Ukraine Isn’t the Only European Government Russia Is Trying to Overthrow

CHIȘINĂU, Moldova – On the first day of spring, according to the Moldovan tradition Mărțișor, people celebrate the end of winter by wearing red and white interwoven strings as bracelets or lapel pins. It’s understandable that Europe’s poorest country, with just 2.6 million people mostly reliant on an agriculture economy, good soil and growing seasons bracketed by brutal cold, would honour the end of winter.

“At least it’s sunny,” said a friend as we walked through the very cold capital Chișinău in early March. “But the sun has teeth.”

In front of us, around 500 demonstrators milled about chanting for “peace” in Ukraine, and for the former member of the USSR to stop looking towards Europe but instead slip back into Russia’s orbit. There’s a widespread belief that the protesters are paid between $20 to $50 each, plus lunch. Most of them seemed older, and in all honesty many appeared to be drunk from homemade brandy poured from plastic 2-litre soda bottles. 

Weeks previously, the presidents of Ukraine and Moldova had warned that Russia was planning on violently overthrowing the country’s pro-European government, using proxy forces to capture government buildings, take hostages, and whip up street violence. Moldova may be poor and often overlooked, but capturing it without a shot being fired would be a huge geopolitical coup for Russia, the country occupying a strategic position on Ukraine’s southwest border, near the city of Odesa.

The pro-Russia demonstration around the city centre in Chișinău might have not appeared totally threatening, but following the crowd that day were a handful of burly young men in cargo pants and tactical backpacks. They carried themselves with an unmistakable military bearing. And they weren’t Moldovan police.

On Sunday the 12th of March, security services in Moldova said they’d arrested at least seven people trained by Russian intelligence services and foiled a plot to foment popular unrest and overthrow the government. Meanwhile at a pro-Russia demonstration on the same day, police arrested 54 people, including 21 people aged under 18. Among the arrests were a number of young men who police said were acting in an aggressive manner, with pepper spray and knives found.

Cops said the attempted coup masterminds, who weren’t among those arrested, included two fugitive oligarchs, Moldova’s former president who is currently under house arrest, officers from the FSB security service which is the main successor to the KGB, and one of the most powerful business and criminal families in Russia.

According to Moldovan police chief Viorel Cernauteanu, FSB-linked agents offered key protest figures $10,000 to cause violence at otherwise peaceful demonstrations.

Over the last month, Moldovan security services have prevented nearly 200 people from entering the country under what they claim are false pretexts to foment unrest, according to multiple government and security officials.

“With the war in Ukraine and sanctions against Russia, it’s impossible for the Russians to send people here,” said a former Moldovan diplomatic official, who asked not to be named discussing Russia. “So they are sending Serbs and Montenegrins, …[with] links to Serbian government organisations acting on Russia’s behalf, it’s clear.”

Incidents, according to multiple officials who met with VICE World News in March, included about a dozen known members of a violent football ultras group with close ties to the Russian-sympathetic Serbian government attempting to enter Moldova to attend a match in Transnistria, an internationally unrecognised, Russian-controlled breakaway republic in eastern Moldova along the border with Ukraine.

Transnistria – which fought the Moldovan government for autonomy in 1992 – has long been a point of tension between Russia and Moldova with hundreds of Russian soldiers occupying the area as “peacekeepers.” Also refused entry to Moldova? A Montenegrin boxing club with ties to far-right nationalists believed to be backed by Russia.

“It’s pretty obvious what’s going on, I think we prevent at least nine out of ten of the people they’re sending from getting in,” said the former Moldovan diplomat. Sunday’s arrests involved activists that police say were organised by FSB-linked suspects from outside Moldova.

“It started with these ultras and boxers, just a couple dozen, that had obvious links to pro-Russian groups in Serbia,” said a NATO intelligence official, who added Sunday’s operation by the Moldovan government, “rounded up the accused plotters who we suspect have ties to Russian intelligence.”

“But the last two weeks have been a flood of suspected attempts to enter the country by suspicious people,” said the NATO official. “It seemed to be a plan.”

Russia’s motives are clear, said the official.

