While the fractured West sleepwalks in distracted confusion, one of Europe’s smallest countries is deciding on Sept. 28 whether to pivot back to Moscow
Moscow is messing with Moldova, and the sleepy Western alliance needs to pay attention. One of Europe’s smallest countries, often dismissed as peripheral, is electing a new parliament on Sept. 28, and Russia is throwing every scheming skullduggery into an effort to drag it into Moscow’s deadly embrace.
Geography explains why this matters. Moldova is wedged between Ukraine, where Russia wages its brutal war, and Romania, a NATO member critical to the assistance to Kyiv. Russian “peacekeepers” already sit in the restive Transnistria region on Moldova’s eastern edge. If a pro-Russian government arises more would stream in, completing the encirclement of Ukraine: north through Belarus, east through Donbas, south via Crimea and west through Moldova.
Russians would also be sitting directly across the Prut River from Romania. Just beyond that border is Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base, NATO’s largest hub in southeastern Europe and a critical lifeline for Ukraine. To imagine Russian troops stationed legally within miles of such an installation is to understand why Moldova, with less than 3 million people, matters.
So Russia is working mighty hard to discredit President Maia Sandu’s pro-European Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS) while boosting the Patriotic Bloc, the main pro-Russian rival. The effect is already visible: polls show the race too close to call, with PAS hovering near 36% and the Patriotic Bloc just a step behind or even ahead in some surveys. The pro-European camp could lose ground despite Sandu’s personal popularity.
In the West, meanwhile, politicians bicker and argue about the usual trivial bullshit. Or in America’s case, about whether painkillers cause autism, whether science is a hoax and whether some bureaucrat should fire dopey comedians.
What happens if the pro-Putin forces win? Sandu would remain president, but a hostile parliament would control Moldova’s government and wield true power. It could appoint a pro-Russian prime minister, seize control of the budget, abandon reforms required for EU accession, and negotiate sweetheart deals with Gazprom for popularity. It could even work to strip the presidency of its powers, and derail Moldova’s EU accession bid — a process explicitly linked to Ukraine’s.
All this would hand Vladimir Putin the prize of flipping an EU candidate and deeply undermining Ukraine and NATO both – without firing a shot. So that’s why the Kremlin has turned Moldova has become something of a grand laboratory for Russian disinformation, perfecting techniques for use across Europe and beyond. The torrent of online manipulation includes bot-driven swarms on Facebook and TikTok, coordinated Telegram channels, and paid influencers spreading pro-Kremlin talking points.
Russia has also poured money into political operations in Moldova – around 200 million euros in 2024 alone, an extraordinary sum equal to roughly one percent of GDP. The funds have bankrolled protests, vote-buying schemes and destabilization campaigns. It all aims to create an image of a government in chaos, all while Moscow’s disinformation machine blames Sandu’s pro-European leadership for the crisis Russia engineered.
The Moldovan Orthodox Church, subordinate to Moscow, has also echoed Kremlin talking points, warning congregants that EU membership would destroy traditions and family values. Social media networks, many run from Moscow or through local proxies, spread endless narratives of betrayal, corruption, and economic ruin.
Russia is also deploying energy blackmail. In January, Moscow cut off the gas deliveries that had long powered Moldova’s electricity generation, with the excuse being a fictitious debt to its Gazprom state company. Energy prices soared and overall inflation surged toward 30 percent, hitting food and medicine hardest. For Europe’s poorest state, this was existential pain. Then gas deliveries resumed only to Transnistria, the pro-Russian separatist enclave in Moldova’s east. The message was that Moscow rewards loyalty.
Romania can and does supply gas to Moldova proper – but what is missing is the will in Brussels to subsidize those deliveries fully, even though the cost of losing Moldova would dwarf the price of stabilizing it.
So a pro-Russian Moldova would validate energy blackmail as a weapon, embolden Moscow’s disinformation machine, and signal to every vulnerable society that elections can be bought and the West will sit by haplessly. It would embolden the Kremlin to repeat the formula in the Balkans or the Baltics – and to redouble its efforts in France, the UK, Germany – and America.
What can be done? Moldova’s neighbor Romania has already faced this storm. In November 2024, its presidential election was upended when a little-known far-right candidate surged to the top of the first round amid a flood of disinformation and undeclared spending. Intelligence services later revealed what everyone suspected: the campaign had been driven by “aggressive hybrid Russian attacks,” from social media manipulation to clandestine funding channels.
The Constitutional Court annulled the entire first round just days before the runoff. Controversial but necessary, it was an act of democratic self-defense, and Romania deserves credit for its clarity of purpose. Naturally, the Trump machine condemned Romania’s actions as an affront to free speech, and in the subsequent May election backed another pro-Putin candidate, who lost.
Moldova may soon require the same courage, but it cannot do it alone. The West has offered symbolic aid, modest subsidies, and a few fact-checking initiatives. These gestures are wholly inadequate.
What is needed is a coordinated strategy. Europe must underwrite Moldova’s economy through the crisis with real resources, not token sums. Subsidies to households and small businesses exist but could be raised further to blunt the inflationary pain that Moscow hopes to weaponize. A robust information campaign must counter Kremlin narratives, expose disinformation, and amplify Moldova’s pro-European choice.
Above all, the EU must send a political signal by accelerating Moldova’s accession process – as it should eventually do for Ukraine. It is so small that integration is manageable. To delay or dither is to play into Moscow’s hands.
The Kremlin’s playbook is well known and Moldova is simply the latest target. But if the West fails here, the message will reverberate through Tbilisi, through Vilnius, through Warsaw. That’s why Sunday’s election in tiny Moldova is the frontline in the democratic West’s struggle against Russia.
Of course, the extra dollop of insanity is that Trump is Putin’s ally in undermining NATO. That is a matter to be survived and finessed until American voters, in the 2026 midterms, can decide if this – along with the other Trumpian lunacies – is really what they want.
