The pro-EU leader says that Moscow has her country in its sights says Marc Bennetts.
As the leader of a small pro-western country on the frontline of Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, President Sandu of Moldova is high on the Kremlin’s list of enemies.
Since President Putin ordered tanks into Ukraine 18 months ago, she says neighbouring Moldova has survived a failed Kremlin-backed coup and Russian energy blackmail, while facing a stream of disinformation aimed at fomenting discord and scuppering the country’s attempt to join the European Union.
In February Sergey Lavrov, Putin’s foreign minister, described Moldova as “the next Ukraine”, a remark widely seen as a thinly veiled threat.
“Russia does not want Moldova to advance on its EU path. Russia wants Moldova to stay part of the grey zone to use it in its fight against the democratic world,” Sandu, 51, told The Times in the presidential office in Chisinau, the capital.
Moldova’s first female president is a former World Bank economist who came to power in 2020, defeating Igor Dodon, the pro-Russian incumbent, after promising to seek EU membership and root out corruption in the former Soviet republic.
Like President Zelensky of Ukraine, she has lived more of her life in an independent country than in one ruled from Moscow and wants Moldova to break away for ever from the Kremlin’s grip.
On the surface, life in Chisinau appears relaxed and far from the horrors of the war in Ukraine. Moldova won EU candidate status last year and on Sunday crowds celebrated Independence Day on Chisinau’s central square.
Yet Moldova, wedged between Ukraine and Nato’s eastern flank in Romania, is living on the edge. Until last November, when Russian troops had to retreat from the Kherson region in southern Ukraine, Putin’s forces were only 150 miles from Chisinau. There are 1,500 Russian troops 50 miles from Chisinau in Transnistria, a Kremlin-backed separatist region.
Moldova’s population is 2.5 million, with a territory half the size of Scotland, but Putin appears determined to drag it back into the Kremlin’s sphere of influence. In February Sandu said Moldova had thwarted a coup that would have involved Kremlin agents seizing government buildings and taking hostages.
Her claim, based on information from Ukraine’s intelligence services, came after Moscow slashed gas deliveries to Moldova and cut electricity supplies. Moldova said in March that it had secured European gas supplies and was no longer dependent on Russia.
“Putin does not respect [our] sovereignty and independence,” Sandu said. “The democratic world needs to help Moldova and Ukraine. Preserving Ukraine and Moldova as democracies is good not only for the people of these countries, but also for the people of Europe, as well as the world.”
This summer Moldova expelled 45 Russian diplomats it said were trying to destabilise the country. Sandu was aware the move was risky, but insisted she had no choice. “We have to defend ourselves.”
Some Moldovans continue to look toward Moscow, however. Putin enjoys the trust of about a third of all voters, according to an opinion poll by the Watchdog MD monitoring group, and is one of the most popular foreign leaders.
Sandu refuses to classify Putin’s supporters as a threat to national security, saying they have been deceived by propaganda. “These are our citizens,” she said. “If they understood exactly what is happening in Ukraine and that Russia is the aggressor, they would not support Putin. We still have the memory of Soviet times, and probably we still have some people who do not fully understand how important freedom is. We need to work with them.”
Moldova recently took steps to counter Russian disinformation by taking pro-Moscow television stations off air. This prompted allegations of state censorship but Sandu insisted it was necessary to protect Moldovans from Kremlin lies. In June the pro-Russian Shor opposition party was banned after it led protests against Sandu’s government over sky-high energy prices this winter.
The party is led by Ilan Shor, an exiled businessman who was convicted in absentia in 2017 of plundering $1 billion from Moldovan banks, equivalent to one eighth of the country’s GDP. Moldova has accused him of aiding Russia’s attempts to bring down the government, which he denies.
Moldova’s EU application is complicated by Transnistria, a stretch of separatist-held land near the Ukrainian border that has been supported by Russia since fighting erupted in the early 1990s.
Zelensky suggested that Ukraine could help to force Russian troops out of Transnistria once Kyiv had liberated all its territories from Russia. “If they want to live, they will leave,” he told a summit of European leaders in Moldova in June.
Any hostilities could have catastrophic consequences, however. Transnistria, population 465,000, is home to the vast Cobasna ammunition dump, estimated to contain up to 20,000 tonnes of Soviet-era weapons and munitions. A blast at the site could equal the destructive power of the atomic explosion in Hiroshima, some experts believe. Sandu hopes the prospect of EU membership will lead to a bloodless resolution.
Moldova has a large number of Russian speakers, as well as those who speak Romanian, the state language. But Sandu said it was wrong to assume that Russian speakers were pro-Putin, noting that many reacted angrily when the Russian embassy in Moldova offered them “protection” last year. “We saw a lot of Russian-speaking people [saying], ‘We don’t want you to invade this country claiming that you want to defend us,’” she said.
Neutrality is enshrined in Moldova’s constitution, meaning it cannot apply to join Nato. A recent poll showed only 26 per cent of the population would be in favour of joining.
Sandu is under no illusions about what Russian victory in Ukraine would mean. “Moldova’s fate depends on Ukraine’s resistance,” she said. Moldova was criticised by Ukrainians last year, however, when it allegedly refused to sell six MiG-29 fighter jets, inherited from the Soviet Union, to Kyiv.
The government has declined to comment directly, saying only that it does not have enough equipment of its own to help its neighbour. Moldova, one of the poorest countries in Europe with the lowest defence expenditure, has about 6,000 soldiers on active duty. “We are asking countries that are stronger than Moldova to continue to provide support to Ukraine,” Sandu said.
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From left, Igor Grosu, president of the parliament, Sandu and Dorin Recean, the prime minister, attend a ceremony celebrating Moldova’s independence – Credit: DUMITRU DORU/EPA (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency)
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