A former VKontakte friend, who unfriended me when last year's invasion started (so I blocked him in kind), explained to me the case for Russia holding onto Transnistria, which was that there was this extremely rare and obscure Turkic ethnic group that's majority-Christian that needs to be protected from "genocide".

Mind you, this guy could be best described as a "4chan tankie". Like, Eric Cartman-level immature, who used racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic language to defend the USSR, China, and Putin while bashing "Western liberal Russophobic fascists".

The Russian case for holding onto far-flung territories like South Ossetia, Transnistria, Donbass, and even fully de jure territories like Chechnya, the Kurils, etc. has always been flimsy, illogical, and incoherent. At this point, we can ignore all of their concern trolling and whining about the "mean old liberal NATO West" after what they did in Ukraine.