Buying off voters, calling in bomb threats and paying protesters to antagonize police — these are the tactics authorities say the Kremlin has taken up to thwart an upcoming election in Moldova.
The tiny former Soviet state has been caught up in a battle between pro-Russian and pro-European forces ahead of an Oct. 20 vote for a new president and on a referendum on whether to join the European Union (EU).
EU membership would deepen Moldova’s ties to the West — and is a direct effort to keep Russia’s influence out.
Russia is intent on keeping Eastern European nations that were once a part of the Soviet Union — like Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine — out of the EU. Historically, a vote to join the EU often precedes a vote to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Cold War-era alliance designed to combat Russia.
The vote comes as some call for NATO and the EU to allow war-torn Ukraine membership — a move that is seen by others as a risky provocation of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Maia Sandu, Moldovan incumbent president and candidate in the upcoming presidential election, center, holds a rally. (Reuters/Vladislav Culiomza/File)
Moldovan authorities have accused a complex web of Russian agents of vote-buying, money laundering and illegal financing to shape the results of both the presidential election and the EU membership referendum.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Moldova has swung between pro-Western and pro-Russian leadership at its helm.
And earlier this year, the U.S. pledged some $136 million to Moldova, with its roughly 3 million-person population, to reduce its dependency on Russian energy and counter Russian disinformation.
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National police chief Viorel Cernauteanu said more than 130,000 Moldovans — or 5% of the nation’s voters — had been bribed by a Russia-managed network to vote against the referendum and in favor of Russia-friendly candidates in what he called an “unprecedented, direct attack.”
“We are faced with the widespread phenomenon of financing and corruption with the aim of disrupting the electoral process in Moldova,” Cernauteanu told reporters.
The issue has drawn the attention of U.S. politicians: Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote a letter Thursday to the CEOs of Meta, Alphabet and Google to urge them to commit resources to address disinformation in Moldova.
Women hold a Moldovan flag during a rally to support a European path for the country in Chisinau, Moldova. (Reuters/Vladislav Culiomza)
He said some $15 million had been transferred in September alone to accounts opened at Russia’s Promsvyazbank.
Ilan Shor, a pro-Russian oligarch living in exile, recently posted on Telegram offering to pay people to vote “no” on the referendum. Shor, who was convicted last year in a scandal that involved a $1 billion theft from Moldovan banks, is believed to be tied to a broader network of Russian state actors intent on keeping the nation out of the EU.
Meanwhile, incumbent President Maia Sandu has portrayed the Oct. 20 contest as a test of her pro-European politics. Sandu, who is seeking a second term, has long accused Moscow of trying to overthrow her government, a charge Moscow denies.
Writing on his own Telegram channel, Shor said Moldova under Sandu “has been turned into a police state for good,” referring to the detention of five of his supporters by prosecutors this week on charges of illegal financing of political parties.
Moldova, which has a Romanian-speaking majority and a Russian-speaking minority, has alternated between pro-Russian and pro-Western governments since the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union.
“Moldova has embarked on a journey of reform, of change, that’s why we have aspirations of joining the EU,” Moldova’s deputy chief of mission in the U.S. Anton Lungu told Fox News Digital, adding that he supports the referendum. “So, we must bear in mind the Soviet legacy and interest towards keeping spheres of influence. The expectation is that this malign influence will continue until Election Day.”
Russian proxies in the nation are reportedly being trained on how to antagonize police and provoke them to use agents like tear gas to stoke anxiety and violent clashes ahead of the election.
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Shor and his network are known to pay protesters up to $100 a night to sleep in protest camps. Fake bomb threats and cyberattacks against schools and government buildings are meant to stoke “controlled chaos,” according to Rebekah Koffler, former senior official in the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and author of “Putin’s Playbook.”
Sandu is running for re-election as a pro-Western politician.
In September, Moldovan police said they arrested two people who were vandalizing government buildings. They then discovered the pair were among a group of 20 young people who had been flown to Moscow to train on how to provoke police during protests and other destabilization activities, and had received more than $5,000 each to vandalize government buildings.
Koffler likens Russia’s influence to the U.S.’ Monroe Doctrine — an 1823 doctrine that warned European nations against interfering in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere. Now applied to adversaries like Russia and China, the doctrine was invoked symbolically in 1962 when the Soviet Union began to build missile-launching sites in Cuba.
“Russia, for centuries, relied on a strategic buffer, or strategic security perimeter, of which the former Soviet states Ukraine, Moldova are part of,” she said.
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“With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, that strategic security perimeter has reduced, specifically the distance between NATO and Moscow and St. Petersburg,” Koffler said, referring to Russia’s capital and second-most key city. St. Petersburg is only about 100 miles from the border of a NATO country — Finland.
Finland and Sweden applied for NATO membership just after the outbreak of war in Ukraine and were incorporated into the alliance in 2023.
Some observers believe the expansion of NATO up to Russia’s borders and the increasing U.S. influence among Eastern European states threatened Putin and prompted him to invade Ukraine in 2022. Others believe he’s long had territorial ambitions to restore the Soviet Union and could not have been dissuaded from invading.
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Russia is known to follow the Gerasimov Doctrine, peddled by high-level Russian General Valery Gerasimov, which advocates for secretly hacking into an enemy’s society and sowing chaos rather than attacking directly through force.
Russian-linked interference in Moldova would fit this form of shadowy puppeteering to control outcomes.
“The very ‘rules of war’ have changed. The role of nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness… All this is supplemented by military means of a concealed character,” Gerasimov wrote in the Russian trade paper “Military-Industrial Kurier.”
Reuters contributed to this report.