be satisfied when external support comes from any outside actor, not only from the patron.

The second component of internal legitimacy is the government’s ability to demonstrate democratic responsiveness (Berg & Mölder 2012, p. 529). A government achieves greater popular approval when it delivers goods and policies based on its subjects’ preferences (Koller 2009, p. 310). For example, as Transnistria’s population overwhelmingly supports a political alignment with Russia, the government’s strategic focus on close ties to its patron state can be seen as a reflection of popular will. Moreover, de facto states have recently placed discursive emphasis on their governance, rule of law and transparency with the implicit claim that they finally ‘earned’ sovereignty in a ‘democratisation-for-recognition strategy’ (Caspersen 2008; Voller 2015; Kopeček et al. 2016). In Transnistria, an officially sanctioned narrative of multi-ethnicity is part of this rhetorical commitment to democratic values (Kopeček et al. 2016, p. 89), as illustrated by the solemn preamble of the constitution, which starts with the words ‘We, [the] multinational people of the Transnistrian Moldavian Republic, united by a common fate on our land’.³

Thirdly, the provision of common goods that improve the community’s welfare is likewise essential to obtain legitimacy (Koller 2009, p. 311; Berg & Mölder 2012, p. 529). Material security through economic goods provision or foreign investment attraction ensures employment, overall well-being and social order (Bakke et al. 2014, pp. 593–94). Perceptions of distributive fairness and sufficient material well-being ensure that the governed are loyal to the state because ‘they feel that they get something in return—in security and other benefits and goods’ (Kolstø & Blakkisrud 2008, p. 485). Transnistria has frequently grappled with its economic performance and the provision of social security. Shortly after Transnistria claimed its independence in 1990, the Transnistrian remnants of the Soviet-era centralised economy broke down in parallel with the contracting markets of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) area. Since then, problems concerning the currency, ‘crony privatisations’, insufficient ability to levy taxes, lack of adequate investments and poor provision of social security have prompted Transnistria to regularly solicit help from Moscow.

The fourth and final component of creating legitimacy is nation-building—‘processes and means by which ethnic entrepreneurs and political leaders promote re-imagined myths of nationhood … a type of “nationalization” by “nationalising elites”’ (Dembińska & Campana 2017, p. 15), which leads to a ‘fostering of [a] collective identity’ (Bakke et al. 2014, p. 594). Nationalising politics ensure social cohesiveness through a shared political culture. The use of state symbols—anthems, flags, coat of arms, coins, state awards—can create a ‘banal omnipresence’ (Antonsich & Skey 2017, p. 2) of ‘everyday nationhood’ (Fox & Miller-Idriss 2008). This ‘banal nationalism’ (Billig 1995) enables material objects to discursively elicit ritualistic allegiances to political collectives manifested in symbols (Kertzer 1988; Pacher 2018a).⁴ In the Transnistrian case, with around 33% of the population being ethnic Moldovans and with the state promoting an image of a ‘multiethnic Transnistria’, nation-building pertains to a ‘common supraethnic Dniester identity’, founded ‘not on ethnicity, but on a common language—Russian—a separate history, and a certain Soviet nostalgia’ (Kolstø 2006, p. 731). As a result of the historical counterreaction to Moldova’s espousal of nationalism (Blakkisrud & Kolstø 2011, pp. 194–95), one part of Transnistria’s distinct national identity-building efforts relates to using a version of the Cyrillic alphabet for Moldovan, as used during the Soviet period, rather than the Latin alphabet, as is used in Moldova (Osipov & Vasilevich 2019, p. 5).

To sum up, the winning of support from outside actors, the satisfactory provision of public goods, the democratic responsiveness of the de facto state’s government, and the fostering of a cohesive demos are crucial sources of internal popular acceptance. Such a consent-centred notion of legitimacy focuses on the interaction between the state, its peers and its subjects, suggesting that legitimacy is inherently relational occurring in performative practices (Jeffrey et al. 2015, p. 179). State awards perfectly illustrate this notion. I will now briefly discuss public diplomacy, under which a government’s relationship-management with the public, including through state awards, falls (Melissen 2005; Gregory 2008; Scott-Smith 2018).

State awards as tools of public diplomacy

Almost every government possesses state awards that they confer upon their own or foreign citizens. It is an age-old policy tool that honours often powerful individuals in a bid to foster loyalty and commitment, and to signal close relationships between the giver and the recipients to a wider audience. This relational aspect of state awards allows them to be subsumed under the framework of public diplomacy. Whereas traditional diplomacy is largely confined to state-to-state negotiations, public diplomacy is about governments reaching out to (often foreign) publics, with the aim of ‘enhancing human relations between sovereign states and peoples to achieve mutual understanding and benefits’ (Fitzpatrick 2012, p. 424). In the present case, relationship-building can be understood on two levels.

Firstly, the often grand ceremonial interactions of state award bestowals foster relational bonds between the giver and the honoured individuals. Every human being fundamentally desires heightened status (Anderson et al. 2015), and will be favourably inclined towards people who confer honour upon them (Henrich & Gil-White 2001). Voluntary deference to others is therefore an instrumental act, one that helps to solicit compliance from the thus honoured (Anderson et al. 2015, p. 2). It follows that the Order of Friendship is a political tool that publicly honours elite actors to create expectations of reciprocity. Governmental award bestowals upon capital-rich personalities seek to tap their resources and their prestige with which the polity’s legitimacy can be enhanced.

Secondly, state awards do not only sustain governmental ties with the individual awardees. The targets of public diplomacy are conceptualised as ‘strategic publics’ (Fitzpatrick 2012) and can be disaggregated into at least two units of analysis, namely the immediately involved persons (individual award recipients) and the general public (Pacher 2018b). While the individual recipients may feel honoured and inclined to further support the Transnistrian cause, the publicity of award bestowals also sends signals to a more general audience. By bestowing awards, the government demonstrates to the general public the values it cherishes, thereby incentivising other honour-seeking individuals to pursue similar activities (Bénabou & Tirole 2006; Frey & Gallus 2016). It also communicates to the domestic general public that the government enjoys friendship with elite actors. If the awardees exhibit characteristics praised by domestic public opinion—for instance, a philanthropic inclination to invest into charity projects in Transnistria—then the award bestowal signals that the government shares the same values as its populace.

