Banner: Moldovan Prime Minister Dorin Recean takes a selfie with President Maia Sandu alongside Parliament Speaker Igor Grosu (right) at Sandu’s presidential re-election campaign rally in Chișinău, September 20, 2024. (Source: Reuters/Vladislav Culiomza)

When Alexandru Coreţchi welcomed me to Chișinău earlier this year, the head of Moldova’s Information Technology and Cyber Security Service looked tired. And with good reason.

His team had spent the previous 36 hours fighting off a Russian-linked cyberattack that targeted government websites.

At the city’s airport, more than $1 million had also just been confiscated, collectively, from pro-Russian Moldovan politicians returning from Moscow. Across social media, Kremlin efforts to undermine Maia Sandu, the country’s Western-leaning president, were a dime a dozen.

“When we started to declare our intention to be an EU member state, the attacks became more violent, more sophisticated,” said Coreţchi, rubbing his eyes while fielding repeated phone calls as his cybersecurity officials mopped up the latest attack.

That was in April.

Since then, Russian-backed efforts to subvert Moldova’s presidential election and separate referendum on whether to join the European Union — both to be held on October 20, 2024 — have only grown stronger.

The Digital Forensic Research Lab has been tracking foreign interference efforts targeting the Eastern European country for more than a year.

These attacks blend a mixture of digital influence operations, often via anonymous social media channels; offline erosion of the country’s democratic institutions from pro-Kremlin local politicians; and Moscow-linked cyberattacks to hobble a country whose president has made it clear she wants Moldova to move closer to the West.

Taken together, the October 20 election and referendum represent a fundamental test for how Moldova and its allies — the United States, European Union and United Kingdom — combat Russia’s so-called “hybrid warfare.”

Among the scores of elections held worldwide in 2024, the upcoming vote in Moldova is the clearest example of how Russia uses all the tools in its arsenal to influence the outcome of another country’s democratic process for its own geopolitical gain.

Attention in the US has focused on outed Russian efforts — made public by the US Department of Justice and Treasury Department — to meddle in the November 2024 US general election.

But it is Moldova, not the US, that faces the most serious attempt by the Kremlin to skew voters’ decisions this fall. In the US, Russian influence remains a muted threat, overshadowed by domestic politics.

In Moldova, it is an ever-present danger.

In the Eastern European country, where a local vocal minority are Russian speakers who want closer ties to Moscow, the Kremlin’s tactics combine both online and offline attempts to influence how people vote.

They are now the default playbook as Russia tries to expand its influence across neighboring countries, especially those with direct borders with Ukraine.

“Russia is using Moldova as a ground floor to unfold this hybrid war in an attempt to restore its control over the region,” said Ana Revenco, a former Moldovan interior minister who, as of October 2023, heads the country’s newly-formed Center for Strategic Communication and Combating Disinformation.

With days left before the polls open, almost two-thirds of Moldovans support closer ties to the European Union, its largest trading partner, according to the most recent poll.

Sandu, the country’s president, also leads her rivals, though she is not expected to garner enough votes to win outright on October 20. A run-off election is likely on November 3.

Yet the outcome of both the referendum and presidential election will be felt beyond Moldova’s borders.

It is a test between the Kremlin’s ability to successfully skew voters’ decisions and collective efforts from Western governments and social media companies to thwart that threat.

Over the last twelve months, Russia has earmarked roughly $100 million for local influence operations, financial support of pro-Kremlin politicians, and cyberattacks, according to Moldovan officials. That figure cannot be independently verified, though, if accurate, dwarfs the country’s budget to combat such attacks.

It represents an all-out blitz that includes anonymous Telegram channels, operating in Russian, spreading false information about Moldovan politics; covert campaigns that duped American celebrities into criticizing Sandu; and, most recently, efforts by Ilan Shor — a local pro-Russian oligarch under both US and EU sanctions — to pay Moldovans to vote ‘no’ in the October 20 referendum.

If the presidential election goes to a run-off, Moscow is likely to double down on its influence operations to attack pro-Western Sandu. The Kremlin did something similar during Slovakia’s recent presidential election in support of Peter Pellegrini, a pro-Russian politician.

In the most surreal attacks against Sandu, an actress with a direct likeness to that of the Moldovan president was videoed in the closing days of 2023 in a social media post that pretended to ban locals from drinking a popular berry-infused tea. The grainy video was uploaded on Telegram, and then quickly spread across Facebook.

The goal: to undermine Sandu by purportedly showing her mocking the country’s poor by outlawing a popular Yuletide drink. It was a digital forgery that local officials believed was directly tied to Russia’s widespread influence campaigns in the country.

Confronted with this full court press, Western countries and many social media platforms have thrown their support either behind Sandu’s government or efforts to remove Russian disinformation.

This is not just a one-time play. The country also holds parliamentary elections in 2025, and under Moldova’s constitution, its prime minister — currently Dorin Recean — wields significant power. The October 20 outcomes in the presidential election and referendum are likely to affect next year’s separate vote.

Yet Western officials and social media executives acknowledge it is an uphill fight.

Despite the rhetoric about combating Russian interference, the US, EU and UK do not have the same financial firepower to match the Kremlin’s alleged $100 million budget for its influence campaigns. Moldova, itself, has limited resources to push back.

Much of the West’s work in Moldova has focused on training locals to spot Russian disinformation campaigns, supporting independent media and fact-checkers to out covert influence operations, and providing direct government-to-government capacity building to shore up nascent Moldovan agencies like those overseen by Coreţchi and Revenco.

It is much-needed work, but whose outcome will be felt over years, not days.

Ahead of the October 20 election and referendum, Ursula von der Leyen, the incoming European Commission president, also traveled to Chișinău to announce a $2 billion, three-year economic support package to align the country more closely with the 27-country bloc.

Yet in the days before the country votes, too much still relies on how social media companies respond to the threat.

Last month, TikTok, Google, Meta and Microsoft agreed to work directly with fact-checking groups and civil society organizations to fast-track their responses to potential foreign interference in Moldova. Other platforms like Telegram — a key vehicle for how Russia spreads falsehoods — are not participating.

It mirrors similar support these companies provided during the most recent European Parliament election, in June, as part of wider regulatory commitments under Europe’s Digital Services Act, or new social media legislation.

The collaboration, according to the European Commission, “will facilitate the flagging of time-sensitive content that presents threats to the integrity of the electoral process in Moldova.”

How successful this ad hoc collaboration between platforms and civil society will be in undermining Russian influence will only be known after October 20.

It is an imperfect partnership that places an oversized responsibility on nonprofit groups and fact-checking organizations to inform social media companies about well-funded Russian covert campaigns that remain rife across their platforms.

Yet without legally-binding obligations — outlined, most clearly, in Europe’s new social media rules — for tech companies to be more transparent about potential direct threats to countries’ democratic institutions, it is, at best, a policymaking “fudge.”

One that combines the legitimate goodwill of social media platforms to rid themselves of covert influence campaigns with the political reality of Moldova now on the frontline of Russia’s global hybrid warfare.

Mark Scott, “Analysis: Why Moldova is a make-or-break moment to combat Russian interference,” Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), October 16, 2024, https://dfrlab.org/2024/10/16/moldova-election-analysis.