Moscow roils a country on the edge of Europe and Russia
CHISINAU, Moldova – Moldova’s police chief, appointed by a government committed to joining the European Union and leaving Russia’s orbit, was alarmed to find his country’s capital suddenly plastered with posters bearing a blunt message: “No EU.”
The posters – written in Russian and Romanian, Moldova’s main language – appeared overnight on bus stops across Chisinau last month, ostensibly part of an advertising campaign for a concert by a popular Russian-speaking singer from Ukraine.
The timing, however, set off alarm bells: the anti-EU message came just as Moldova, a former Soviet republic, was gearing up for a contentious referendum on whether to amend its constitution to enshrine the “irreversibility” of its “European course.”
Now, with just days left before voting on Sunday, the police chief, Viorel Cernauteanu, says he knows what was going on.
The posters had nothing to do with the singer, he said in an interview, but were part of a “big psychological operation” directed by Russia to derail the referendum, which will be held at the same time as a presidential election.
Cernauteanu said he believed the operation was the work of Ilan Shor, a fugitive Moldovan oligarch sheltering in Moscow, citing evidence, which he did not share, that the people who commissioned the posters were linked to the tycoon.
Shor, who has been sentenced in Moldova to 15 years in jail in connection with the theft of hundreds of millions of dollars from the country’s banking system, has for years worked to promote Russia and stoke hostility to the West but this effort, say officials, has reached a new intensity in recent months. He could not be reached for comment.
Sunday’s vote on changing the constitution marks the culmination of a decades-long tug of war over Moldova’s direction between East and West. Each side has invested heavily in swaying the outcome. While the European Union has done this openly through support for Moldova’s economy and its government, Russia has sought to keep the country within its orbit through furtive funding for anti-government activities and what officials and international tech giants describe as a massive campaign of disinformation against the EU.
The anti-EU posters that appeared in Chisinau were quickly removed, as campaigning for the referendum is restricted to organizations registered with the election commission.
The incumbent pro-Western president, Maia Sandu, is expected to win the presidential race, despite widespread disappointment over her economic record.
The referendum, however, is more uncertain. At least a third of people on the electoral rolls will need to cast ballots for the results to be valid – a challenge given that so many people have emigrated from Moldova in recent years to work abroad.
Uncertainty over the result has energized supporters and opponents of Moldova’s tilt away from Russia. Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, last week visited Chisinau, where she urged people to vote, though she did not say which way, and pledged an economic support package of worth nearly $2 billion.
From the other side, Moldovan and European officials say, there has been a brazen campaign in favor of a no vote or abstention driven by disinformation and subterfuge directed from Moscow.
The Kremlin said Monday that it “categorically rejects” accusations of meddling in Moldova and accused the Moldovan government of muzzling Russia’s supporters.
In a message this month on Telegram, Shor promised to pay the equivalent of $28 to each new subscriber to a channel called “Stop EU” on the online communication platform.
Telegram has since suspended Shor’s channel “because it violated local laws.”
Shor responded on the social platform X, the only major platform from which he has not been ejected, by denouncing Sandu’s supporters in the West as “increasingly totalitarian puppet masters.”
The role of social media in spreading disinformation has stirred growing alarm in Washington and prompted appeals to companies like Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, to do more to control its spread in Moldova.
Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin, D-Md., the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, sent letters last week to the executives of Meta and Alphabet, the owner of Google and YouTube, urging them to enforce their policies against disinformation and incitement.
Moldova’s partners and “those who help moderate key parts of Moldova’s information space” needed to “prevent malign foreign influence from interfering in one of the most important choices Moldovans will ever make,” Cardin wrote.
On Friday, Meta said it had taken down seven accounts, one group and 23 pages on Facebook, and another 20 accounts on Instagram that the company linked to “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” The activity involved a dozen fictitious, Russian-language news outlets.
Among the accounts blocked by Facebook was one used to promote the concert in Chisinau by the Ukrainian singer, Anastasia Prikhodko, and which also featured the “NO EU” message.
Kyryl Savchenko, a spokesperson for the singer in Kyiv, said that a Chisinau concert had been planned but that it had now been canceled. He declined further comment.
Like neighboring Ukraine, locked in 31 months of war with Russia over its own aspiration to join the West, Moldova was part of the Soviet Union until 1991. Since then, it has seesawed between leaders favoring close alignment with the West, like Sandu, and others who leaned toward Russia.
Sandu, whom opinion polls put far ahead of 10 rival candidates in the presidential race, is hoping the referendum will finally put Moldova on a clear path to the West.
Resistance to that is strong in some areas, particularly among older Russian speakers in areas near the border with Ukraine. Pro-EU activists visited the northern town of Drochia last week to try to rally support for the referendum but made no headway with people like Vasile Maximienco, 78, an ethnic Ukrainian. Maximienco said EU membership would only accelerate an exodus abroad of young people and “do nothing but provide Europe with cheap labor.”
Moscow has been working hard to amplify such concerns, pumping out reports of how Europe will bring economic ruin and an assault on traditional values.
Ahead of the referendum, Moldovan officials say, Russia has poured money and energy into preventing the constitution from being amended, unleashing what Stanislav Secrieru, Sandu’s national security adviser, called an “epidemic of fakes” on social media.
Disinformation, Secrieru added, has long been a problem, but it became “much bigger in sale and more aggressive in message” before Sunday’s vote.
Microsoft has tracked a multipronged Russian campaign targeted at Moldova that has included hacks and leaks of government documents; denial of service attacks on government websites; and a torrent of disinformation including bogus news stories and artificially generated images and videos, amplified by bots and inauthentic accounts.
A video popped up last week online purporting to show Moldova’s economic development minister, Dumitru Alaiba, an EU supporter, cavorting at a drug- and drink-fueled sauna party with a naked woman. The minister denounced the video as a “two-bit fake.”
The Russian campaign has focused on spreading fear that a clear vote in favor of one day joining the European Union, a possibility that is still many years away, would plunge the country into war, as happened in Ukraine, and destroy Moldovan families by allowing Brussels to brainwash children into becoming gay or transgender.
Railing against Europe as a degenerate “Gayropa” has long been a fixture of Russian propaganda and has found traction in parts of the former Soviet Union bound to Russia, as Moldova and Ukraine are, by a shared Orthodox Christian faith and deep seams of homophobia.
In early October, social media accounts of dubious authenticity began circulating what looked like a letter written on the letterhead of Moldova’s Ministry of Culture. It demanded that employers give their workers paid leave to attend an “LGBT festival” and that government offices hang rainbow flags. There was no festival and the ministry dismissed the letter as fake.
Handing out leaflets last week in Chisinau urging people to vote on Sunday, Andrei Mazepa, a pro-EU student, said widespread anti-LGBTQ sentiment was perhaps the biggest obstacle for the pro-European cause, particularly among older people. Young Moldovans, he added, “are not homophobic, but ask them whether they want same-sex marriage and only 1% will say yes.”
Russia has pushed hard on what it sees as a winning issue.
At a meeting last month in Moscow with two Moldovan politicians close to Shor, Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry’s spokesperson, warned that Moldovans needed to stop integration with Europe before “they come to take children in order to remake them: boys to girls and girls to boys.”
If the vote Sunday keeps Moldova on its current pro-European path, she said, “It will be too late.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
