Moldova is not at war with Russia. Russian tanks are not advancing towards Chișinău, and Moldovan soldiers are not fighting Russian forces along the border. Yet the war in neighbouring Ukraine has increasingly made the distinction between war and peace feel inadequate for describing Moldova’s position.
On Monday, President Maia Sandu publicly accused Russia of supporting a plan to destabilise Moldova. She said information supplied by Ukrainian authorities suggested that outside actors intended to use people with military backgrounds, including foreign citizens, to infiltrate protests, attack government buildings and attempt to replace Moldova’s pro-European government. Moscow rejected the allegations and accused Moldovan authorities of trying to inflame anti-Russian sentiment.
These are serious claims, and they should be treated as claims rather than automatically established facts while evidence remains incomplete. But they appear within a much broader pattern of pressure on Moldova that makes the underlying security problem worth examining even before every allegation is resolved.
Moldova is a country of roughly 2.6 million people positioned directly between Romania and Ukraine. It was part of the Soviet Union until 1991, remains deeply connected economically and historically to the post-Soviet space, and contains substantial political disagreement over whether its future should lie primarily with Europe or retain stronger relationships with Russia.
Sandu has placed Moldova firmly on a European trajectory. The country applied for European Union membership after Russia invaded Ukraine and received EU candidate status in June 2022. Yet Moldova’s domestic politics remain much more divided than that foreign-policy direction might suggest. Pro-Russian political forces retain support, particularly among some Russian-speaking communities and regions, while many Moldovans remain economically vulnerable to decisions taken in Moscow.
That vulnerability is where modern geopolitical power becomes more complicated than military strength.
If Russia wanted to influence Moldova, sending soldiers across the border would be the most obvious and expensive method. It would also produce the strongest international reaction, generate resistance inside Moldova and make Russian responsibility completely unambiguous.
There are cheaper instruments.
Energy.
Money.
Information.
Political networks.
Cyber operations.
Economic pressure.
Support for protests.
These mechanisms occupy what analysts often call the grey zone between ordinary diplomacy and conventional war. They can change another country’s political environment without producing the clarity associated with an invasion.
That ambiguity is itself useful.
A tank has an identifiable owner.
A viral social-media post does not necessarily.
A missile strike produces a crater.
Political financing moves through accounts and intermediaries.
A military occupation creates an obvious aggressor and defender.
A protest may contain citizens with entirely legitimate grievances alongside organisers receiving outside support.
This makes hybrid interference difficult for democracies to counter because the state cannot simply treat every instrument of foreign influence as an enemy soldier.
The protesters are still citizens.
The media organisations may still be domestic institutions.
The political parties may still receive genuine votes.
The economic grievances may still be real.
This is the central problem Moldova faces.
Russia may have incentives to exploit Moldovan dissatisfaction.
That does not mean Russia created the dissatisfaction.
Moldova has experienced extremely high inflation, rising energy costs and declining household purchasing power. The country was heavily dependent on Russian energy, and the war transformed that dependence into an obvious strategic vulnerability. Russian missile attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure have also disrupted electricity supplies connected to Moldova, while the country has absorbed a very large number of Ukrainian refugees relative to its population.
For a wealthy state, those shocks would be difficult.
For one of Europe’s poorer countries, they are enormous.
The government therefore faces a dangerous analytical temptation: if foreign adversaries are genuinely attempting to exploit domestic anger, it becomes easy to interpret the anger itself as foreign.
That would be a mistake.
A Moldovan citizen protesting because their electricity bill has become unaffordable does not become a Russian agent because Moscow would prefer the protest to weaken Sandu.
Foreign exploitation and domestic grievance can exist simultaneously.
This distinction is essential because democracies facing external interference can undermine themselves through over-securitisation. Once political opposition is treated primarily as a national-security problem, governments acquire incentives to restrict speech, parties and protests in the name of protecting democracy.
Some restrictions may genuinely be necessary.
Foreign governments should not be permitted secretly to purchase political influence.
Covert financing deserves investigation.
Violent plots should be disrupted.
Espionage should be prosecuted.
But the evidentiary threshold matters.
If “Russia benefits from this argument” becomes sufficient reason to suppress the argument, Moscow indirectly gains the ability to determine which political opinions Moldovans are allowed to express.
That would be a remarkable strategic victory.
A foreign adversary could contaminate domestic dissent merely by supporting it rhetorically.
The democratic response therefore has to distinguish foreign coordination from political coincidence.
