Which Eastern European language is close to Italian and Spanish?

The Romanian language is spoken in two Eastern European countries, comprising close to 30 million people, Romania and Moldova. The language belongs to the Romance (= Latin-based) family of languages, and is a close relative to Italian, Spanish, French and Portuguese. Despite being surrounded by countries with Slavic languages (Russian, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croat, Czech, Polish, Bulgarian and others), the Romanian language managed to maintain its Latin roots and has adopted only about 15% of Slavic words.

The original people who lived in Romania were called Dacians, but after the Roman occupation more than 2000 years ago, many Dacians joined the Roman legions and started speaking Latin and this is how the whole country started to speak a Latin-derived language. Legend has it that the Romans also used the country as an exile colony for convicts, something like later-day Australia, and this is another reason for the language similarity with Latin. Today there are only about 180 words in Romanian that have been identified as being of Dacian origin.

Examples of very similar words and expressions between Spanish and Romanian abound; for example "como" (how) in Spanish is "cum" in Romanian, "mujer" (woman) is "muiere" (colloquial for "woman"), "de donde vienes" (where do you come from) is "de unde vii", etc...There are many similar examples for Italian. And of course, with the exception of French, the Latin languages are phonetic, i.e. you read what you write.