By 
Elisabedi Koridze, Europe Team
Sasha Pleshco, via Unsplash/ May 22nd, 2023.
Despite the Russian disinformation and interference efforts, Moldova’s pro-EU Party won the elections.
Moldova’s parliamentary elections were held on September 28th, 2025, and ended in a decisive victory of the pro-European party of Action and Solidarity (PAS). President Maia Sandu’s party, PAS, garnered more than twice the number of votes of the main pro-Russian opposition party, Patriotic Electoral Bloc (BEP), which received under 25% of the vote. Winning elections is crucial for Moldova’s future path into the European Union (EU), as Moldova was awarded its EU candidate status in 2022 along with Ukraine and Georgia, four months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It should be noted that, reportedly, the election process was influenced by disinformation campaigns and other types of interference by Russia.
According to the BBC, there was a network that promised its participants money if they posted pro-Russian propaganda and fake news undermining Moldova’s pro-EU ruling party ahead of the country’s parliamentary election. More specifically, the participants were paid to find supporters of BEP, and carry out a poll, which would be secretly recorded. An important thing is that the participants were doing this under the name of a non-existent organisation. They then published the results of the poll, which suggested that the ruling party would lose the elections. But even before the elections took place, the official polls suggested that Maia Sandu’s party was ahead of the pro-Russian BEP.
Using an undercover reporter, the BBC found connections between the secret network and Moldovan oligarch Ilan Shor, who is sanctioned by the United Kingdom (UK) for corruption and by the United States (US) for “the Kremlin’s malign influence operations”. The above-mentioned network is also linked with a non-profit organisation called Evrazia, which, on the other hand, has connections with Ilan Shor and is sanctioned by the UK, US, and EU for bribing Moldovan citizens to vote against EU membership last year. BBC’s undercover reporter attended secret online seminars, which would “prepare operatives”. The undercover reporter was later contacted by a network coordinator and told her that she would be paid 3,000 Moldovan lei ($170) a month to produce TikTok and Facebook posts in the run-up to the election and that she would be sent the money from Promsvyazbank, a sanctioned Russian state-owned bank, which is a shareholder in one of Ilan Shor’s companies.
Russia has denied that it was waging a disinformation campaign or trying to buy votes, but this is not the first time that Russia has tried to do something like this. However, as the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said: “Even after spending huge, huge resources to undermine it and corrupt whoever they could, Russia had failed to destabilise Moldova”.
