I doubt you knew much about Moldova, and perhaps virtually nothing at all until its EU referendum hit the headlines last weekend. Me too. But suddenly it is on the front line of European resistance to Vladimir Putin, as the Russian dictator attempts to completely buy and subvert what appeared to be a properly functioning eastern European democracy.
A small country of fewer than three million people sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine in southeastern Europe, Moldova was historically a part of Romania before it was annexed into the Soviet Union by Stalin in 1940. Romania joined Nato in 2004 and the EU in 2007. Reunion with Romania has been a live issue in Moldova since the end of the Soviet Union, and had this happened its European destiny would have been more assured. But it didn’t, partly because of a Russian minority in the country. It remained in Russian/European limbo, a bit like its much larger neighbour Ukraine—and like Georgia in the Caucasus.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 sounded loud alarm bells that Moldova could easily be next, and its recently elected pro-western—and Harvard-educated—president Maia Sandu promptly opened negotiations to join the EU. Polls showed huge support for this move, and for Sandu personally.
Hence the EU referendum last weekend, on the same day as Moldova’s presidential election in which Sandu was re-standing. The referendum was expected to pass by a large margin, and Sandu to be re-elected easily.
But Putin decided otherwise. He poured tens of millions into the small country, through client oligarchs, in an attempt to buy more than 100,000 votes and change the result of both the referendum and the presidential election. There were also riots and demonstrations by thugs paid from the same sources.
The sheer openness and brazenness of the destabilisation was a step beyond Putin’s election interference elsewhere, except in Belarus in 2020 where it happened in cooperation with the longstanding tyrannical president, Alexander Lukashenko. It is a stark warning as to what could be in store across democratic eastern Europe, particularly in countries with Russian minorities like the Baltics, if Putin is further emboldened.
The good news is that it didn’t succeed—or at least not yet. The pro-EU referendum passed by a narrow majority (50.5 per cent), and Sandu came top in the presidential election. If Putin can’t pull off a civil coup in tiny Moldova, which isn’t in either the EU or Nato, then he will find it much harder still in the likes of Lithuania and Latvia, let alone one of the large democracies in the region.
The bad news is that he hasn’t lost yet. There is a second round of Moldova’s presidential election on 3rd November, because Sandu didn’t get more than half the vote. Were she to lose to her pro-Russian opponent, Moldova’s EU application would probably unravel and maybe the country’s democracy along with it. Even if Sandu is re-elected, it is a rocky road ahead to the safe haven of EU membership and security guarantees.
All of which puts into sharp relief not only the Ukrainian conflict, but also the coming election in Georgia this weekend, which is similarly fraught. As will be the next election in Hungary in 2026, which looks increasingly like it will be a showdown between Viktor Orbán-Putin on the one hand, and European democracy on the other. It could go either way, particularly if Donald Trump is on Putin’s side too.
