In his book “War”, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Bob Woodward describes the talks between President Zelensky and Vice President Kamala Harris on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference. Harris said that the Russians were ready to attack any day. Zelensky and then-Defense Minister Reznikov categorically rejected the possibility that they would attack from Belarus, because Belarusians would not support the Russians. This was the first thing that came to my mind when, at the first post-election press conference of Moldovan President Maia Sandu, her answer to the direct question “Do you blame Russia for interfering in your elections?” was: criminal groups that influence elections with dirty money from abroad are to blame. Anyone who has ever had a kitten will understand me. When a kitten puts its head under the covers, it is convinced that no one can see it either.

I can be accused of victimization, but this tragedy was created by Maya Sandu herself. After all, it was she who decided to hold a referendum on the same day as the presidential election, in which Moldovan citizens had to decide whether to include the European integration path in the country's constitution. The leader of the only major pro-European political force in Moldova decided to increase the turnout, which is usually very low in the country, and thus guarantee herself a convincing victory. And also to secure a certain amount of credibility necessary for the center-right liberal PAS (the acronym stands for Action and Justice in Ukrainian) to survive next year's parliamentary elections with dignity. No one in the European Union has asked Sandu to conduct a national poll on whether Moldovans want to be part of the EU. Moldova has been a candidate for EU membership for more than two years. The goal, which has been declared publicly, is to cement this European choice. Because the constitutional amendments adopted in the referendum are approved by the Supreme Court, they do not need to be passed through the parliament... and therefore the new parliament, even if Sandu's party loses its majority next year, will not be able to cancel them. A new referendum will be needed. So, on the one hand, constitutional consolidation, on the other hand, the encouragement of the electorate... what could have gone wrong?

The day before the election, I had four conversations with Ukrainian and Western colleagues about the so-called “grid”. Information about it spread significantly after a journalist from the local Ziarul de Gardă newspaper joined the network of Ilan Shor, a fugitive Moldovan oligarch and head of the populist pro-Russian Pobeda party, which is banned in Moldova, for several months. Her investigation clearly demonstrates how Moldovans are recruited, how they are paid (and significantly underpaid), and how they are given specific tasks to work in the interests of the Kremlin. “I don't think Shore spends any of his own money on this,” Andrei Cureraru, a security expert at the Watchdog.md think tank, told me. - “Rather, he will misappropriate the extra money allocated by the Kremlin. First he, and then everyone under him, so that only a little bit will reach the executors.” The Deputy Prime Minister for European Integration of Moldova, Cristina Gerasimov, has previously stated that Russia has invested at least one hundred million euros in an attempt to influence these elections. By the way, we are talking about money that it did not spend on the war and hybrid operations in Ukraine. This suggests, first of all, that destabilizing Moldova is a strategic necessity for the Russians, which is easy to understand: if Moldova is forced to leave the European path, as it was previously done with Georgia, Ukraine will be worse off. Two out of three of its neighbors in the European package of candidate countries will be “downed pilots.” It will be possible to tell stories with renewed vigor inside Ukraine about the terrible EuroLGBT, which will certainly chase down and eat every Christian baby, forcing it to change its gender in the cradle. None of my interlocutors yesterday questioned the existence of this Shor's “network,” which is what we were all interested in (and to which it is very difficult to get an objective answer), and to what extent the result, which stunned both the Moldovan authorities and their allies, actually depended on this “network.” That is, how many Moldovan votes the Kremlin was actually able to buy with Shor's hands. And how many Moldovans voted the way they did, because in fact there is no significant majority in favor of Moldova's integration into the European Union (as many journalists and analysts believed), and society is divided almost in half on this issue. Ukrainians, who staged the Orange Revolution in 2004 to prevent Yanukovych from stealing the votes cast for Yushchenko and elected the same Yanukovych president in the next election in 2009, are as familiar with such fluctuations as anyone.

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When assessing the specifics of the Moldovan electorate, three things should be kept in mind. First, there are fewer people in the whole of Moldova than in Kyiv: 2 million 600 thousand according to the latest census. More than a million more Moldovan citizens live abroad, and up to two-thirds of them left Russia, where there were about 200,000, after the start of the full-scale invasion, in different directions, both because of economic deterioration and because they did not want to be in the army of the aggressor state. So, when we hear that Elon Shore tried to buy 300,000 votes with Russian money, we are talking about every eighth person in the country. 

