Mike Phipps looks at the increasing Russian pressure on one of Europe’s smallest countries

Moldova rarely makes the news. It’s Europe’s poorest country, with just 2.6 million people. It borders Romania and Ukraine and is some way from Russia. But in recent months, it has been subjected to an increasing campaign of destabilisation by the Putin regime.

In February of this year, President Maia Sandu told reporters that Russian agents were planning to violently overthrow the country’s pro-European government. Russia, she said, wanted to use proxy forces to capture government buildings, take hostages, and whip up street violence, in order to topple the government and turn it away from the European Union and towards Moscow.

The announcement came a week after Ukrainian President Zelenskyy said his country had intercepted plans by Russian secret services to destroy Moldova, a claim confirmed by Moldovan intelligence.

It might be thought that Russia has enough on its plate with its illegal war on Ukraine, But its raising of tensions with other nearby countries is part of the Kremlin’s same strategy to restore its diminishing influence in Eastern Europe. In a country like Moldova, with weak institutions, Putin’s malign influence goes a long way.

Moldova has taken in hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees and provided Ukraine with humanitarian but not military aid. The Moldovan government has also expressed support for Ukraine but has not sanctioned Russia.

It’s estimated that Russian intelligence agents outnumber domestic counter-intelligence officers in the country. Demonstrations in the capital calling for ‘peace’ in Ukraine are regularly accompanied by “burly young men… with an unmistakable military bearing”. Rumours abound that Russian agents not only pay the protesters but offer large sums to any who will cause violence. Russia also mounts a sophisticated media propaganda operation in the country.

Defence Minister Anatolie Nosatii believes Russia poses a real threat to Moldova: “I’m talking about a hybrid war. It manifests itself through disinformation and fake news, which is reflected in the tensions within our society, generated by Russia to change the political order, destabilise the situation and overthrow state power.”

On the streets of the capital Chișinău and other cities, reports the Guardian, “tensions have ratcheted up amid a string of unusual incidents. Moldovan airspace was temporarily closed after authorities spotted an unidentified flying object near the northern town of Soroca, and missile debris from Russian airstrikes on neighbouring Ukraine has fallen inside Moldova’s borders.”

In February 2022, at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a Moldovan chemical tanker was shelled by Russian military forces in the Black Sea. In May, the Russian hacking group Killnet attacked several websites of official institutions in Moldova. And in August, Russia banned the import of most agricultural products from Moldova.

Energy is another weapon of destabilisation. Since last year’s invasion of Ukraine, Putin has limited gas transfers to Moldova, massively driving up energy bills – up sevenfold since 2021. Inflation is at over 30%, the highest in Europe. The economic pain created provides fertile ground for anti-government sentiment to be whipped up.

One figure from the country’s recent scandalous past seeking to capitalise on the situation – seemingly with assistance from the Kremlin – is Ilan Shor, a politician and businessman who was convicted for his role in Moldova’s ‘theft of the century’, when $1bn was removed from three of the country’s top banks. Following this, Shor fled the country. But his Shor Party has been regular organising protests to undermine the new government while its leader is expanding his media outlets in the country. Despite his general unpopularity and small electoral base, Russian state propagandists regularly hail him as the ‘leader of the Moldovan opposition’.

It’s little surprise that most Moldovans see their future with the European Union. An estimated one million Moldovans already work there and send money home. There is also a desire to break with  the institutional corruption and abuses associates with Soviet-era governance.

Maia Sandu became Moldova’s president at the end of 2020, after winning a landslide election against the pro-Russian Igor Dodon, on a pro-EU and anti-corruption platform. This and her party’s  victory in parliamentary elections in July 2021 appears to set Moldova on a modernising course. Before this, suggests one report, “Russia didn’t need to do much to run Moldova. The then-President Igor Dodon… emailed his foreign policy speeches to Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov – before he gave them.” Until the early 2000s, Russian security services even had their own office in the Moldovan security headquarters building, officials confirm.

Last year Dodon was arrested for corruption and treason. Russian state media outlets continue to express their solidarity with him.

The situation in Moldova is complicated by the Transnistria issue. Under Soviet rule, the Moldavian Republic was subject to a policy of Russification and when the USSR broke up and Moldova became independent, there was considerable opposition in the Transnistria region, where ethnic Moldovans are outnumbered by Russians and Ukrainians. Encouraged by Russia, secessionist movements developed and conflict erupted – nearly a thousand people were killed. A ceasefire has since left Transnistria a virtually autonomous zone, controlled by forces sympathetic to Russia, despite it being an internationally recognised part of Moldova.

In April 2022, a Russian major general said that one of the objectives of the Russian invasion of Ukraine was to establish a land corridor with occupied Transnistria, claiming that there was “evidence that the Russian-speaking population is being oppressed” in the region without giving further details. Following this, a series of explosions of unknown authorship occurred in Transnistria which some commentators have ascribed to false flag operations by Russia.

Commenting on the region, Vlad Iaviță wrote recently of “Transnistria’s capture by a kleptocratic, authoritarian regime in Tiraspol, the unrecognised state’s capital. Corruption and organised crime make many forms of business activity difficult and unpredictable, while infrastructure remains extremely poor.

“Illegally propped up by Moscow politically and economically for the past 30 years, the Tiraspol kleptocracy fosters crime and human rights abuses. Human trafficking, kidnappings, killings: any form of violence you can think of, everyone in the region knows someone who has been affected.”

He went on: “With Ukraine, people were surprised to see Russia’s preposterous claims of genocide against ethnic Russians in the country. The use of puppet regimes in Donbas drew attention to ‘new’ geopolitical tricks by Russia. The use of ‘provocation’ operations by the Russian military to justify aggression in Ukraine gained notoriety after the warnings from Western intelligence agencies this winter. But it had all happened already, hidden in plain sight. The blueprint for everything that surprised the world in 2022 started in 1992, with Transnistria.”

The separatist movement, he noted, started under the arch-narrative that Russian-speaking citizens would be marginalised in a right-wing, nationalist Moldova. Russia effectively provoked a bloody conflict, following which it endorsed the separatist republic. “It has used it as a proxy to force Moldova into its orbit,” concluded Iaviță, “whether through control over its biggest electricity plants in Dubăsari and Cuciurgan, as well as its gas pipelines; through recurring election fraud in favour of pro-Russian candidates; or through constant military pressure and organised crime.”

Today Transnistria is being used by Russia as a conduit for weaponry with which to target Ukraine. Sandu has said Russian forces should withdraw from the breakaway region but has emphasised she is looking for a peaceful and diplomatic solution to the conflict.

Yet in March Russia accused Moldova and Ukraine of plotting terror attacks targeting Transnistria after announcing two arrests in the region. It warned that Russia will respond to protect the autonomous area’s sizeable Russian-speaking minority.

In the same month, Western media published a document apparently drawn up by Russia’s security service, outlining a ten-year plan to destabilise Moldova, using pro-Russian groups, the Orthodox Church and the cutting off of supplies of natural gas.

In February, Russian President Putin cancelled a 2012 decree underpinning Moldova’s sovereignty, saying the move was to “ensure the national interests of Russia.” Moldova’s President Sandu expressed her fears openly about a Kremlin coup: “sabotage and militarily trained people disguised as civilians to carry out violent actions, attacks on government buildings and taking hostages.”

Mike Phipps’ new book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.

Image: President Maia Sandu. Source: Ceremonia de învestitură a Preşedintelui ales al Republicii Moldova, Maia Sandu. Author: Privesc.Eu Moldova,  licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.