Moldova warns Russia unleashing huge interference campaign to sway crucial election

By Christian Edwards, CNN

(CNN) — As Moldova prepares for a crucial parliamentary election on Sunday, Russia is ramping up its efforts to interfere in the vote, officials say, in what they describe as a brazen attempt to halt the westward lurch of the former Soviet state and install a government more pliant to Moscow.

In a national address this week, President Maia Sandu warned that the Kremlin is spending “hundreds of millions of euros” in a ploy to buy Moldovans’ votes, “intoxicate” them with disinformation online, and recruit provocateurs to stoke “disorder, violence and fear.”

“If Russia gains control over Moldova, the consequences will be immediate and dangerous for the entire region. Every Moldovan will suffer, no matter who they voted for,” said Sandu, whose pro-European Union Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS) is seeking to retain its governing majority.

Moldova, which borders Ukraine and won independence as the Soviet Union crumbled, is no stranger to Russian meddling. “We have lived with this for 30 years,” Nicu Popescu, Moldova’s former foreign minister, told CNN. “If you live in the tropics, you always have rain.”

But this time is different, he said, with Moldova facing a “tsunami” of Russian cash, cryptocurrency and disinformation, in a campaign that aims to bolster the pro-Russian opposition, the Patriotic Bloc. The Kremlin appears to have learned lessons from its unsuccessful attempt to clinch two crucial votes last year, according to officials and analysts.

In October 2024, Moldova held a presidential election and referendum on EU membership. Sandu secured a second term and the “yes” vote won by a razor-thin margin, despite polls predicting easier victories for both. Before the votes, Moldovan authorities said more than 130,000 citizens had been bribed by a Russia-linked network to vote “no” in the referendum.

That network was spearheaded by Ilan Shor, an oligarch living in exile after he was convicted in absentia for his role in stealing $1 billion from Moldovan banks in 2014. Shor’s vote-buying scheme was blatant: He posted a video to his Telegram channel offering to pay voters the equivalent of $28 if they registered with his campaign.

Although vote-buying is still prominent, Russia’s tactics have evolved since then, says Valeriu Pasha, chairman of WatchDog, a digital monitoring group in Moldova. Rather than one man offering payments through Telegram, the campaign now seeks to recruit networks of actors in local communities, with an emphasis on “face-to-face” communication, he said.

“They train these people, they indoctrinate them, they pay them, they send them very precise instructions, talking points, and content to be shared on TikTok. It all works in a coordinated way, which helps them to manipulate algorithms on social media, especially TikTok,” Pasha told CNN.

The campaign also seeks to sow confusion among voters who lean towards PAS, by promoting nominally pro-EU candidates and parties who many suspect of harboring ties to Russia.

For instance, Irina Vlah, a member of parliament for the Heart of Moldova party, part of the Patriotic Bloc, has dampened her pro-Russian rhetoric and now says she favors joining the European Union. Vlah has, however, been sanctioned by Canada “in relation to Russia’s malign interference activities in Moldova,” and was on Thursday banned from entering Poland on similar grounds. CNN has asked Vlah for comment.

The country’s large diaspora was crucial in securing Sandu’s reelection last year. But analysts say that the current campaign has aimed to demotivate those more liberal voters. Last month, Shor warned: “We are preparing surprises for the Moldovan authorities at overseas polling stations.” It was not clear what he was referring to. During last year’s vote, four German cities reported false bomb threats at polling stations, in what Germany’s foreign ministry said was a “coordinated attempt” to stop Moldovans abroad from voting.

Shor did not respond to CNN’s request for comment. The Kremlin has repeatedly denied interfering in foreign elections.

Testing times

PAS swept to power in a landslide in 2021 on a pledge to clean up corruption and improve governance. But its progress was hampered by the security and economic crisis resulting from Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Russia cut critical gas supplies to Moldova later that year, in what officials claimed was an attempt to punish Sandu for tacking closer to the West. But since then, Sandu has ended Moldova’s near-total reliance on Russian gas and arranged new imports from Europe. In 2023, Moldova was awarded EU candidate status.

While Sandu’s leadership has won her admiration in Brussels, she has been vilified by the Kremlin. Oana Popescu-Zamfir, director of the GlobalFocus Center think-tank, said the Kremlin is working to ensure that Moldova does not become a poster -child for post-Soviet democratization.

“For such a small country, with as few resources as Moldova, to be able to have it their way, in such an asymmetric fight against Russia and its resources – it’s simply not an option that Russia is willing to accept,” she told CNN.

The campaign has painted Sandu as the “embodiment of all EU-inspired evil,” she added. Shor has claimed that the EU is trying to make Moldovans into “zombies,” casting Russia instead as the defender of tradition and identity. EUvsDisinfo, a monitoring group, says messages like “the EU have spent millions of dollars to destroy traditional values” have proliferated online.

Much of the vitriol centers on the fact that Sandu is a woman. One widespread post that impersonated OK!, the celebrity magazine, made the outlandish claim that Sandu, who does not have children, sought sperm donations from the pop stars Elton John and Ricky Martin.

Holding firm

Although Russia has been honing its tactics, Moldova has also learned lessons from previous campaigns. Stanislav Secrieru, the national security chief, said this week that police had dismantled a network linked to Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU, which had trained over 100 Moldovans in Serbia to use violent tactics against police.

“Their mission: to organize pre- and post-electoral violence,” Secrieru said.

Popescu, the former foreign minister who is standing as a candidate for PAS, said Moldova has withstood Russia’s recent attempts to destabilize the country.

“They tried with gas, they failed. They tried with electricity, they failed. They tried to buy an election last year, they failed,” he said. “Moldova is facing stronger headwinds, but is also pushing back more than ever.”

However, recent polls suggest that PAS could struggle to keep its majority and may need to seek a coalition with others in the 101-seat legislature, which could provide more opportunities for meddling, said Popescu-Zamfir.

“As long as they can just insert a few disruptors into a fragmented coalition, especially if those disruptors hold key ministerial positions, they can stall or even reverse reforms,” she said.

And although police have uncovered networks seeking to cause havoc after the election, the fear is that authorities will not be able to expose them all.

Popescu-Zamfir warned disinformation may be merely an “opening salvo” to outright violence that seeks to “destabilize society at large, if Russia doesn’t manage to fulfil its goals through discourse only.”

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CNN’s Anna Chernova, Daria Tarasova-Markina, Kosta Gak, Clare Sebastian and Vasco Cotovio contributed reporting.