it's ironic too because nobody who's complaining about that grammatical quirk with Kiev/Kyiv or "on Ukraine" vs "in Ukraine" seems to have an issue that the west-aligned countries calls Pridnestrovie the entirely different name "Transnistria" which actually does that thing of 'refusing the status of the country' because it just means "[the Moldovan territory] past the Dneister (river)"

and also its doubly so because Pridnestrovians don't want to be called that because it's literally the name the Romanian and German Nazis used for their occupation government when they did the Holocaust there (Transnistria Governorate)