“It’s a transparent attempt by Russia to foment unrest that distracts the EU, while possibly forcing Ukraine to leave more troops along the border with Transnistria,” said the NATO official. “Toppling the Moldovan government would help [Russian President Vladimir] Putin but none of this will have an effect on the outcome [of the war in Ukraine.] If Ukraine had fallen, Russia would have taken over Moldova. Instead Ukraine survived and now the future of Russia’s presence in Transnistria is in doubt.”

Last week, Russia accused Moldova and Ukraine of plotting terror attacks or even a military operation to target Transnistria after announcing two arrests in the breakaway region and warned that Russia will respond to protect the autonomous area’s sizeable Russian-speaking minority. 

Driving the attempt to tap into genuine populist anger over a sixfold increase in energy prices and pivot Moldova away from Europe and towards Russia is a Russian-backed social media campaign described by one researcher as the most vicious they’d ever seen.

“Fox News is like Nickelodeon compared to what the Kremlin's propaganda machine broadcasts every day to millions of Moldovans,” said Felix Kartte, a senior adviser at the social media research firm Reset, who worked with the Moldovan government to combat online disinformation.

“Facebook ads from Ilan Shor are openly inciting a coup against the democratically elected government, and Meta is letting them get away with it,” he said. Reset investigated the campaign on behalf of the Moldovan government and Kartte’s work eventually forced Facebook to pull the ads. But not before one video describing Western diplomats as “evil spirits,” that needed to be “ripped out,” was viewed more than a million times. In a country of 2.8 million people. Spokespersons for Meta have said that Shor was immediately flagged when the campaign was brought to their attention. 

“I have never seen such a brazen attempt to overthrow a democracy via social media,” Kartte said.

Shor’s eponymous Moldovan political party is the main conduit through which the Russian-backed attempt to overthrow the government is flowing, security officials who briefed the media on Sunday said.

The Shor Party, the most active pro-Russian opposition party in the country, denies bussing in protesters from outside the capital and paying them to demonstrate, despite credible evidence of exactly this online. 

In the words of an FSB assessment, Shor is completely polarising, with about half the population considering him a thief, after being charged by Moldovan authorities as part of the 2014 bank fraud.

The other half, according to the FSB assessment, which was first reported by the Washington Post, “idealise” Shor for his patronage and pro-Russia stances. And much of that support has been inflamed by brutally high energy prices.

Since last year’s invasion of Ukraine, Putin has limited gas transfers, massively driving up regional bills. Moldovan officials say efforts to switch energy dependence to Romania should fix the issue later this year, and the EU-backed government uses huge subsidies directly to consumers on their energy bill to offset the shock. But with a population of long-suffering rural poor, there’s legitimate economic pain, and Moscow and its local political allies, like Shor, have used the Moscow-ordered gas shortages as leverage.

Conditions are tough in Moldova, stuck between Romania and Ukraine and regularly steamrolled by such local empires as Russia, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire. History often treats Moldova more as a place for armies to pass through while attacking nearby Odesa or the Balkans than a nation. Bitten off by Joseph Stalin and made part of the USSR prior to World War II, then occupied by Germany before Stalin’s triumphant return, Moldova has often served as a line between Slavic Ukraine and Latin Romania. Its tiny size and rural poverty feel geopolitically intentional. And it's these conditions and poor economic prospects that have sent as much as a third of the country – one million by many accounts – to jobs across France, Italy, Spain and Portugal, where Romanian speakers can quickly absorb the local language. In an EU economy, even basic service industry jobs pay enough to send money back to Moldova to support families. And most Moldovans qualify for Romanian passports, further lowering the bar to EU entry.

“One third of the country lives in the EU and sends money back to pay for grandparents to raise their children,” a Moldovan professional in his 30s, who didn’t want to be quoted by name in a story about a Russian coup, told me. “The children will eventually leave for jobs in Europe.”

This historic vulnerability immediately came to mind when, in February, Ukrainian President Voldymyr Zelenskyy announced that Ukrainian services had discovered a Russian-led plot to overthrow Moldova’s pro-European Union government. Moldova’s President Maia Sandu quickly repeated the claims before getting an audience with US President Joe Biden, who pledged $400 million in economic support that Moldovan officials say will be mostly used for energy subsidies keeping the country functioning.