The Transnistrian Order of Friendship is an apt tool to pursue relationship-building through the use of cooperative signals. The emphasis on positive elements in foreign policy was typical of the early tenure of the de facto Transnistrian president, Evgenii Shevchuk, elected in 2012, particularly when contrasted with the confrontational style of his predecessor Igor Smirnov (Kosienkowski 2012, p. 7). The Order provides a channel to establish close personal relations with important Russian officials and other elites to win favourable attitudes from strategic partners, a crucial approach in the post-Soviet sphere, where politics is often defined by informal patron–client relations (Hale 2014). By disseminating information on award bestowals through the Transnistrian mass media, including solemn photographs of the de facto president shaking hands with the decorated recipients, the domestic public can collectively witness the symbolic togetherness of their representative with foreign elites.⁵

The Order itself is a metallic object depicting official Transnistrian state emblems. It is named and modelled after other friendship orders that were established in socialist countries based on the concept of ‘Friendship of Peoples’ (druzhba narodov), a genealogical derivative of Marx’s solidarity among labourers (Roshchin 2011; Koschut & Oelsner 2014; Applebaum 2015).⁶ The name of the Order thus already indicates a cross-boundary impetus, and it is indeed primarily intended for foreigners: according to its statutes, the Order was first and foremost ‘established to reward citizens of foreign states … for special services in strengthening peace, friendship, cooperation and mutual understanding between peoples’.⁷ Transnistria possesses various state awards, such as the Order of Merit, the Order for Personal Courage and the Labour Glory Order, but they are chiefly intended for domestic citizens. The Order of Friendship is the only one that is aimed at foreigners, making it relevant to researchers interested in how de facto states pursue legitimacy-enhancing diplomatic practices.

Hypothesis

The literature on legitimacy in de facto states assumes that the absence of legitimacy and the ‘lack of international recognition [are the] key background conditions that shaped the institutional setup and the functioning of the political system’ (Protsyk 2012, p. 177). As one part of that setup, does the way in which the Transnistrian government uses its Order of Friendship permit the identification of underlying legitimacy-building strategies? This question can be answered in the affirmative when one can confirm that each award bestowal seeks to draw on the abovementioned four sources of legitimacy. In other words, this article hypothesises that each recipient of the Transnistrian Order of Friendship has resources at their disposal to provide Transnistria with external security and support, an image of democratic responsiveness and responsibility, material goods contributing to the welfare of Transnistria, or nation-building aspects.

Data samples and methodology

List of recipients

Primary search of official databases

As there is no official list of recipients of the Transnistrian Order of Friendship, this research first surveyed publicly accessible data to obtain a list of recipients from the founding of the award in 2012 until 15 August 2018. All identified recipients can be traced back to a single presidential decree or another official source. While the list of recipients cannot guarantee completeness, the problem of missing data is mitigated by the fact that an informal examination of the ‘known unknowns’ does not refute, but rather confirms our findings (as will be demonstrated below).

Data collection was pursued in the following steps.⁸ First, as all Transnistrian state honours are awarded by presidential decrees (ukazy),⁹ this study consulted databases of such ukazy. There are three relevant databases, namely the Yuridicheskaya Literatura,¹⁰ Zakony Pridnestrov’ya ¹¹ and a database on the website of the Transnistrian President.¹² I searched all three for the term Orden druzhby (Order of Friendship) in Cyrillic, finding a total of 17 individual recipients. To ensure traceability, the exact official sources are listed in the list of recipients (see Table 1).

TABLE 1 Recipients of the Transnistrian Order of Friendship

	Date	Recipient	Nationality	Comment	Source
R1	2012	Sergey Baburin	Russia	State Duma deputy	*
R2	2 September 2012	Stanislav Kochiev	South Ossetia	Chairman of the Parliament of the Republic of South Ossetia	Ukaz No. 574, 2 September 2012
R3	29 August 2014	Aleksey Zhuravlyov	Russia	State Duma deputy; Chairman of political party Rodina; founder of the NGO ‘Eurasian Integration’	†
R4	9 February 2015	Oleg Matveychev	Russia	Political analyst	Ukaz No. 46, 9 February 2015
R5	14 April 2015	Sergey Gubarev	Russia	Diplomat	Ukaz No. 150, 14 April 2015
R6	14 April 2015	Sergey Gavrilov	Russia	State Duma deputy	Ukaz No. 151, 14 April 2015
R7	14 April 2015	Kazbek Taisayev	Russia	Secretary of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party, State Duma deputy	Ukaz No. 152, 14 April 2015
R8	28 August 2015	Aleksandr Vataman	Abkhazia	Diplomat	Ukaz No. 331, 28 August 2015
R9	28 August 2015	Sergey Surago	South Ossetia	Diplomat	Ukaz No. 331, 28 August 2015
R10	31 August 2015	Grigory Marakutsa	Transnistria	The first speaker of the Transnistrian Supreme Council	Ukaz No. 341, 31 August 2015
R11	3 September 2015	Valerian Tulgar	Transnistria	Represents the Union of Moldavians in Transnistria	‡
R12	12 October 2015	Natalia Valeeva	Born in Transnistria, naturalised Italian	Archer (three times world champion)	Ukaz No. 400, 12 October 2015
R13	19 June 2016	Leonid Tibilov	South Ossetia	De facto head of state	§
R14	25 July 2016	Anatoly Lokot	Russia	Mayor of Novosibirsk, member of the Russian Communist Party	Ukaz No. 262, 15 July 2016
R15	25 October 2016	Raul Khajimba	Abkhazia	De facto head of state	¶
R16	25 November 2016	Iosif Kobzon	Russia	Popular singer, State Duma deputy	Ukaz No. 489, 25 November 2016
R17	30 January 2017	Farit Mukhametshin	Russia	Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador of the Russian Federation in the Republic of Moldova	Ukaz No. 64, 30 January 2017
R18	26 April 2017	Petro Kushman	Catholic Church	Bishop’s Delegate of the Tiraspol District Vicariate of the Roman Catholic Church	Ukaz No. 256, 26 April 2017
R19	26 April 2017	Miguel Maury Buendía	Catholic Church	Apostolic Nuncio in Moldova	Ukaz No. 256, 26 April 2017
R20	26 April 2017	Grigory Karasin	Russia	Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation	Ukaz No. 255, 26 April 2017
R21	1 July 2017	Operative Group of the Russian Troops (unnamed individuals)	Russia	Russian forces stationed in Transnistria	ǁ
R22	20 September 2017	Anatoly Bibilov	South Ossetia	De facto head of state	**
R23	8 November 2017	Interparliamentary Assembly of the Community for Democracy and Peoples’ Rights	Abkhazia and South Ossetia	Organisation comprising representatives of legislative bodies of Transnistria, Abkhazia and South Ossetia	Ukaz No. 625, 8 November 2017
R24	29 January 2018	Anatoly Belitchenko	Transnistria	Moldova Steel Works (MMZ)	Ukaz No. 27, 29 January 2018

