 Throughout late 1991 and into early 1992, workers’ battalions, increasingly the beneficiaries of weaponry from sympathetic Red Army officers and defections from among the local military personnel, grew better prepared than the loyalist Moldovan police in Transnistria.Police stations were captured, policemen were evicted, and in extreme cases workers’ battalions and police traded fire.Skirmishes in November 1990, and September and December 1991 witnessed continued Moldovan inability to reassert sovereignty in the region.