5 Kopecks

Transnistria's aluminium coinage of 2000 was issued by a state recognised by virtually no other country on earth — a self-declared republic that broke from Moldova during a brief, bloody war in 1992 and has remained in a frozen conflict ever since, propped up economically by Russian subsidies and a captive local market. The coins were a deliberate act of institutional self-assertion, giving the Tiraspol government the visible apparatus of monetary independence without the underlying economic foundations to support it.

The extreme lightness of the aluminium blanks made these pieces impractical for vending machines and poorly received in daily use.