Sources: * ‘Sergey Baburin: “Ya benderchanin, rabotayushchii v Rossii”’, ProfVesti, 9 September 2012, available at: https://profvesti.org/2012/09/09/8992, accessed 19 August 2018; † ‘Uchreditel ANO “Evraziiskaya integratsiya” nagrazhden Ordenom Druzhby PMR’, VestiPMR, 29 August 2014, available at: http://vestipmr.info/articles/2014/08/29/uchreditel-ano-evraziyskaya-integraciyanagrazhdyon-ordenom, accessed 12 August 2017; ‡ ‘Valerian Tulgara: “Net takoi sily v mire, kotoraya mogla by otvernut Pridnestrove ot Rossii”’, NovostiPMR, 19 August 2015, available at: http://novostipmr.ru/info/vesti/2015-08-valeriyan-tulgara-to-schem-my-spravlyalis-eti-25-let-s-chem-my-eshhe-spravimsya-stanet-dostoyaniem-respubliki/, accessed 12 August 2017; § ‘Prezident Yuzhnoi Osetii Leonid Tibilov prinyal delegatsiyu PMR’, State Information Agency of the Republic of South Ossetia, 19 September 2016, available at: http://cominf.org/node/1166509623, accessed 12 August 2017; ¶ ‘Vstrecha Prezidenta s Ministrom Inostrannykh del PMR’, President of Abkhazia, 25 October 2016, available at: http://presidentofabkhazia.org/about/info/news/?ELEMENT_ID=5293, accessed 12 August 2017; ǁ ‘Operativnoi Gruppe Rossiiskikh Voisk v PMR―22 Goda’, NovostiPMR, 1 July 2017, available at: https://novostipmr.com/ru/news/17-07-01/operativnoy-gruppe-rossiyskih-voysk-v-pmr-22-goda, accessed 12 August 2017; ** ‘Pridnestrovian Delegation Meets with the President of South Ossetia’, NovostiPMR, 13 November 2017, available at: https://novostipmr.com/en/news/17-11-13/pridnestrovian-delegation-meets-presidentsouth-osseti, accessed 19 August 2018.

Secondary search for ‘missing data’

The president can also sign decrees that remain deliberately closed from public access (Kireyeva 2017). This possibility heightens the risk of missing data, reducing in turn statistical power and increasing the likeliness of a biased estimation (Kang 2013). To hedge against this risk, I conducted a web search on both Yandex.ru and Google.com using the keywords ‘PMR Orden Druzhby’ (in Cyrillic) and browsed the first 50 results for each, creating a ‘web sphere’ that included all websites to which the search results linked to. This method revealed 11 additional recipients. I then assessed the credibility of the web sources claiming that these additional individuals had received the Transnistrian Order of Friendship. Four of these sources were found to lack sufficient credibility as they relied on unofficial sources, while the other seven were judged as credible (for reasons discussed below) and thus included in the list. As case deletion is the default response when data seem unreliable (Kang 2013, p. 403), the study simply omitted the first four cases from the main analysis.

The rejected ones are as follows. The information agency Rex reported that two individuals, Modest Kolerov and Aleksey Martynov, had received the Transnistrian Order of Friendship based on a decree from 31 August 2012.¹³ However, a search of the databases of presidential decrees did not confirm these decorations. It is possible that the claimed bestowals were listed in one or two of these unpublished decrees, but given the lack of secure official information, this article does not include them in its main analysis. Furthermore, no corresponding decree was found to confirm the bestowal of the Order of Friendship on Leonid Reshetnikov—the director of the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies (RISS)—an event reported on the RISS website.¹⁴ The same is true with the alleged bestowal of the award on the Institute of CIS Countries headed by the Russian State Duma Deputy Konstantin Zatulin (Zatulin 2016). The study thus does not include these four cases in the data sample. However, as will be discussed later, the integration of these rejected cases would not have changed the conclusion; on the contrary, their inclusion would have confirmed the hypothesis.

