Russia’s Disinformation Targets Moldova’s Ties with Europe

To destabilize Moldova, which lies strategically adjacent to Russia’s war on Ukraine, Putin’s government has cut off critical gas supplies and banned imports of Moldovan-grown fruit and vegetables. It funds pro-Russian political parties and street protests, and conducts cyberattacks, independent reporting has shown.

“However, the Kremlin’s biggest stake in achieving its goal seems to be propaganda and spreading false information through its agents of influence in Moldova,” says Petru Macovei, director of Moldova’s Independent Press Association. These include “pro-Russian politicians and parties, TV stations and websites controlled by pro-Russian political groups, activists and individuals engaged in promoting fakery and speculation on the most popular social networks in Moldova — Facebook, Telegram and Tik-Tok,” Macovei wrote recently for the U.S.-based Center for Global Peace Journalism. Moldovan political and information analyst Valeriu Pasha cites experts’ estimates that Russia spent $50 million on disinformation in 2023.

Some of the disinformation attacks are startlingly transparent lies: A prominent Russian, pro-Kremlin commentator, Vladimir Solovyov, last year posted a photo on social media of a Moldovan rally supporting EU membership, simply relabeling it an anti-EU demonstration in a different city. Other attacks are increasingly sophisticated, including the use of artificial intelligence to create “deepfaked” videos of President Maia Sandu, according to Moldova-based journalists and Sandu’s office.

In recognition of the hybrid war, Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Moldova on May 29 and pledged $135 million in aid to help Moldova counter disinformation and secure its energy supplies. The United States aims to “bolster the ability of Moldovans to resist Russian interference, to hold free and fair elections, to continue down the path to the European Union and Western integration, to create more economic opportunity,” Blinken said. “Disinformation and misinformation” form “one of the most potent hybrid tools that Russia uses,” he said.

Russia Opposes Moldova’s Shift Toward Europe

Moldova and its roughly 3 million people lie between Ukraine and Romania, part of what for more than two centuries has been a border region, and frequent battleground, between Russia’s czarist and Soviet empires to the east, and Europeans to the west. Since the Soviet Union’s collapse at the end of 1991, most of its former western borderlands — the three Baltic republics, Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia — have sought fuller independence from Moscow by integrating with the European Union. Moldova is in a potentially pivotal phase of that effort, which could be definitively affirmed by three national votes: a simultaneous presidential election and referendum on EU membership in October, and parliamentary elections in July 2025.

Since the Cold War ended with the Soviet collapse, 11 former Soviet bloc nations have joined the now 27-member European Union. The inclusion of Moldova and Ukraine is an opportunity to advance “our collective aspiration for peace, for security, for democracy and for prosperity” in Europe, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said last week as the two countries opened their talks on EU accession.

Those negotiations are likely to extend for years, as they have for other candidates — several Western Balkan countries and Turkey. As a condition of membership, which Moldova hopes to achieve by 2030, the EU said last fall it will press candidate countries to strengthen “the rule of law, in particular the independence and functioning of the judiciary and the fight against corruption, fundamental rights, the economy, the functioning of democratic institutions and public administration reform.”

Disinformation in Southeast Europe

Yet Russia has made disinformation, including fake news, “a permanent instrument of its politics,” with “targeted campaigns” to polarize and weaken democratic societies, notes a 2023 report (“Blurring the Truth”) by a German civic education institution, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. Moldova and other “countries in Southeast Europe in particular seem highly susceptible to disinformation campaigns,” partly because of the region’s often poorly financed professional news media and the many ethnic conflicts that disinformation campaigns can exploit.

Many studies — by the European Commission, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, international affairs think tanks and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, among others — underscore the massive scale of Russia’s global disinformation offensive, and its escalation in the 28 months since Putin launched his all-out war on Ukraine. The Kremlin is running a “disinformation campaign of an unparalleled magnitude,” a European Council research project reported last year. Those operations typically use social media, creating hundreds of fake accounts, and now are amplified via artificial intelligence. In Moldova as elsewhere, Russia has spread its disinformation on platforms that include Facebook and Twitter. Moscow’s campaigns in Moldova have been documented for years by independent news media such as Moldova’s Ziarul de Garda newspaper and a British prodemocracy organization, Reset.

As “a multicultural country with a polarized political environment,” Moldova is particularly “vulnerable to external influence, manipulation, propaganda and disinformation,” the Konrad Adenauer Foundation reported. Disinformation poses “a severe threat to its democratic development and national security,” it said. A Disinformation Resilience Index published in 2021 by the Poland-based Eurasian States in Transition Research Center found Moldova and Belarus “the weakest [among 10 former Soviet or Soviet-bloc states] in their ability to withstand foreign-led information threats.”

Russia’s Disinformation Narratives

Russia’s disinformation in Moldova pursues three key goals: to derail Moldova’s accession to the EU, undermine support for the pro-Europe government of President Maia Sandu and bring Moldova back into Russia’s orbit. The Russian campaign uses several core narratives, according to a study by a NATO Information Center in Chisinau, Moldova’s capital, and the Romania-based Center for Conflict Prevention and Early Warning. These narratives include:

1. A risk of war over Transnistria, a separatist enclave at Moldova’s eastern edge, if Moldova should press for the withdrawal of Russian troops based there.

2. Risk of communal conflict between Moldova’s ethnic or linguistically Romanian citizens (roughly 80 percent or more of the population) and the minorities of Russians or other Russian-speaking citizens.

3. NATO’s threat of war. Moldova is constitutionally mandated to be militarily neutral, but it cooperates with NATO. Russia warns that Moldova may join NATO, making war almost inevitable.

4. Anti-LGBT propaganda. Russia warns that liberal EU policies include “homosexual propaganda” that will turn Moldovan children to homosexuality.

5. Russia is good, Europe is bad. Russian narratives say that deeply impoverished Moldova owes its few advantages — such as Soviet-built factories — to its rule from Moscow, while “nothing good came out of Europe.”

Russian Disinformation: Impact and Response

Russian disinformation presents “a direct threat to the security of the country and endangers the free, democratic and prosperous future of Moldova,” President Sandu said last year, and opinion research suggests the impact of what she called Russia’s “most dangerous” weapon. A 2022 survey by the international nonprofit Center for Sustainable Peace and Democratic Development found 35% of Moldovans agreeing that “Russia invaded Ukraine to protect people marginalized by Nazi sympathizers.” Similarly, 31% agreed that “the Russian Federation is the guarantor of peace and stability in Moldova.” Russia’s disinformation campaigns “lead to decreased support for human rights, exacerbate relations between linguistic groups, and may increase vulnerability to political violence, especially among the youth,” said the report, which was funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Moldova’s international partners can help it withstand hybrid attacks by supporting Moldovan press and information institutions. One challenge, noted recently by Moldova-based analyst David Smith: Because Moldova is a small media market, the limited advertising or other revenue available to its news media leaves fact-based journalism massively overmatched by the millions of dollars per month that experts say Russia is spending on disinformation. Moldovan analyst and ex-diplomat Vladimir Lupan suggested in a recent interview that international partners find ways to help Moldova’s Association of Electronic Press or other institutions build capacities for real-time detection and countering of faked information. This could include initiatives like StopFals, a fact-checking project run by Moldova’s Independent Press Association.

Steven Youngblood is the director of education for the nonprofit organization Making Peace Visible. He was a 2023-24 Fulbright scholar in Moldova and the founding director of the Center for Global Peace Journalism.