I’ve looked at enough ruble-denominated currency to know what “ruble” looks like in Cyrillic, namely, рубль. This is somebody’s one-ruble note. 

Not Russia, nor Belarus, which are the two nations that currently call their money that. Not the defunct Armenian ruble, Latvian ruble or Tajikistani ruble, either.

Instead, this is a Transnistrian ruble. To the naked eye, and not the scanner, those black rectangles are shiny silver, which I take to be an anti-counterfeiting measure. That inspires the question: who would counterfeit these notes? Perfidious Moldovans?

In news reports, Transnistria is inevitably referred to as a “breakaway” territory from Moldova that’s “Russian backed.” A polite way – and why do we need to be polite? – to call them Russian stooges. The map accompanying this article shows how that might be a geopolitical concern these days.

In any case, internationally unrecognized Transnistria has its own currency, with the one ruble sporting the famed Russian military commander Alexander Vasilyevich Suvorov, who did so much to facilitate his nation’s imperial expansion under Catherine the Great.

Field Marshal Suvorov has a more direct connection with Transnistria, however, since he’s considered the founder of modern Tiraspol, capital of the breakaway territory. He ordered fortifications built on the site late in the 18th century, though the city had antecedents going back to Greek settlement around 600 BC.

The reverse features an uninspiring image of a monument in Transnistria to one or both of the Jassy-Kishinev offensives of 1944, probably the second, since it was a smashing success for the Red Army and (remarkably) the U.S. Army Air Corps.

“On August 20, 1944, the Soviet Second Ukrainian Front, under the command of General Rodion Malinovsky, and the Third Ukrainian Front, under the command of General Fyodor Tolbukhin, launched a two-pronged attack against German Army South Ukraine…” the National World War II Museum explains.

“By August 23, the German Sixth Army had been surrounded by the two converging Soviet fronts. German air support was nowhere to be found, because it had been eliminated by the United States Fifteenth Air Force.

“While it does not receive a lot of attention, the offensive was one of the most successful joint operations of the war. It was quite an achievement, considering this was only the second time that the Americans and Soviets worked together. Yet you would have to look hard to find literature on the offensive. Perhaps it is time to give the Second Jassy-Kishinev Offensive the attention it deserves.”