Suppose a Moldovan political party opposes EU membership.
Russia also opposes Moldova joining the EU.
That overlap does not prove the party is controlled by Moscow.
Citizens can independently prefer closer relations with Russia.
The relevant questions concern financing, coordination, covert direction and illegal activity rather than ideological similarity alone.
This is why countering foreign interference is fundamentally an intelligence and institutional problem rather than simply a rhetorical one.
Governments need enough intelligence capability to identify actual networks of influence while maintaining enough judicial independence that allegations can be tested rather than merely announced.
Courts matter.
Transparent political-finance rules matter.
Independent journalism matters.
Election monitoring matters.
Cybersecurity matters.
None is as dramatic as military deterrence.
Together they form a kind of democratic national defence.
This may become increasingly important because open societies possess vulnerabilities authoritarian governments can exploit. Democracies deliberately allow political disagreement, protest and independent media. An adversary can insert itself into those channels by amplifying extreme narratives, financing political actors or spreading false information.
The obvious response would be closing the channels.
That would defeat their purpose.
Democratic resilience therefore cannot mean preventing foreign powers from influencing every citizen. That is impossible in an interconnected information environment.
It means making institutions sufficiently transparent and trusted that manipulation has difficulty converting disagreement into systemic collapse.
This is an information problem similar to the one China faced in November, but almost reversed. China’s government reduces foreign and domestic information flows through censorship because it prioritises political control. Moldova cannot adopt that model without weakening the European democratic order it says it is trying to join.
The democratic advantage is openness.
The democratic vulnerability is also openness.
The solution has to preserve the first while managing the second.
Energy provides another form of influence that does not require covert operations at all. Moldova’s historical dependence on Russian gas gives Moscow economic leverage because energy is not an ordinary import. It is an input into almost every household and business.
If energy supply becomes uncertain, prices rise.
When prices rise, real incomes fall.
When real incomes fall, governments become unpopular.
Economic dependence therefore creates political transmission.
Russia does not need to instruct a voter to oppose Sandu. If geopolitical confrontation contributes to a household’s energy bill doubling, the household may reach that conclusion independently.
This is why economic interdependence can produce both peace and coercion.
Liberal international-relations theory often emphasises that trade raises the cost of conflict because states become economically dependent on one another.
That is true.
Dependence also creates leverage.
If I need your gas more than you need my money, our economic relationship is asymmetric.
You possess bargaining power.
The relevant concept is therefore not simply interdependence but asymmetric interdependence.
Europe has spent the last year discovering this through Russian energy.
Moldova experiences the problem much more severely because its economy is smaller and its alternatives are more limited.
Diversification therefore becomes national-security policy.
Building electricity connections with Romania, finding alternative gas supplies and integrating with European energy markets may appear like infrastructure policy.
They reduce geopolitical vulnerability.
This is another reason state capacity matters internationally. Sovereignty is not simply a flag and internationally recognised border.
A country whose electricity, finance, communications or defence depend overwhelmingly on one foreign power possesses less practical freedom of action even while remaining legally sovereign.
Strategic autonomy therefore requires infrastructure.
India’s foreign policy uses the term in a great-power context.
For Moldova, autonomy is more basic: can the country make political choices without one supplier being able to impose unbearable economic costs?
The separatist territory of Transnistria makes Moldova’s security problem even more complicated. The narrow strip of territory along the Ukrainian border broke away from Moldovan control during the collapse of the Soviet Union and has existed as an internationally unrecognised entity for three decades. Russian troops remain stationed there.
This means Russian military power is already physically present inside Moldova’s internationally recognised borders even though Russia has not launched a conventional invasion of Moldova during the current war.
Transnistria illustrates how unresolved conflicts create long-term geopolitical leverage.
A frozen conflict is not truly frozen.
It preserves uncertainty.
The central government does not fully control its territory.
Foreign forces remain involved.
Political settlement can be reopened during future crises.
The absence of active war can therefore coexist with permanent strategic vulnerability.
Georgia experiences similar problems in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Ukraine experienced it in the Donbas before the 2022 full-scale invasion.
Territorial ambiguity can become an instrument of influence.
This is why Moldova’s European integration has security implications far beyond trade regulations. Joining European institutions gradually embeds the country inside networks of law, finance, infrastructure and political cooperation that reduce the relative influence of its former imperial centre.
From Moscow’s perspective, that geopolitical movement matters.
From Chișinău’s perspective, it can represent both economic modernisation and a form of strategic insurance.