Seven other cases that could not be found in the official databases of presidential decrees were nevertheless integrated into the list of recipients. The first three are the de facto Head of State of South Ossetia, Leonid Tibilov, on 19 June 2016,¹⁵ the de facto Head of State of Abkhazia, Raul Khajimba, on 25 October 2016,¹⁶ and Tibilov’s successor, Anatoly Bibilov, on 20 September 2017.¹⁷ While respective decrees cannot be found in the official databases, I deemed the sources reporting the bestowals to be credible, for they were the official web presentations of the respective recipients’ de facto governments. Other cases included in this study were those reported by Transnistrian media sources: Sergey Baburin, a Russian State Duma member and high-ranking politician who allegedly received the Order of Friendship in 2012;¹⁸ Aleksey Zhuravlyov, another Russian State Duma deputy and founder of the NGO ‘Eurasian Integration’ who was supposed to have received the award on 29 August 2014;¹⁹ Valerian Tulgar, the official representative of the Union of Moldavians in Transnistria (Soyuz moldavan v Pridnestrov’ye), who was presumably bestowed the Order of Friendship by the president in September 2015;²⁰ and a number of unnamed representatives of the Operative Group of the Russian Troops (OGRT) in Transnistria on 1 July 2017.²¹ These instances were included because this information was backed by reports on media sources controlled by the Transnistrian government (Thoric & Silitcaia 2016) and was therefore deemed credible.

Final list of recipients

The following analysis will be based on the following list of 24 recipients.

The recipients represent Russia (11 out of 24 recipients), South Ossetia (five), Transnistria (four recipients, one of whom represents ethnic Moldovans), Abkhazia (three recipients) and the Catholic Church (two recipients). ‘Representation’ refers to the primary affiliation of the recipient to a political community, which is most often the polity for which they work or the territory of their origin (Sharp 1999; Kratochwil 2001). This is not to be confused with a recipient’s citizenship: a perspective focusing on citizenship would also include, inter alia, an Italian (R12) and a Spanish (R19), and the categorisation of those who represent the contested states Abkhazia and South Ossetia would be problematic.

Content analysis

The following examines assumed legitimacy-building strategies of the Order of Friendship via the method of content analysis. This approach usually proceeds in five steps: first, formulation of research question or hypothesis (see above); second, selection of sample data; third, the coding of categories; fourth, the training of coders, content-coding and the assessment of intercoder reliability; and fifth, analysis and interpretation of the result thus obtained (Mayring 2000).

Data sampling

The choice of the data sample to be analysed cannot be confined to the official decrees stipulating the award bestowals. As a reason for the bestowal, the decrees merely contain a short generic formula and disclose hardly any information about the respective recipient other than their names. Thus, a closer analysis must draw on information from sources other than the decrees. An internet search offers greater information. Ideally, the data sample should be random, but constructing a statistically random and yet representative sample on the internet is impossible given the sheer volume of data (Herring 2009). Scholars of web content analysis have therefore allowed room for greater flexibility, for example, by taking into account web spheres or by generating sampling frames rather than a clearly delimited sample (Herring 2009; Lewis et al. 2013).

This study’s sampling frame is limited to the first 15 link destinations following a web search on Yandex.ru using the Cyrillic spellings of the respective award recipients and PMR, the abbreviation for Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic. It is further limited to a selection of only those web sources that pertain to official governmental or state-controlled institutions so as to prevent sources of lesser credibility being included in the study sample. Only a maximum of four sources per recipient is taken into account. Moreover, as web data are known to be ‘liquid’ rather than static (Karlsson & Sjøvaag 2016), the whole data sample is ‘frozen’ or saved as durable PDFs (between 4 and 9 August 2017, and on 14 August 2018) and made available in the supplementary material. This procedure is intended to ensure replicability and transparency.

The data sample consists of a total of 70 sources, of which 35 pertain to official Transnistrian state organs (50%), 23 to Transnistrian media (33%), seven to non-Transnistrian official state organs (10%), and the rest to South Ossetian information agencies, the Russian Communist Party and the Russian National Research University Higher School of Economics (6%). The list and the PDFs of the sources that constitute the sample are available as supplementary materials on Harvard Dataverse.²² These sources were considered to allow for reasonable inferences about the resources available to each recipient that may contribute to Transnistrian legitimacy.

Categories and coding scheme

The quality of a case study can be enhanced by using a framework explicitly derived from existing literature (Gibbert et al. 2008). The categories of this study are thus coded according to a deductive content analysis method, that is, they are deduced from the theories of legitimacy as summarised above. The subcategories are ‘external security’, ‘democratic responsiveness’, ‘material goods provision’, ‘nation-building’ and ‘none’; the first four can be broadly classified as ‘legitimacy-building’, while the fifth subcategory indicates ‘no legitimacy-building’. The category definitions, examples and precise coding rules are listed in Table 2.

TABLE 2 Coding Scheme for the Content Analysis

Categories	Subcategories	Definition	Examples
Legitimacy-building	External security and support	The recipient has considerable military, political or diplomatic means that can help support Transnistria, by mitigating an external threat to Transnistria or by promoting a favourable stance towards Transnistria among the elite actors of other countries.	Recipients are politicians with major leverage in their home country (heads of states, ministers, members of parliaments).
	Democratic responsiveness	The bestowal embodies a value informed by democracy or rule of law, or the recipient exhibits a characteristic that accords with the Transnistrian population’s clearly stated preferences.	Recipients are part of a minority in Transnistria. Recipient can help Transnistria to align closer to the population’s overwhelmingly preferred partner, Russia.
	Material goods provision	Recipients control material resources that they can mobilise to increase Transnistrian welfare.	Recipients have the capital to conduct large-scale investment or charity projects in Transnistria.
	Nation-building	Recipients exhibit characteristics that are valuable for fostering a particular Transnistrian identity.	Recipients vocally defend a Transnistrian identity in an anti-Moldovan manner.
No legitimacy-building	None	Recipients have none of the above characteristics, or they can undermine Transnistria’s internal legitimacy (for example, by fear of retaliation from the patron state).	Recipient is a US politician known for her or his anti-Russian stance.

