Moldova’s Pro-EU Party Prevails Despite Russian AI Disinformation Campaign

Moldova’s pro-European Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS) secured a narrow victory in the recent parliamentary elections, winning 50.2% of the vote despite facing an unprecedented wave of Russian-backed disinformation. The pro-Russian Patriotic Bloc managed only 24.2%, marking a significant win for Moldova’s European aspirations in the face of well-documented foreign interference.

The September 28 election results brought relief to both pro-EU Moldovans and European partners who had feared that this strategically positioned country—located between Ukraine and EU member Romania—might succumb to Russian propaganda efforts. The European Commission has already pledged 1.9 billion euros to help Moldova build infrastructure necessary to speed up its EU accession process.

“The main takeaway from our observing mission is that election day comes with an overwhelming silence. This silence tells us clearly that the primary manipulation tactics were already implemented well before election day,” said Ana Mocanu, executive director of Funky Citizens, a Romanian organization working in media literacy and fact-checking.

“What we’re witnessing is that election day merely harvests the results of a much broader, long-term manipulation mechanism,” Mocanu added. “The real battle is now fought in digital form or at the grassroots level, through networks that are already organized and synchronized by election day.”

The scale of digital interference was staggering. Between September 1-23, approximately 9,900 TikTok videos were published, generating over 93 million views from accounts displaying patterns of “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” This represents an evolution in the Kremlin’s information warfare playbook, with artificial intelligence replacing human troll farms as the primary source of propaganda content.

An investigation by Context, a journalistic startup, revealed “a Russian propaganda and disinformation bubble” consisting of 128 TikTok accounts producing AI-generated video content. These accounts posted over 6,000 clips during a two-month period, spreading disinformation and polarizing narratives. False claims circulated widely, including assertions that the elections would not take place or that Orthodox Christianity was under threat from the EU.

Expert Forum’s analysis of 3,391 videos, 36,338 comments, and 100 identified inauthentic accounts on TikTok revealed a pattern of AI-generated fake accounts creating an extraordinary number of views in a short period—13.9 million views in Moldova’s trending content during the pre-election month alone.

“When I began this monitoring work, I anticipated a manageable volume of content in a small country compared to what we’ve been through in Romania,” said Madalina Voinea from Expert Forum. “The reality proved far more challenging, not because of the narratives themselves, but because of the sheer scale of their artificial amplification.”

The fugitive oligarch Ilan Shor, known for his connection to the 2014 billion-dollar bank fraud in Moldova and currently based in Moscow, played a significant role in this disinformation campaign. Companies he founded in 2024 funneled money into Moldova’s social media landscape, with Shor personally paying for 1,326 out of 1,505 ads on Meta platforms between April 30 and July 28, totaling 45,000 euros.

Shor’s influence extended beyond Meta platforms. Thirty Telegram channels linked to him appeared simultaneously, all targeting the Moldovan parliamentary elections. A data leak revealed that 134 people operated these channels, receiving payments of 1.8 million euros in 2024 and 1 million euros in the first five months of 2025.

The vulnerability to such campaigns varies across Moldova’s diverse regions. “This fear-mongering is particularly effective in Gagauzia and Transnistria, regions where communities genuinely feel neglected by the central government and excluded from Moldova’s pro-EU trajectory,” Voinea noted. Despite this, the pro-EU governing PAS party still managed to secure nearly 30% support in Transnistria, indicating limits to the effectiveness of Russian propaganda.

With EU member Romania on Moldova’s western border and approximately one-third of Moldovans holding Romanian passports, civil society activists in both countries fear Moldova could become a gateway for Russian influence into the EU.

“Moldova is doing exceptionally well in integrating into the European Union,” Voinea said, suggesting that Moldova might enter the EU before Ukraine “because it’s a very small country and it has made amazing progress in justice reform, the integration process, legislation, education, corruption, the economy, everything.”

With a parliamentary majority, Moldovan President Maia Sandu is well-positioned to advance the country’s EU integration process. However, the Russian disinformation operations targeting Moldova may represent just a testing ground for tactics that could soon appear elsewhere in Europe.

“In Moldova, people have been living with disinformation in their daily lives for three years now,” Mocanu observed, contrasting Moldova’s prepared authorities with Romania’s lack of similar public communication services to counter disinformation.

The Moldovan case offers valuable lessons for democracies across Europe facing similar challenges to their information ecosystems and electoral processes.