Moldova is home to the famous Cricova wine cellars, which have been visited by many world leaders.
This was reported by URA-Inform with reference to The New York Times.
Among them was Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, but after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he was officially banned from visiting this place.
The Cricova cellars contain many rarities. Among them are trophy wines confiscated by the Soviet army from Hermann Goering at the end of World War II, which are now on display in one of the galleries. There are also 460 bottles given to US Secretary of State John Kerry in 2013, worth more than $8,000. They remain in an underground vault under his name.
However, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who twice visited the cellars of the state-owned Cricova winery, was banished. His wine bottles, along with his photograph, were hidden from view in a vast complex of underground tunnels that twist and turn for 75 miles beneath vineyards north of the Moldovan capital, Chisinau.
“After Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Moldova’s neighbor Ukraine in 2022, the winery had a lot of questions we couldn’t answer about why he was still here,” Sorin Maslo, the winery’s director, told reporters.
However, despite Vladimir Putin being banned from visiting the Cricova winery’s cellars, its wine collection, a gift from Moldova’s former communist leader, was not destroyed. As Maslo specified, all the bottles were put away in a remote and little-known corner of the underground storage facilities, where they remain out of reach and out of sight.
The Cricova complex is not only a historic wine storage facility, but also a symbol of political change. The ban on mentioning Putin and moving his collection reflects Moldova's attitude to Russia's actions.
Recall that earlier it was reported that Trump accidentally published a personal message online: to whom and what he wrote.