Alongside the principal investigator, a second coder, a native Russian speaker provided with basic knowledge of Transnistria, was employed in the analysis. The purpose of this study was explained to her, along with the coding schemes. Both coders screened the data sample to find information about how the respective Order of Friendship recipients were presented. Whenever a coder assumed that the respective recipient was, based on the available information, able to provide one of the subcategories of internal legitimacy to Transnistria, the recipient’s dataset was coded with that applicable category; coders could code multiple subcategories for one recipient; if no subcategory was deemed applicable, the recipient was coded in the fifth category (‘no legitimacy-building’). The screening of data and the coding were conducted independently by both coders on 10–12 August 2017 and 14 August 2018.

Results

Intercoder reliability was calculated in terms of percentage agreement: ‘the percentage of all coding decisions made by pairs of coders on which the coders agree’ (Lombard et al. 2002, p. 590). On the level of high-level categories, of which there were only two (legitimacy-building ‘yes’ or ‘no’), intercoder reliability was measured at 1.0; there was a 100% agreed perception that all Order of Friendship bestowals served to build internal legitimacy, confirming this article’s hypothesis. On the level of subcategories, intercoder reliability was 0.88. The coders discussed their disagreements, after which intercoder agreement (Campbell et al. 2013) regarding the subcategories increased to 0.95.²³ When the coders disagreed, the principal investigator acceded four times, and the second coder acceded five times to the other’s opinion. As ‘coefficients of .90 or greater would be acceptable to all, .80 or greater would be acceptable in most situations’ (Neuendorf 2002, p. 145), the interrater agreement of 0.95 may be deemed a fair outcome that allows this article to proceed with a discussion of the results.

Table 3 enumerates the final results after the negotiated agreements between the coders, listing the jointly agreed points as ‘X’:

TABLE 3 Intercoder Agreement on Categories Applied to Order of Friendship Recipients

Recipient	Legitimacy-building				No legitimacy-building
	External security	Democratic responsiveness	Material goods provision	Nation-building
R1	X	X
R2	X
R3	X	X	X
R4		X
R5	X	X
R6	X	X	X
R7	X	X
R8	X
R9	X
R10		X		X
R11		X		X
R12				X
R13	X
R14	X	X	X
R15	X
R16	X	X
R17	X	X	X
R18		X	X
R19	X	X
R20	X	X
R21	X	X
R22	X
R23	X	X
R24			X

Discussion

Every publicly and reliably documented bestowal of the Transnistrian Order of Friendship reveals a strategy of legitimacy-building: by associating itself through the award with influential foreign ‘friends’, the Transnistrian government projects a sense of security. These ‘friends’ are all well-known, politically active figures in their home polities, including the heads of states of Abkhazia and South Ossetia (R13, R15 and R22) and representatives from their legislative bodies (R23), the chairman of the South Ossetian parliament (R2), diplomats from various jurisdictions (R5, R8, R9, R17 and R19), the deputy foreign minister of the Russian Federation (R20), the mayor of Novosibirsk (R14) and State Duma deputies (R1, R6, R7, R16), as well as a Russian political scientist who enjoys wide Russian media coverage and is an influential voice in domestic Russian politics (R4). These personalities arguably possess leverage that could be used to enact political change; they control considerable resources that the Transnistrian government may wish to access. Moreover, many of them have already publicly expressed their support for the Transnistrian cause. For example, back in 2010, Stanislav Kochiev (R2) demanded that Russia recognise the independence of Transnistria (Transnistrian Foreign Ministry 2010); similar calls were uttered by Oleg Matveichev (R4),²⁴ while politicians such as Sergey Gavrilov (R6) have promised favourable discussions on Transnistria in the Russian State Duma.²⁵ Co-opting such resource-controlling and politically influential personalities via one of the highest state honours enables the Transnistrian state to demonstrate to its subjects that it enjoys powerful external support.

As ‘democratic responsiveness’ ensures that the government’s foreign policy broadly follows public opinion, which includes accommodating the popular preference for close political ties with Russia, this category was applied as a default option to all bestowals where the respective recipient was an influential Russian politician or diplomat. By ostentatiously honouring Russian political players, the Transnistrian government demonstrates that it shares values and bonds of friendship with elite actors in Transnistria’s patron state, Russia. It is also assumed that the bestowal of the Order on Transnistria’s speaker of the parliament, the Supreme Council (R10), amounted to the honouring of the embodiment of democratic values, given the organ’s constitution through electoral procedures. The same is true with regards to the Inter-Parliamentary Assembly of the Community for Democracy and Peoples’ Rights, an organisation comprising representatives of the legislative bodies of Transnistria, South Ossetia and Abkhazia (R23). Furthermore, an accommodation of popular taste was evident when the award was conferred on a successful sportswoman (R12) and a famous singer, Iosif Kobzon (R16).²⁶ In cases when the recipient was a representative of an ethnic or religious minority (R11, R18 and R19), they were also assumed to have been honoured for reasons of democratic-pluralistic values.

