Moldova, officially the Republic of Moldova (Moldovan/Romanian: Republica Moldova) is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, located between Romania to the west and Ukraine to the north, east and south. It declared itself an independent state with the same boundaries as the preceding Moldovan SSR in 1991, as part of the devolution of the Soviet Union. A strip of Moldova's internationally recognized territory on the east bank of the river Dniester is under de facto control of a breakaway government of Transnistria since 1990.