Once the PMSSR had been created, the incipient government in Tiraspol fought an increasingly violent struggle for sovereignty with the Moldovan government in Chişinău. In August 1991, many of Gorbachev's advisors participated in a coup d'état attempt to prevent him from signing the New Union Treaty in which Soviet Republics such as Moldova would gain more autonomy under the Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics. The PMSSR supported the failed coup attempt, which the rest of Moldova opposed. 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. Throughout the first half of 1992 the violence continued to escalate and culminated in a short, but bloody, war in late June 1992. The war left the separatists in Tiraspol with "de facto" control over most of Transnistria and the west-bank city of Bendery.