Secondly, one of the main theses of Russian and pro-Russian propaganda was that the European Union is the peaceful hands of the belligerent NATO, and if you get close to it, war will happen to you immediately. The war was painfully experienced here in the early nineties, which resulted in the formation of an enclave on the border with Ukraine on the left bank of the Dniester: unrecognized Transnistria, which still consumes Russian gas for free. And it sells the electricity generated by this gas to Chisinau. The current government is trying to gradually reintegrate it, arguing that due to understandable logistical problems with delivery to Russia, 80% of Transnistria's business has successfully reoriented to the European Union. So even the Transnistrian region would seem to benefit from European integration. But speaking with Moldovans in Balti and Chisinau, I have repeatedly felt that they talk about the war as if it were a sexually transmitted disease. Which you can't catch if you don't go to bad places and do anything bad there. Do you remember how many of our compatriots, a few years after the invasion began in 2014, called it nothing more than “yeti sabotage”? But where does this taboo come from and spread, who imposes this non-resistance to evil on tens of thousands of people as a (dubious) way of moral victory?

And this brings us to the third factor of influence on the electorate, which the current government could not do anything about. Approximately 80 percent of the Orthodox churches in Moldova are subordinate to the Moscow Patriarchate. They do not pray for the victory of the Russians, as priests in Russia do, but they are organized trips to Russia, and, according to Andrei Curăraru, some are offered up to a thousand dollars a month for relevant propaganda during sermons. Again, this is not a “grid” or direct bribery of voters. This is a much more economical way of bribing, because only pastors need to be encouraged, and the whole community will be influenced at once.

At a rally near the parliament, organized by one of the pro-Russian candidates, Renato Usatyi, I met many young and well-dressed people. None of them - of those who agreed to talk at all - could explain why they were there. Renato Usatyi called from the stage to vote so that the whole world would shudder (spoiler alert: it did), and to do so, to use the entire network of his contacts, to write to all his friends and relatives with a call to vote correctly. Have you been to Europe, I ask a blond young man who hesitantly says that he came to Usatyi “probably through friends” but “doesn't think much of politics.” He shakes his head. Why are you against Europe, I ask. He honestly says he doesn't know. But when I ask him if he is paid to participate in the rally, of course, he says he is not. Literally twenty steps away, I find a woman holding a piece of paper with printed names, some with autographs, and the number 400 in front of each. Four hundred Moldovan lei is about nine hundred hryvnias. The woman is frightened by the attempt to film the paper and disappears into the crowd. This is not a “Shor's net” either, but it works.

On Sunday, as I realize later, I am happily in a warm bath, in one of the most anti-European districts of the capital, where my hotel is located, and I meet only pro-European people at the polling stations. In Russian-because they don't speak English, and Russian is everywhere in Chisinau-they say that there can be no other choice, because the European Union is the future, and at least their children and grandchildren should have it. Only later did I realize that I had fallen for the “Trump effect”-the same effect that sociologists who compiled pre-election ratings in Moldova in 2024 and in the United States in 2016, when Donald Trump first came to power-unexpectedly for everyone. People who are (for whatever reason) ashamed of their choices do not talk about them on camera or to strangers. This explains much better than any other explanation why all the voters who were supposedly undecided voted for the little-known former prosecutor Alexandru Stoianoglo, turning him into a dangerous rival for Maia Sandu in the second round. These same people also voted against European integration. In Chisinau, they made up as much as 44 percent of the vote, and Sandu failed to get more than half of the vote even here. 

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At ten in the evening, an hour after the polls closed in Moldova, at the first briefing of the Central Election Commission, I could not believe my eyes and for the first few minutes I thought that they must have started counting from Gagauzia. Its residents are predictably against everything related to the European Union and love Shor, although in recent years the region has been receiving new roads and other infrastructure projects with European money. The same kind of deafening misunderstanding is observed at the headquarters of Maia Sandu. She herself appears in front of the cameras only late at night to speak for a minute and a half about an “unprecedented attack on democracy.” She speaks in Romanian, without an English translation, which is later distributed in writing. The Western press present there was at least surprised by this. At that time, it was not clear whether it would be possible to save face at all: by about ten in the morning on Monday, there were more votes against European integration than for it. It is only thanks to the foreign districts, where Sandu's supporters-and Europe's supporters-dominate, that the situation can be reversed. This gives any opponent of the incumbent president absolutely legitimate reasons to doubt that she-and the European integration she leads-is supported by the majority of Moldovans. But the main tragedy arranged by Maia Sandu for Maia Sandu is not even this, nor is it the second round, which she risks losing. 

When the Moldovan president appeared on camera for the second time, at two in the afternoon on Monday - the CEC was just finishing processing the ballots - she had the first and last chance to clarify who had attacked Moldova's democracy.

And she was afraid. 

And thus, she legitimized the fear of those who would vote against her in the second round, stirred up by Russia.

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