Sursa: publicrecord.roU.S. Vice President JD Vance has criticized Romania for cancelling last year’s presidential election based on the “flimsy suspicions of an intelligence agency and enormous pressure from its continental neighbors.”
As expected, Romanian opposition politicians welcomed Vance’s comments made at the Munich Security Conference on Friday in which he questioned the annulment of the country’s presidential election after accusations of Russian meddling.
Romania’s government has failed to communicate clearly how Russia meddled and why Romania’s Western partners supported the unprecedented step of canceling the election. Universul.net which has been tracking Russian disinformation since it invaded Ukraine in 2022 lays out how what former President Klaus Iohannis called a ‘complex and subtle’ campaign worked.
To recap, the first round of Romania’s presidential election was canceled by the Constitutional Court on December 6 two days before the runoff. According to Romanian intelligence reports, foreign state actors, later identified as Russia, had manipulated social-media platforms, especially TikTok, to benefit far-right, pro-Russian candidate Calin Georgescu.
The campaign was orchestrated by Russia, President Klaus Iohannis, former U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, EU foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas, and NATO’s deputy secretary general in charge of hybrid warfare, James Appathurei, said.
“What we have seen in Romania are social media accounts left in a long hibernation, created there years ago, activated, unattributed, but used to influence the outcome.” Appathurei said.
He noticed “money paid to micro-influencers…. people who have 2,000 followers, 100 followers, 5,000 followers, but [you pay] 10,000 …”, so that when they make a review they also add a sentence that is favorable to [the pro-Russian candidate]. Moscow has denied any interference.
Disinformation is stealthy. You will not find messages calling on voters to support Vladimir Putin or Russia or even connecting Moscow to Calin Geoorgescu or George Simion. That would not work in Romania where many are fearful of Russia mindful of recent history when Romania was under Soviet influence.
▪︎There were 25,000 TikTok accounts – coordinated by Russia – that acted jointly to boost Georgescu. So efficient were these accounts that on the first day Georgescu set up an account they got 4.5 million views in a few hours. This is basically impossible without massive and sophisticated engineering.
▪︎ The #călingeorgescu hashtag got 700 million views on TikTok in just three months with a record 100 million views in one day alone, most of them Romanians. Millions were bombarded all day long with videos of Georgescu, bringing him a huge electoral advantage.
▪︎ Georgescu at one point was the ninth most popular person on TikTok even though many Romanians hadn’t even heard of him. International celebrities would be envious of such a feat.
▪︎ TikTok representatives admitted in the European Parliament that Georgescu was promoted by accounts which had hundreds of thousands of followers linked to Sputnik (Russia’s propaganda platform), but later refrained from saying that they found electoral promotion.
▪︎ Russia paid 69 million euros for a campaign to promote their narratives in Romania and Bulgaria, according to Bulgarian cybersecurity group BG Elves. Universul.net reported on this.
▪︎ Researchers from disinformation organizations Reset Tech, Check First, and EU Disinfo Lab found traces of a strong pro-Georgescu online campaign on the same Russian channels.
▪︎ Bloomberg wrote about a Facebook network in an unnamed foreign country that paid 270,000 euros for 4,100 political ads to promote Calin Georgescu and to some extent Simion and to denigrate Elena Lasconi, who came second in the first round of presidential elections.
▪︎ Paid advertisements of homeopathic treatments and saints from a company linked to Russia got an incredible 440 million impressions. The ads which align with Georgescu’s campaign appeared years before before Georgescu appeared talking about the same themes to an already processed audience ( Snoop.ro investigation). At the same address in the UK there is another company, staffed by Georgescu’s supporters from “United Thrace” and pro-Russian Romanian journalists who have been pushing Kremlin’s propaganda for years and are frequent guests at the Russian embassy.
▪︎ A context.ro material shows that the Osavul software (supported by NATO, among others) demonstrates more clearly that a Russian Internet network involved in destabilizing democracies in elections helped Georgescu. Russian accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers boosted him overnight. From less than 100 posts per day, he reached over 1,000 outside Romania at the beginning of November, helped by foreign accounts.
▪︎ Bogdan Peșchir, an acquaintance of Russian puppet oligarch in Moldova, Ilan Shor, who paid Romanian influencers to get involved in Moldova’s electoral campaign in favor of a pro-Russia candidate, paid one million euros to promote Georgescu on TikTok. In itself, this is a a violation of electoral rules, and a disguised electoral bribe, it gives an advantage to a candidate who declared zero spending.
▪︎ A French state agency has discovered the Russian operation “Portal Kombat”, dozens of extremely prolific, unrealistically prolific Russian websites (150,000 articles in just 3 months) that promoted Calin Georgescu.
▪︎ Hundreds of influencers on social media were duped (and paid small sums of money) into promoting the #echilibrușiverticalitate campaign which was linked to Călin Georgescu. There is a question whether this campaign was hijacked or whether it was a Liberal Party maneuver. But whatever the truth, it meant that Georgescu received undue benefits and illegal campaigning.
▪︎ Thousands of pro-Georgescu volunteers used the Russian Telegram network to promote him and promised money “depending on their involvement”, according to G4 Media citing a Pro-TV report.
▪︎ An apparently South African company which hides Russian interests, FA Agency, paid Romanian influencers up to 1,000 euros per post to promote Georgescu.
▪︎ In the last ten years, more notably in the last five, thousands of pages and groups have appeared promoting Georgescu themes about “the old days”, about how “the EU and NATO are bad”, and the “ancestral lands” (the name of Georgescu’s association). These pages support Georgescu.
▪︎ Thousands of Facebook pages have changed their names from “Sales Târgoviște” or “Animal lovers from Suceava” to “We support Calin Georgescu” or “Calin Georgescu voters”. Maybe some were fans, but thousands of pages changing over the course of 1-2 days?
Romania’s national intelligence agency, the SRI said that reports declassified on December 4 spoke of an operation prepared in advance, in favor of Calin Georgescu, with “the modus operandi of a state actor”. Almost 800 TikTok accounts were created in 2016, and Telegram accounts in 2022 and all were mobilized two weeks before the Nov. 24 election.
Romania’s Foreign Intelligence Service, SIE, says Romania “has become a priority for Russia’s hostile actions, with the Kremlin’s growing interest in influencing (at least) the mood and agenda in Romanian society in the electoral context.”
Finally,former President Klaus Iohannis called the interference “complex and complicated.”
“From the way they acted, from the way the action of attacks on TikTok was carried out, TikTok accounts in Russia, simultaneous attack on all servers that were caught in the vote count, attacks that were rejected. These multiple actions cannot be carried out by individual actors, groups or parties,”he said. “They have such a magnitude and complexity that only a state actor can do such a thing. In the intelligence community, these models are very well known and it is known who acts in this way, and this is where Russia was,” Iohannis said.