For weeks, police in the Republic of Moldova have been posting alarming notices on their Telegram messaging channel.
Authorities have repeatedly warned of “fake news” on social media sites, called on citizens not to take “election bribes” and released reports on the arrest of paid demonstrators. Most recently, Moldova’s police posted a video explaining to voters how Russia is currently buying masses of votes through an app named “Taito.”
Moldovan President Maia Sandu described what is going on in her tiny country, sandwiched between southwestern Ukraine and northeastern Romania, after attending a Supreme Security Council meeting last week by pointing to the “unprecedented” example of Russia’s efforts to “interfere” in the country’s upcoming election on September 28 in order to control it again.
But why? The result of the vote will determine whether the tiny republic remains a democratic nation on a path to European integration or whether an alliance of pro-Russian parties takes over the government and maneuvers it back into Moscow’s orbit. And despite the campaign not having officially begun, events in the country are moving fast.
Massive Russian sabotage effort
Russia is apparently treating Moldova as a proving ground for various pre-election hybrid attacks. The aim is to relentlessly use acts of sabotage to sow doubt in the country’s democratic system to create uncertainty and political chaos.
Russia’s tools? Paid public protests, massive vote buying in Moldova and among Moldovans abroad, flooding social media with fake news — and, increasingly, misguiding AI-generated content — and hacker attacks on IT systems. Beyond these, Russia has also increased the number of missiles and drones that it flies through Moldova’s airspace en route to attacking Ukraine in an effort to create more fear of war among Moldovans. These efforts combined have transformed Moldova’s national parliamentary election into a whole-of-Europe affair.
Recently, the July 27 arrest of former Moldovan oligarch Vladimir Plahotniuc at the Athens airport in Greece has made for lots of headlines. Moldovan authorities have sought Plahotniuc’s arrest on various charges — among others, for his suspected role in Moldova’s so-called “Billion Dollar Heist” between 2012 and 2014 — since he fled the country in 2019.
Last month, the Latvia-based independent investigative news magazine The Insider published a report claiming that Plahotniuc had traveled to Russia and Belarus several times in recent months to meet with Dmitry Kozak, a longtime ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin and currently vice president of Putin’s presidential administration.
When the name Kozak is uttered, alarm bells in Moldova set off. Kozak was the author of a 2003 plan that would have seen Moldova split up into a loose federation of small states. At the last minute, Moldova’s then-president, Vladimir Voronin, refused to sign the so-called “Kozak Memorandum,” a slap in the face for the Kremlin that neither Putin nor Kozak will have forgotten. Plahotniuc’s meetings with Kozak are reported to have centered on how the oligarch could reactivate the network that he controlled before he fled Moldova, in order to return the country to Russia’s fold.
Decades of Russian political aggression
Although tiny agrarian Moldova and its roughly 3.5 million citizens are meaningless to Russia economically, it has nevertheless been the target of Russian neo-imperial aggression for three decades. It was in Moldova, in the spring of 1992, that Russia launched its first post-Soviet war against an independent country — under the same pretext it would use repeatedly thereafter, to protect Russian-speaking citizens from a supposedly fascist national government.
The Kremlin supports a separatist regime of mafia-like Russian secret agents in Moldova’s Transnistria region and has remained in breach of international law by stationing its own soldiers and a massive arms arsenal there. Moscow has also used Moldova’s banks to distribute billions of dollars across the globe as part of its “Russian Laundromat” system and constantly threatens the country by shutting down gas deliveries.
In mid-2019, Moldova actually made a massive step toward real democratic regime change, which had, until then, been a rocky journey despite never having fallen into the trap of a pro-Russian restoration. Moldova’s voters chose the popular anti-corruption activist Maia Sandu to head their government, eventually making her president. Sandu’s Action and Solidarity Party (PAS) won an absolute majority in Moldova’s 2021 parliamentary election with the promise of enacting ambitious legal and economic reforms, with which it has had middling success.
A shadowy network run from Moscow
There are a host of reasons keeping Sandu and the PAS from succeeding. Among them are decades of corruption that have emptied national coffers, a mass exodus that has robbed the government of its brightest minds, the fact that the crisis in Transnistria continues to fester, the EU’s belated help in securing Moldova’s energy independence from Russia, and lastly, decades of non-stop Russian propaganda. One of the most critical narratives being pushed in the latter is that the EU and NATO are actually trying to drag Moldova into the war in Ukraine — that Russia started.
Sandu and the PAS’ lagging support under Prime Minister Dorin Recean and the effectiveness of Russian interference were on display during last year’s presidential election, which was also tied to an EU referendum. Sandu eventually won convincingly in the second-round of voting, but the referendum on EU integration barely passed. Shortly before the vote, authorities in Moldova announced that they had uncovered a network of operatives that had successfully purchased as many as 300,000 votes in the tally.
The network behind the vote-buying campaign was run by Ilan Shor, a Moldovan-Israeli businessman. Shor is also rumored to have orchestrated the so-called Billion Dollar Heist before he joined Vladimir Plahotniuc in fleeing the country — first to Israel and then to Russia. Although a number of the political parties that Shor has founded have been banned in Moldova, he continues to exert influence from inside Russia. In preparation for Moldova’s September election, Shor founded what he dubbed the “Victory” party alliance in Moscow. Moldova’s Central Election Commission (CEC) barred the alliance from the vote in July.
The Patriot Bloc, Putin’s ‘second front’
In September, observers expect that Putin’s “second front,” the pro-Russian four-party “Patriotic Bloc” that includes former-President Igor Dodon, will stand for election. Though Dodon is a Socialist in name, his party, in fact, stands for right-wing populist and Kremlin-aligned positions like all three of the other parties in the bloc. Fittingly, the leaders of all four parties traveled to Moscow for consultations before registering for the September parliamentary ballot. At the top of their election platform is the “restoration of relations with Russia.”
The Kremlin claims it has nothing to do with any of this. When Sandu accused Russia of engaging in massive election interference, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov shrugged it off, saying simply that Russia does not involve itself with the internal affairs of other nations.
This article was originally published in German and translated into English by Jon Shelton