Other bestowals were instrumental in facilitating material goods provision, effectively co-opting individuals who controlled tangible resources and who had shown willingness to mobilise them in the interests of Transnistria. The Russian State Duma deputy Aleksey Zhuravlyov (R3), for instance, was the founder of the NGO ‘Eurasian Integration’, which had provided aid to build humanitarian facilities in Transnistria, such as a hospital specialising in chemotherapy (Istomin & Bolgova 2016, p. 12; Transnistrian Foreign Ministry 2016). Similar philanthropic impulses apply to the Russian State Duma deputy Gavrilov (R6), who served as a contact point for Russo–Transnistrian cooperation in economic and humanitarian matters. He suggested that his home country ‘actively works on [the] implementation of programs of support of Pridnestrovie’ which touch upon the ‘strengthening of financial stability of the state, assistance in the sphere of retirement benefits, of school and preschool education, provision of educational materials, modernization of medical equipment and other spheres’ (Transnistrian Foreign Ministry 2012). Similar notions of brokering welfare projects were audible in the case of the Russian ambassador to Moldova (R17) when he underscored his country’s commitment to large-scale humanitarian assistance and further investment into the Transnistrian economy (Transnistrian Foreign Ministry 2013). In another case, the mayor of Novosibirsk, Anatoly Lokot (R14), received the Order of Friendship for having concluded a twinning agreement with Tiraspol, opening a new market for Transnistrian enterprises.²⁷ This bestowal was thus also assumed to enhance legitimacy via an increase in economic welfare. The Catholic Bishop’s Delegate of the Tiraspol District (R18) similarly conducted charity projects.²⁸ Finally, the decoration of Anatoly Belitchenko (R24) also fell under the category of ‘material benefit’. He had headed the Moldova Steel Works (MMZ), ‘the most productive and profitable of the almost dozen Russian-owned factories in Transnistria’, for over two decades (Chamberlain-Creangă & Allin 2010, p. 334). In some financial years, MMZ accounted for up to two-thirds of the region’s tax revenues, making Belitchenko a major political player in Transnistria (Balmaceda 2013, p. 452). Belitchenko also presided over the Transnistrian Union of Industrialists, Agrarians and Entrepreneurs, which was tasked with attracting foreign investments to Transnistria (Transnistrian Foreign Ministry 2011). Thus, through its conferral of the award, the government makes a public show of respect for individuals who provide resources that benefit the welfare of Transnistria, socially as well as economically.

The logic of nation-building was assumed to be behind the granting of the award to Grigory Marakutsa (R10), who was officially hailed as an invaluable individual whose contribution to the ‘preservation and development of Moldovan culture and the Moldovan language on a Cyrillic basis’ was particularly emphasised.²⁹ Similar rhetoric was used in the case of Valerian Tulgar (R11), the Chairman of the Union of Ethnic Moldovans in Transnistria, who had vocally condemned Moldova’s politics towards the de facto state.³⁰ The case of honouring an Olympic archer born in Transnistria (but an Italian citizen) was also seen as an attempt to ‘nationalise’ her (R12), while there was no intercoder agreement with regards to nation-building measures in the cases of the two representatives of the Catholic Church (R18 and R19).³¹

While each bestowal signals different values, they all seek to attract legitimacy-enhancing resources. A brief and informal examination can claim the same with regards to the ‘known unknowns’ initially identified but omitted from the list because they were only named in non-official sources.³² All four alleged recipients were Russians and headed well-networked organisations, thus potentially providing influential external support. Modest Kolerov, the first alleged recipient, is director of the Regnum news agency, one of the largest Russian news dissemination networks. Aleksey Martynov, the second alleged recipient, heads the International Institute of Newly Established States, a Moscow-based think-tank with a branch in Tiraspol that offers geopolitical expertise to local policymakers. The Institute of CIS Countries, another alleged institutional awardee, is headed by Konstantin Zatulin, the First Deputy Chairman of the Russian State Duma Committee on CIS Affairs, Eurasian Integration and Relations with Compatriots. Finally, Leonid Reshetnikov was, by presidential decree, appointed director of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, which conducts political research directly reporting to the Russian presidential administration, from 2009 to 2017. All awardees had access to important political networks and resources that the government of Transnistria was likely to mobilise in order to provide legitimacy-enhancing goods. These four cases, therefore, do not refute this article’s hypothesis but rather confirm it.

The analysis supports the current knowledge established in the literature on Transnistria’s foreign relations. As the majority of recipients observed in this study are Russians, it corroborates the predominant prediction (Istomin & Bolgova 2016; Rogstad 2018; Kosienkowski 2020) that Transnistria would exercise continued loyalty towards its patron. The notion that Transnistrian allegiance would continue to focus on Russia is most plausibly explained by the conceptual framework of ‘bandwagoning’ (with Russia) and ‘balancing’ (with Moldova), according to which a weak state actively strengthens its ties to a major power to ensure its survival against a perceived threat (Gnedina 2015). This literature on bandwagoning and balancing has also directed attention to another important point of reference in Transnistrian foreign policy, namely Ukraine. It may seem puzzling that no publicly known recipient of the Order of Friendship at the time of writing was Ukrainian, given the importance of Ukraine to Transnistria in political, economic and cultural terms (Kosienkowski 2012). However, the frameworks of bandwagoning and post-Soviet multivector foreign policies predicted that Transnistria would put aside its ties to Ukraine when Kyiv’s relations with Russia soured. As recent analysts stated, ‘if Ukraine was seen as a reliable partner, Tiraspol could try to sacrifice its bandwagoning to Moscow by … deepening its alignment with Kiev. However, it is questionable whether Transnistria possesses enough resources to sustain itself in the long run’ (Istomin & Bolgova 2016, p. 14)—particularly after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. For instance, in the Transnistrian 2016 presidential campaign, Vadiim Krasnosel’skii’s loyalty to Russia was doubted because he had grown up in the same neighbourhood as Petro Poroshenko, who became president of Ukraine in 2014: ‘after the Euromaidan Revolution, any linkage that could be intimated to exist between any of the candidates in the Transnistrian elections and the current Ukrainian leadership became a liability’ (Kolstø & Blakkisrud 2017, p. 512). It is possible that the souring of Russian–Ukrainian ties had already been sensed by the Transnistrian authorities when the Order of Friendship was established, and that Transnistria has not awarded any Ukrainians because of its policy of bandwagoning with Russia.

While the state award’s overwhelming focus on Russia and the absence of Ukrainian recipients can be explained by existing frameworks, this article’s analysis also points towards an understudied issue, namely, the hitherto unexplained ties that bind the Transnistrian de facto state with, on the one hand, the elites from other post-Soviet de facto states, most notably Abkhazia and South Ossetia and, on the other, politically relevant entities beyond that, such as the Catholic Church and transnational actors (Pacher 2019). When analysing de facto states, most researchers have focused on either the ties that bind them to their patrons or adversaries, or on systemic forces embodied by the United States, and have seldom gone further. The empirical observation that Transnistria also nurtures relations with other entities could serve as an invitation to theorise the strategies and rationales behind de facto states’ relationships with other international actors.

