Yedisan territory of the expelled Nogais) became part of the Russian Empire. At that time, the population was sparse and the Russian Empire encouraged large migrations into the region, including ethnic Ukrainians, Romanians, Russians and Germans. Russia began attempting to lure Romanian settlers (mostly from Moldavia, but also from Transylvania, Bukovina and Muntenia) to settle in its territory in 1775. But the colonization was to a larger scale after 1792, to Transnistria and beyond, when the Russian government declared that the region between the Dniester and the Bug was to become a new principality named "New Moldavia", under Russian suzerainty. After 1812, Russia annexed from Moldavia a territory which became known as Bessarabia (located west of the Dniester and up to the Prut River), while a process of russification started to be done with the Romanian populations east of the Dniester River (Transnistria). Soviet and post-Soviet periods (1917 to present) Since the Soviet era, Transnistria is home to three major groups: Romanians forming a plurality alongside Russians and Ukrainians. Historically, after one century of russification, the Romanians were no more the majority of population in the areas of the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (MASSR) established, in 1924, within the Ukrainian SSR. MASSR was limited to some areas east of the Dniester, until Balta. East of Balta, most of the Romanians -settled there since the end of Tartar attacks in the 16th century- were already assimilated by the slavs in the early 20th century (but there were nearly 100,000 Moldovan speaking living east of the MASSR and up to the Dnieper river.). According to the 1926 Soviet census, the Moldavian ASSR had a population of 572,339, of which: Despite this relatively extensive territory allotted to the MASSR, more than 85,000 Romanians remained in Ukraine (and Soviet Russia) outside the territory of MASSR. In 1941, during World War II, when Romania created the Transnistria Governorate, an extended territory from the Dniester up to the Bug, most of the population was Ukrainian/Russian and only nearly 10% was Romanian. In this way, from 1941 to 1944 the Romanian "irredentism" had obtained the union of nearly 200,000 ethnic Romanians to their motherland, after the loss of Northern Transylvania to Hungary. Even Odessa was subject to Romanian administration, as the city had been made part of Transnistria Governorate. In December 1941, Romanian authorities conducted a census in the Transnistria Governorate, and the ethnic structure was