Putin has just suffered humiliation in Eastern Europe

 Moldova’s parliamentary elections have yielded a landslide victory for the pro-Europe Party of Action and Solidarity (Pas). With 99.5 per cent of the polling stations counted, the Pas has secured just over half the votes while the pro-Russian Patriotic Electoral Bloc (Bep) won just 24.26 per cent of the vote.

The Pas’s victory is a major triumph for Moldovan president Maia Sandu’s European Union (EU) membership aspirations. Negotiations between Moldova and Brussels began in earnest in June 2024, and the path is now clear for Moldova to potentially accede to the EU in 2028. Sandu’s historic victory is an equally crushing blow to Russia’s strategic ambitions and a humiliation for its well-honed disinformation machinery.

For more than three decades, Russia has deployed a diverse array of tactics to secure Moldova’s fealty and stymie its European aspirations. From 1990 to 1992, Russia militarily supported separatists in Transnistria, a region on the Dniester River near the Moldova-Ukraine border.

After the Transnistria War ended, Russia pledged to withdraw its forces from Moldova by 2002. President Vladimir Putin reneged on that agreement and Transnistria remains under a de facto state of Russian occupation.

After Sandu defeated her pro-Russian rival Igor Dodon and became president in 2020, Russia stepped up its use of hybrid threats against Moldova. In October 2022, Russian energy giant Gazprom announced a 30 per cent cut in natural gas exports to Moldova. Gazprom’s decision coincided with Russia’s strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and created severe electricity shortages in Moldova. The Kremlin hoped that the ensuing protests would topple Moldova’s democratically elected government, but Sandu held firm and divested from Russian energy.

When its coercive tactics failed, Russia turned to the industrial-scale dissemination of disinformation. During the latest elections, TikTok dismantled 100,000 accounts that used AI to promote pro-Kremlin messaging to Moldovan voters. Evrazia, a non-profit organisation linked to sanctioned businessman Ilan Shor, reportedly financed polls that falsely showed the Bep in the lead. To tie Sandu to controversial liberal values, anti-LGTBQ+ content spread widely

Russia combined these digital tactics with the use of live person surrogates. Through all-expenses paid pilgrimages to Russia, the Kremlin induced Moldovan Orthodox Church priests into becoming purveyors of anti-Western disinformation. Dodon railed against the anti-democratic character of Moldova’s elections and has threatened to protest the results. As Moldovans went to the polls, Telegram founder Pavel Durov added fuel to the fire by claiming that the French intelligence services were trying to interfere in the elections.

Although Russia combined information warfare with cyberattacks against Moldova’s election commission, it failed to engineer its preferred outcome. Russia’s defeat is the latest in a long string of failures for its disinformation machinery. Russia failed to corral co-ethnics into supporting its invasion of Ukraine, stop Romanian president Dan Nicosur’s election triumph and secure victories for friendly Right-wing populist candidates in Western European elections.

These setbacks underscore improved tactics by social media watchdogs to curb pro-Kremlin automated content and the growing tiredness of Russian conspiracy theories. While Russian disinformation may help former prime minister Andrej Babis triumph in the October 3-4 Czech elections, the Kremlin might lose its strongest European ally prime minister Viktor Orban when Hungary goes to the polls next year.

Even when its preferred candidate triumphs, the Kremlin generally cannot steer them towards firmly cutting off assistance to Ukraine or diplomatically re-engaging with Russia. While Moscow viewed Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s Right-wing coalition partners as potentially friendly, Italy has resolutely supported Ukraine’s resistance to Russian aggression. In response, Russia has flailed with cyberattacks and information warfare against Italy, but these acts of sabotage have not yielded tangible results.

Moldova’s parliamentary elections were a triumph for its European orientation and a critical victory against Russian disinformation. A two-pronged sucker-punch for Putin that underscores Russia’s loosening grip on its regional neighbourhood.