But despite these crucial economic, and cultural, ties to Europe, as a former republic of the Soviet Union, Moldova also faces massive pressure from the east. The links to Russia remain strong, virtually every Moldovan also speaks Russian and often Ukrainian, and the Moldovan university students often take advantage of the cheap costs and shared language of Russian universities.

The links between Moldova, Ukraine and Russia aren’t limited to education and language, however, there’s also a deeply ingrained Russian security presence.

Taranu said USSR’s Russian chauvinism was mild compared to the reinvigorated Russian imperialism that replaced it under Putin.

“[As ambassador] my Russian counterparts never took Moldovan independence seriously, they never recovered from Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and the Baltics becoming independent, you see this now with Ukraine,” he said. “Putin doesn’t care as much about the Central Asian countries, but he wants to restore the USSR’s glory towards Europe.”

“The West thought economic ties and peace were enough but the West can’t understand that Putin’s crazy and wants to be Peter [the Great]. That it won’t work doesn’t matter.”

Putin’s imperial ambitions, the war in Ukraine, and the fact that the Cold War never really ended in Moldova leave this country completely vulnerable.

“If Odesa had fallen to the Russians, Moldova would have been wiped away,” the former Moldovan diplomat told me over coffee. “Prior to the invasion, they could land a plane of FSB officers at the airport and take over in two hours.”

But prior to 2019’s election of Sandu, Russia didn’t need to do much to run Moldova. The then-President Igor Dodon worked so closely with Russia that when someone leaked his mobile phone records to the RISE Moldova investigative group, he was constantly calling someone saved under the contact “Kremlin Guy.” Dodon also emailed his foreign policy speeches to Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov – before he gave them.

Dodon – currently under house arrest for, among other things, treason – was backed by elements of the Moldovan intelligence services notorious for their close ties to Russia. So close that Russia’s FSB resident, or station chief, had their own office in the Moldovan security headquarters building until the early 2000s, according to multiple officials.

The situation in Moldova is no joke, however. According to RISE Moldova and multiple Moldovan officials VICE World News spoke to, Dodon and Shor are linked to Igor Chaika, a Russian oligarch, considered the economic power behind Russian influence in the country. First reported by RISE Moldova and confirmed by multiple Moldovan officials – an ongoing investigation by Moldovan prosecutors has reportedly found business links between Chaika and the Moldovans. 

Dodon, Shor and Igor Chaika are all named in the US Treasury sanctions list. Plahotniuc was also sanctioned at the same time. 

“In exchange for the promise of Russian support in the election, Chayka [sic] obtained backing for legislation preferred by the Kremlin, including a law to strip Moldova’s president of control of the country's intelligence agency. The [Russian government] used Chayka’s companies as a front to funnel money to the collaborating political parties in Moldova,” said the Treasury designation. “Some of these illicit campaign funds were earmarked for bribes and electoral fraud.”

Chaika’s father is the former Russian prosecutor general with close ties to Putin and his older brother specialises in taking over Russian companies threatened with investigation by his father. The Chaikas’ notoriety inside Russia for brutal business tactics and enormous corruption earned them a 2016 YouTube documentary made by Russian dissident opposition figure Alexei Navalny, currently in a Russian penal colony. The Chaikas are considered some of the best connected, most powerful and profoundly dangerous figures in Russia. And Igor Chaika’s job is to manage Moldova, according to RISE Moldova. Dodon and Shor deny charges against them and claim they are victims of a government cover-up. A representative of the Shor Party declined to meet while I was in Moldova.

“There are more FSB officers assigned to Moldova than Moldova has counter-intelligence officers,” said the former Moldovan diplomat, a claim considered “credible,” by the NATO intelligence officer. Russia’s embassy – one of the largest and most modern buildings in Chișinău – spans an entire large, Soviet-style block with multi-storey buildings, a presence completely out of proportion to Moldova's few million people.

“The intelligence services can be trusted,” said the former Moldovan diplomat, “as long as Putin is losing.”