As Moldova prepares for a key parliamentary election on Sunday, Russia is stepping up efforts to interfere in the vote, officials say they are describing it as a brave attempt to stop the former Soviet state slowly towards the west and set up a government more flexibly in Moscow.
In a national speech this week, President Maia Sandhu warned that the Kremlin is “intoxicated” because he is “intoxicated” online, with “hundreds of millions of euros” to buy Moldovan’s votes, and that he is recruiting provocates to inhale “disability, violence, fear.”
“If Russia controls Moldova, the outcome will be immediate and dangerous for the entire region. All Moldovans will suffer no matter who they vote for,” Sandhu said.
Moldova, which was adjacent to Ukraine when the Soviet Union fell apart and gained independence, is not accustomed to Russian interference. “We’ve been living with this for 30 years,” Nik Popescu, former Moldova foreign minister, told CNN. “If you live in the tropics, you’re always raining.”
But this time it’s different, he said, Moldova is facing a “tsunami” of Russian cash, cryptocurrency and misinformation, in a campaign aimed at strengthening the patriotic bloc, the Russian opposition. Officials and analysts say the Kremlin has apparently learned a lesson from its failure to win two important votes last year.
In October 2024, Moldova held a presidential election and referendum on EU membership. Sandhu has won his second term and a “yes” vote with a thin razor margin despite predicting that both wins will be easier. Before the vote, Moldovan authorities said that more than 130,000 citizens had won bribes through a Russian-related network and voted “no” in the referendum.
The network was led by Iran Shoal, an oligarch who lives in exile after being convicted of absence in the role of stealing $1 billion from a Moldovan bank in 2014. The Shoal’s voting purchase scheme was blatant.
Valeriu Pasha, chairman of Watchdog, Moldova’s digital monitoring group, said that while voting purchases remained prominent, Russian tactics have evolved since. Rather than offering payments through Telegram, the campaign is now trying to employ a network of community actors with an emphasis on “face-to-face” communications, he said.
“They train these people, indoctrinate them, pay them, they send them very accurate instructions, points of talk, and content shared on Tiktok. It all works in a coordinated way that helps them manipulate the algorithms on social media, especially on Tiktok,” Pasha told CNN.
The campaign also seeks to soothe confusion among voters leaning towards PAS by promoting parties suspected of having nominal pro-EU candidates with Russia.
For example, Irina Vla, a member of the central parliament of the Moldovan Party, part of a patriotic bloc, has dampened her pro-Russian rhetoric and says that now she likes to join the European Union. However, the VLAH was approved by Canada “in connection with Russian malignant interference activities in Moldova” and was banned from entering Poland on similar reasons on Thursday. CNN has contacted VLAH for comment.
The country’s big diaspora was important in securing Sandhu’s re-election last year. However, analysts say the current campaign aims to demote these more liberal voters. Last month, Shoal warned: “We are preparing the surprises of the Moldovan authorities at overseas polling stations.” It was not clear what he was referring to. During the vote last year, four German cities reported false bomb threats at polling stations. This is what the German Foreign Ministry said overseas was a “coordinated attempt” to stop votes overseas.
Shor did not respond to CNN’s request for comment. The Kremlin has repeatedly denied interference in foreign elections.
PAS took power in landslides in 2021 with a pledge to clean up corruption and improve governance. However, that progress was hampered by the security and economic crisis caused by the full-scale invasion of Russia in 2022.
Russia cut its critical gas supply to Moldova later that year. Officials claimed it was an attempt to punish Sandhu to tack near the west. However, since then, Sandhu has ended Moldova’s largely dependence on Russian gas and arranged for new imports from Europe. In 2023, Moldova was awarded EU candidate status.
Sandou’s leadership has won praise in Brussels, but she is slandered by the Kremlin. Oana Popescu-Zamfir, director of GlobalFocus Center Think-Tank, said Kremlin is working to ensure that Moldova is a poster of post-Soviet democracy – not become a child.
“In such a small country like Moldova that has few resources, we can make it possible to redo it in such an asymmetrical battle between Russia and its resources. It’s not an option that Russia is trying to accept,” she told CNN.
The campaign portrayed Sandhu as “an embodiment of evil inspired by all EUs,” she added. Shoal claims that the EU is trying to make Moldovan a “zombie” and instead casts Russia as a defender of tradition and identity. Watch group Euvsdisinfo says messages such as “The EU spent millions of dollars on destroying traditional values” have multiplied online.
Much of vitriol is concentrated on the fact that Sandhu is a woman. One extensive post that impersonated OK, a celebrity magazine, claimed that childless Sandou had sought sperm donations from pop stars Elton John and Ricky Martin.
Russia is honing its tactics, but Moldova has also learned lessons from previous campaigns. National Security Secretary Stanislav Sekriel said this week that police had dismantled a network related to Russia’s military intelligence reporting agency.
“Their mission: to organize violence before and after the election,” Sekriel said.
Popez, a former foreign minister standing as a candidate for the PAS, said Moldova has endured recent attempts to destabilise Russia’s country.
“They tried with gas, they failed. They tried with electricity, they failed. They tried with electricity, they failed. They tried to buy the election last year, they failed,” he said. “Moldova is facing stronger headwinds, but it’s been pushed back more than ever.”
However, recent polls suggest that PAs may have struggled to maintain their majority and may need to seek coalitions with others in the 101-seat assembly.
“As long as they can insert some of the destroyers into fragmented coalitions, they can either stall or even turn the reforms around, especially if those destroyers hold the position of key ministers,” she said.
And while police have discovered a network that is trying to wreak havoc after the election, authorities fear that they cannot expose them all.
Popescu-Zamfir warned that “if Russia cannot achieve its goals through discourse alone, it could be just the “opening salvo” of the “opening salvo” against the complete violence of “trying to destabilize the entire society.”