Finally, while the literature focusing on the post-Soviet space often takes a patron’s backing for granted, this articles hints that de facto states need to proactively seek their support (Berg & Vits 2018). Introducing the framework of diplomatic practice theory (Pouliot 2008; Pouliot & Cornut 2015) to the study of de facto states could highlight the mechanisms behind these cross-border relational processes.

Concluding remarks

This study has shown that Transnistria uses its only state award bestowed upon foreigners, the Order of Friendship, as a diplomatic tool to foster internal and external legitimacy. With each bestowal, the government communicates to the public that it has increased external security and support, democratic responsiveness, material goods provision or nation-building efforts. All four are sources of legitimacy that lead to enhanced domestic support and foreign friendship in the absence of formal recognition. By demonstrating how a public diplomacy tool is used to deepen legitimacy, this study not only sheds light on the hitherto understudied political processes of contested states, but also points towards aspects of diplomatic practices that operate to co-opt foreign elites.

The method used in this research exhibits strengths and weaknesses. Despite the difficulties associated with a web content analysis, this article sought to attain a high degree of replicability and transparency by making the sources clear and by setting a limited sampling frame. It generated a list of recipients based exclusively on traceable official sources, hence ensuring the reliability of the data. The problem of ‘liquid’ internet content was resolved by providing PDFs of the data sample as a supplementary material to this article. However, a weakness of this research is that the amount of missing data is unknown (Gibbert et al. 2008). This issue was addressed by the focus on the public legitimacy-building strategies or, in terms of public diplomacy, the signals sent by the government to the public. Moreover, a brief informal examination of the four ‘known unknowns’, or allegedly missing data, confirmed the hypothesis rather than refuting it.

This research supports the existing literature, which assumes that de facto states use their political tools to enhance internal and external legitimacy. While it confirms the predominant view of Transnistria’s bandwagoning with Russia as part of a multivector foreign policy, it also opens up a novel direction. Most studies of de facto states have implicitly or explicitly assumed that they almost completely rely on their patron states, whose support, in turn, is taken for granted. However, as already indicated by Caspersen (2009, p. 53) who argues that de facto states may also seek ‘alternative sources of support’ beyond their patron state, or by Dembińska and Campana (2017, p. 1) who suggest that a patron state was a necessary but not sufficient condition for a contested state to endure, the Transnistrian Order of Friendship also attempted to co-opt personalities from polities other than its patron Russia. Exploration of how de facto states interact diplomatically with entities other than their patrons is key to a holistic understanding of their foreign policies, without which any notion of how de facto states behave on the international stage is necessarily incomplete.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andreas Pacher

Andreas Pacher, Vienna School of International Studies, Favoritenstraße 15A, 1040 Vienna, Austria; Department of Legal and Constitutional History, University of Vienna, Schottengasse 10–16, 1010 Vienna, Austria. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 ‘Ukaz Prezident Pridnestrovskoi Moldavskoi Respubliki 4 Aprelya 2012 g. N 245’, Yuridicheskaya Literatura PMR, 4 April 2012, available at: https://www.ulpmr.ru/ul/show/197cUta4HSz2F8fH2wxDdMiIo/eZgKk3tuZ0=, accessed 12 August 2017.

2 The term ‘de facto state’ denotes polities in which the leadership enjoys popular support and ‘sufficient capacity to provide governmental services to a given population in a defined territorial area, over which effective control is maintained for an extended period of time’. However, the state is ‘unable to achieve any degree of substantive recognition and therefore remains illegitimate in the eyes of international society’ (Pegg 1998, p. 26).

3 ‘Konstitutsiya Pridnestrovskoi Moldavskoi Respubliki’, The Supreme Council of the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, 30 July 2000, available at: http://www.vspmr.org/legislation/constitution/, accessed 10 January 2020.

4 A more systematic focus on state awards could answer to Skey’s (2009) invitation to segregate (rather than to homogenise) the audience of ‘banal nationalism’ into different segments, since state awards primarily target selected elites, not mass audiences. See also Tam and Kim (2018).

5 See also Kolstø and Blakkisrud’s (2017, pp. 521–23) remarks on the use of photographs in Transnistrian presidential campaigns, for example, by Evgenii Shevchuk with Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitrii Rogozin, or by Vadim Krasnosel’skii with the popular singer Iosif Kobzon in 2016.

6 The term ‘Friendship’ is also used with reference to universities (such as the Peoples’ Friendship University in Moscow), monuments (the Arch of Friendship in Kyiv), and various state awards targeting foreigners (such as in Russia, Central Asia, certain Chinese Provinces and even North Korea).

7 ‘Ukaz Prezidenta PMR №245’, President of Transnistria, 4 April 2012, available at: https://www.webcitation.org/6GrD6WbMo, accessed 20 August 2018.

8 My attempts to establish direct contact with the Transnistrian Presidential Office, the Foreign Ministry and the Ministry of Justice were unsuccessful.

9 ‘O gosudarstvennykh nagradakh Pridnestrovskoi Moldavskoi Respubliki’, President of Transnistria, 5 July 2019, available at: http://president.gospmr.org/pravovye-akty/ukazi/o-gosudarstvennih-nagradah-pridnestrovskoy-moldavskoy-respubliki.html, accessed 10 January 2020.

10 ‘Yuridicheskaya Literatura PMR’, Government of Transnistria, available at: https://www.ulpmr.ru/, accessed 12 August 2017.

11 ‘Vse Zakony Pridnestrov’ya’, PMR Online, 2017, available at: http://pravo.pmr-online.com/, accessed 12 August 2017.

12 ‘Ukazy’, President of Transnistria, available at: http://president.gospmr.org/pravovye-akty/ukazi/, accessed 10 January 2020.

13 ‘Prezident Pridnestrovskoi Moldavskoi respubliki nagradil Modesta Kolerova i Alekseya Martynova Ordenom Druzhby’, IA Rex, 5 September 2012, available at: http://www.iarex.ru/news/28849.html, accessed 12 August 2017.

