might be worth pointing out that this happened in Transnistria (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transnistria) a part of Moldova that has stronger political ties to Russia than to Moldova. It's complicated.
This doesn't seem to be correct. According to the press releases from the Moldovan Prosecutor-General's office, the factory is "in a locality in the Criuleni District", so it's in territory controlled by the Moldovan government. But several individuals associated with this operation, including its leader, live in territory that the Moldovan government does not control (i.e. in Transnistria). This latter complication is specifically mentioned.
Transnistria claimed independence a while ago. Only Russia acknowledges their claim but de facto Moldova has lost the monopoly on violence in that small region.
Transnistria is basically following the same pattern as North Georgia or East Ukraine. Step 1 is a "separatists" group pops up overnight and declares independence. Step 2 is the totally legit "separatists" happen to do exactly the things Russia would do if they had annexed the place per se. Step 3 is Russia acknowledges the "independence" of the "breakaway" region and also denies being behind the separatists to begin with. Step 4 is Western leaders send strongly worded letters and symbolic sanctions. Step 5 is everyone forgets and the relationship status is set to "it's complicated".
This is how Russia invades without invading. The relevant term of art is "hybrid warfare".
Perhaps so, Russian actions covert or overt are not justifiable.
However it should kept in mind all of these areas were part of Soviet Union, it is not unreasonable for pockets of broken up CIS states to want to split away, they could be ethnically Russian minority being oppressed and want to join Russia or be independent even., their problems may be genuine.
"Transnistria is basically following the same pattern as North Georgia or East Ukraine. ... This is how Russia invades without invading. The relevant term of art is "hybrid warfare"."
I don't think you have made even the slightest effort to research the issue before regurgitating this stale bit of Russophobic propaganda.
You could start from wiki [0]:
In the 1980s ... in the Moldavian SSR in particular, there was a significant resurgence of pro-Romanian nationalism among ethnic Moldovans. The most prominent of these movements was the Popular Front of Moldova. In the spring of 1988, PFM demanded that the Soviet authorities declare Moldovan the only state language, return to the use of the Latin alphabet, and recognise the shared ethnic identity of Moldovans and Romanians. The more radical factions of the Popular Front espoused extreme anti-minority, ethnocentric and chauvinist positions, calling for minority populations, particularly the Slavs (mainly Russians and Ukrainians) and Gagauz, to leave or be expelled from Moldova.
On 31 August 1989, the Supreme Soviet of the Moldavian SSR adopted Moldovan as the only official language with Russian retained only for secondary purposes, returned Moldovan to the Latin alphabet, and declared a shared Moldovan-Romanian linguistic identity. As plans for major cultural changes in Moldova were made public, tensions rose further. Ethnic minorities felt threatened by the prospects of removing Russian as the official language, which served as the medium of interethnic communication, and by the possible future reunification of Moldova and Romania, as well as the ethnocentric rhetoric of the Popular Front. The Yedinstvo (Unity) Movement, established by the Slavic population of Moldova, pressed for equal status to be given to both Russian and Moldovan. Transnistria's ethnic and linguistic composition differed significantly from most of the rest of Moldova. The share of ethnic Russians and Ukrainians was especially high and an overall majority of the population, some of them ethnic Moldovans, spoke Russian as a mother tongue. Ethnic Moldovans accounted for less than 40% of Transnistria's population in 1989.
The nationalist Popular Front won the first free parliamentary elections in the Moldavian SSR in the spring of 1990, and its agenda started slowly to be implemented. On 2 September 1990, the Pridnestrovian [Russian for Transnistrian] Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic was proclaimed as a Soviet republic by an ad hoc assembly, the Second Congress of the Peoples' Representatives of Transnistria. Violence escalated when in October 1990 the Popular Front called for volunteers to form armed militias to stop an autonomy referendum in Gagauzia, which had an even higher share of ethnic minorities. In response, volunteer militias were formed in Transnistria. In April 1990, nationalist mobs attacked ethnic Russian members of parliament, while the Moldovan police refused to intervene or restore order.
In the interest of preserving a unified Moldavian SSR within the USSR and preventing the situation escalating further, then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, while citing the restriction of civil rights of ethnic minorities by Moldova as the cause of the dispute, declared the Transnistria proclamation to be lacking legal basis and annulled it by presidential decree on 22 December 1990.
Not the GP, but probably the "complicated" part is that the Moldovan prosecutors would not be able to shut down an illegal factory in Transnistria, which is de facto independent. The fact that the workers were from Transnistria probably provided them some type of immunity for a while. It's quite unlikely that the factory and the operation itself was really unknown. It's more likely that for political reasons, the authorities needed to turn a blind eye to it. What exactly changed now, who knows? It's complicated ...
The factory was on on Moldova's territory. Why would
"authorities need to turn a blind eye to it" is beyond my comprehension. What kind of "political reasons"? That is unless they were simply paid off and are regular crooks.
Got any proof of that? It looks more like you just being "creative"
Indeed, I don't have proof. As I said, I was not the original poster, I was just exercising a bit of critical thinking.
Now, I started reading a bit into this. What I got so far is this: the authorities kept an eye on this operation for a few months. They arrested the main guys, who indeed reside on the other side of the river. These guys claim to be some sort of "inventors" who were simply experimenting with these helicopters and trying to overcome some technical obstacles. They say what they are doing on their property should not be anyone's business: they were indeed assembling helicopters, but did not sell yet anything. Given that, the authorities claim that the illegal things they did now include flying the helicopters for short periods of time without permission to fly, and bringing in the country various technical components without proper custom declarations (they had entire engines there, which they sourced from some engine manufacturers). If it comes to these types of arguments, the whole case does not appear so slam dunk.
The Transnistria angle, I'm not sure if there was one. There could be a faint one, in the fact that the prosecutors did not want to arrest some resident of Transistria without a watertight case, so that's why they waited for months. Now some people claim they messed up anyway.
It is. So sorry about that. It was written as part of a "celebrate Global Entrepreneurship Week" thing by Stripe and it was suggested that such a title would have more inspirational value. That's no excuse for that title and I apologize.
Move to Berlin and find a decent startup. Plenty of challenging jobs but more importantly you'll find there's a much better work-life balance. It's still up to you to put your time to good use.
As someone who has wanted to move to Berlin, are there good resources/ways to connect with tech companies there? Most of the networking I've done has been natural interaction, and I only have so much vacation in a year.
little pieces of text(code in general) that I want to remember/have available somewhere but that doesn't really belong in the code's repository. For example a certain solr query that I use to test out different things, or a certain list of commands I need to run every 2-3 weeks to parse a log in a certain way.
