[1] Born in Taxobeni, Fălești district, Ilașcu graduated from the Faculty of Economic Studies of the Agricultural Institute in Chișinău.

On 5 September 1989 as he spoke at a meeting in Tiraspol in favour of the language laws passed by the Moldovan parliament, he was taken away by policemen, who needed to protect him from the crowd of political opponents.

[2] Starting with 1989, he was the president of the Tiraspol branch of the Moldovan Popular Front, which advocated the union of Moldova and Romania.

[4] On 2 June 1992, he and three more ethnic Romanians (Andrei Ivanțoc, Alexandru Leșco and Tudor Petrov Popa) were arrested by the breakaway Transnistrian government and charged with the murder of two separatist officials.

On 9 December 1993, the Supreme Court of Transnistria found him guilty of a number of offences defined in the Criminal Code of the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic, including incitement to commit an offence against national security, organisation of activities with the aim of committing extremely dangerous offences against the State, murdering a representative of the State with the aim of spreading terror, premeditated murder, unlawfully requisitioning means of transport, deliberate destruction of another's property and illegal or unauthorised use of ammunition or explosives.

This decision was contested by various international human rights organizations, which doubted the fairness of the trial and alleged that they were prosecuted only because they were members of the Tiraspol branch of the Popular Front, a Moldovan party which favours a union with Romania.