US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld urged Russia on Saturday to uphold its obligations and withdraw troops from Moldova to help settle a 13-year-old dispute between the former Soviet state and the Dnestr region.
During a three-hour visit on his way to a Nato summit in Istanbul, Rumsfeld also thanked Moldova's people for "their help in the war on terror and particularly for their part in Iraq".
US officials said he was the first high-ranking American cabinet member to visit Moldova. He met President Vladimir Voronin, Defence Minister Victor Gaiciuc and Foreign Minister Andrei Stratan.
Moldova, considered the poorest country in Europe, is wedged between Ukraine and Romania at the edge of Nato's expanding frontier and is governed by a communist president.
"The United States, as is the government of Moldova, interested in a peaceful resolution (to Dnestr) and has found several resolutions worth looking at," he told a news conference.
Voronin has proposed a conference that would include the United States and the European Union in talks with Russia, Ukraine and Romania.
But Rumsfeld pointedly added: "Certainly the obligations that were understaken in Istanbul five years ago need to be fulfilled."
That was a reference to the 1999 Istanbul summit of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), where Moscow undertook to leave the region and remove weapons inherited after the fall of the Soviet Union by 2002.
Russian troops have helped maintain an uneasy truce in Moldova since intervening in 1992 to end a civil war with Dnestr, a sliver of land populated by Russian speakers. Dnestr broke away from Moldova in 1990, before the end of Soviet rule.
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