14 ‘Leonid Petrovich Reshetnikov’, RISS, 2017, available at: https://riss.ru/profile/prime/, accessed 12 August 2017. (Note that the source mentions the Order of Friendship only in the Russian section, not in the English one.)

15 ‘Prezident Yuzhnoi Osetii Leonid Tibilov prinyal delegatsiyu PMR’, State Information Agency of the Republic of South Ossetia, 19 September 2016, available at: http://cominf.org/node/1166509623, accessed 12 August 2017.

16 ‘Vstrecha Prezidenta s Ministrom Inostrannykh del PMR’, President of Abkhazia, 25 October 2016, available at: http://presidentofabkhazia.org/about/info/news/?ELEMENT_ID=5293, accessed 12 August 2017.

17 See, ‘Pridnestrovian Delegation Meets with the President of South Ossetia’, NovostiPMR, 13 November 2017, available at: https://novostipmr.com/en/news/17-11-13/pridnestrovian-delegation-meets-president-south-osseti, accessed 19 August 2018. The three de facto states Transnistria, South Ossetia and Abkhazia regularly offer moral support to each other since they are ‘companions in misfortune’ (Kosienkowski 2012, p. 51). It is also noteworthy that state award bestowals are reciprocated among the three de facto states’ officials.

18 ‘Sergey Baburin: “Ya benderchanin, rabotayushchii v Rossii”’, ProfVesti, 9 September 2012, available at: https://profvesti.org/2012/09/09/8992, accessed 19 August 2018.

19 ‘Uchreditel ANO “Evraziiskaya integratsiya” nagrazhden Ordenom Druzhby PMR’, VestiPMR, 29 August 2014, available at: http://vestipmr.info/articles/2014/08/29/uchreditel-ano-evraziyskaya-integraciya-nagrazhdyon-ordenom, accessed 12 August 2017.

20 ‘Valerian Tulgara: “Net takoi sily v mire, kotoraya mogla by otvernut’ Pridnestrove ot Rossii”’, NovostiPMR, 19 August 2015, available at: http://novostipmr.ru/info/vesti/2015-08-valeriyan-tulgara-to-s-chem-my-spravlyalis-eti-25-let-s-chem-my-eshhe-spravimsya-stanet-dostoyaniem-respubliki/, accessed 12 August 2017.

21 ‘Operativnoi Gruppe Rossiiskikh Voisk v PMR―22 Goda’, NovostiPMR, 1 July 2017, available at: https://novostipmr.com/ru/news/17-07-01/operativnoy-gruppe-rossiyskih-voysk-v-pmr-22-goda, accessed 12 August 2017.

22 ‘Dataset on Legitimacy-building with Transnistria’s Order of Friendship’, Harvard Dataverse, 2017, available at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/JMKOAS, accessed 10 January 2020.

23 ‘Dataset on Legitimacy-building with Transnistria’s Order of Friendship’, Harvard Dataverse, 2017, available at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/JMKOAS, accessed 10 January 2020.

24 ‘Oleg Matveichev: u Rossii poyavilsya khoroshii shans priznat’ Pridnestrov’e’, VestiPMR, 25 January 2016, available at: http://vestipmr.info/articles/2016/01/25/oleg-matveychev-u-rossii-poyavilsya-horoshiy-shans-priznat, accessed 12 August 2017.

25 ‘V Moskve sostoyalas’ vstrecha Vitaliya Ignat’eva i Sergeya Gavrilova’, VestiPMR, 14 October 2015, available at: http://vestipmr.info/articles/2015/10/14/v-moskve-sostoyalas-vstrecha-vitaliya-ignateva-i-sergeya, accessed 12 August 2017.

26 It is worth noting that the honouring of Iosif Kobzon, one of the most popular singers in the post-Soviet space, occurred shortly before the presidential elections with much media coverage. This timing indicates how state awards can be instrumentalised by an incumbent leader to leverage the popularity of individual figures by association.

27 ‘Anatolii Lokot poobeshhal sozdat’’ blagopriyatnye usloviya dlya postavok Pridnestrovskoi produktsii v Novosibirsk’, NovostiPMR, 25 July 2016, available at: https://novostipmr.com/ru/news/16-07-25/anatoliy-lokot-poobeshchal-sozdat-blagopriyatnye-usloviya-dlya, accessed 12 August 2017.

28 ‘O nagrazhdenii gramotoi Prezidenta Pridnestrovskoi Moldavskoi Respubliki Kushmana Petra’, Zakon PMR, 5 April 2001, available at: http://zakon-pmr.com/DetailDoc.aspx?document=52802, accessed 12 August 2017.

29 ‘Marakutsa Grigorii Stepanovich’, Tiraspol Administration, 2012, available at: http://www.tirasadmin.org/marakutsa-grigorij-stepanovich, accessed 10 August 2017.

30 ‘Valeriyan Tulgara: to, s chem my spravlyalis’ eti 25 let, s chem my eshche spravimtsya, stanet dostoyaniem respubliki’, NovostiPMR, 18 August 2015, available at: http://novostipmr.ru/info/vesti/2015-08-valeriyan-tulgara-to-s-chem-my-spravlyalis-eti-25-let-s-chem-my-eshhe-spravimsya-stanet-dostoyaniem-respubliki/, accessed 12 August 2017.

31 For more on the Catholic Church’s unique position in international relations, see Albert (2017) and Troy (2018).

32 ‘Prezident Pridnestrovskii Moldavskoi respubliki nagradil Modesta Kolerova i Alekseya Martynova Ordenom Druzhby’, IA Rex, 5 September 2012, available at: http://www.iarex.ru/news/28849.html, accessed 12 August 2017; ‘Leonid Petrovich Reshetnikov’, RISS, 2017, available at: https://riss.ru/profile/prime/, accessed 12 August 2017.