“How do we bankrupt Russia?” one character asks in an internet meme circulated about Moldova’s parliamentary election this past Sunday. The answer? To hold more elections in Moldova. Moldovan authorities estimated that the Kremlin spent hundreds of millions of euros to run influence campaigns on Facebook, Telegram, and TikTok, to organize the transport of voters in the diaspora—especially within Russia—to polling stations, and to buy votes directly. Mind you, Moldova’s economy has an annual GDP of some $18 billion, making it akin to a political campaign in the United States spending hundreds of billions, and still failing to win.
The brute force of Russian money was also combined with a new degree of sophistication. Unlike in the old days, when Russian operatives or people working for the disgraced oligarch Ilan Shor would smuggle bags of cash into the country, the more recent methods involved opening personal bank accounts in Russia for thousands of Moldovans ahead of the 2024 EU referendum and presidential election, as well as the use of crypto this year.
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