Yet European integration itself can become destabilising if governments treat citizens sceptical of it as illegitimate.
Moldova contains communities with cultural, linguistic and economic ties to Russia. A durable European trajectory needs to incorporate them rather than simply defeat them politically.
Otherwise foreign powers receive a ready-made constituency for narratives of exclusion.
This is where identity and geopolitics interact.
A Russian-speaking Moldovan should not have to become geopolitically Russian.
Language is not foreign policy.
Ethnicity is not allegiance.
Democratic states become more resilient when citizenship provides enough political belonging that external powers cannot easily claim to speak on behalf of domestic minorities.
That is one reason inclusive institutions are security institutions.
Minority rights are not merely moral obligations.
They reduce opportunities for foreign manipulation.
Again, domestic governance becomes foreign policy.
Moldova’s government changed this week as Dorin Recean became prime minister after Natalia Gavrilița resigned. Recean has a background in security and previously served as interior minister and presidential security adviser. His appointment reflects how heavily security concerns now dominate Moldovan politics; he would go on to frame Russian destabilisation as a central threat to the state.
But Moldova cannot securitise its way out of every problem.
A security-oriented government still needs to reduce inflation, improve public services, reform institutions and make European integration produce tangible benefits.
Otherwise geopolitical alignment remains an elite project while citizens experience only its short-term costs.
This is a recurring problem in international politics. Governments tell citizens that a strategic choice will produce long-term security and prosperity.
Citizens pay energy bills this month.
The time horizons differ.
A successful government needs to connect them.
EU integration becomes politically durable when Moldovans experience better infrastructure, more investment, stronger institutions and higher incomes, not simply because Brussels declares support for their geopolitical direction.
This is where development becomes security again.
A citizen with economic opportunity and confidence in domestic institutions is harder for foreign propaganda to persuade that the state has failed them.
That does not mean poverty automatically produces pro-Russian politics.
It means institutional legitimacy affects the effectiveness of external influence.
Propaganda works best when it attaches itself to something people already experience.
A fabricated story about government incompetence is less persuasive when government visibly works.
Disinformation therefore cannot be defeated only by fact-checking.
Sometimes the strongest counter-disinformation policy is competent administration.
Fix the road.
Keep the electricity on.
Reduce corruption.
Publish government data.
Investigate officials.
Allow journalists to criticise.
Then foreign narratives claiming the entire state is fraudulent encounter more contradictory evidence in everyday life.
This is democratic resilience from the bottom up.
Moldova’s situation also demonstrates why the word war may increasingly describe only one end of a spectrum of interstate competition.
Countries can attempt to influence one another through sanctions, cyberattacks, political financing, energy, information, proxies and covert operations while avoiding conventional military confrontation.
This is attractive because the target struggles to determine the appropriate response.
A missile can justify military retaliation.
What does a government do about 10,000 anonymous social-media accounts?
What does it do when a foreign company controls critical infrastructure?
What does it do when money moves through legal-looking political organisations?
The ambiguity lowers the cost of aggression.
It also increases the risk that governments exaggerate foreign threats for domestic political advantage.
That is why evidence and independent institutions remain so important.
Sandu’s allegations this week are serious.
Russia’s denial is equally unsurprising.
The public should not be asked simply to choose which government it trusts more.
Investigations should establish what can be established.
Democratic security policy needs evidence because the alternative is giving governments enormous discretionary power over political opponents whenever they invoke foreign interference.
The danger runs in both directions.
Underreact and foreign networks exploit democratic openness.
Overreact and the government destroys democratic openness itself.
The equilibrium is difficult.
That difficulty is not evidence democracy is weak.
It is the cost of refusing the easier authoritarian solution.
Moldova’s challenge is therefore larger than surviving Russian pressure.
It needs to survive Russian pressure as a democracy.
If defending the state requires suppressing legitimate political opposition, then the geopolitical contest has already changed the political system Russia is supposedly threatening.
If protecting openness means ignoring covert foreign financing or violent destabilisation, the state may become incapable of protecting constitutional government.
Resilience exists between those failures.
This small country is consequently confronting one of the largest questions in modern international politics.
How does an open society defend itself against an adversary willing to operate inside openness?
The answer cannot be closing society.
It has to be making openness harder to weaponise.
Transparent money.
Independent courts.
Reliable intelligence.
Diverse energy supplies.
Competent government.
Protected minorities.
Competitive elections.
Those institutions look domestic.
Together they are a national-security strategy.
Russia does not need to invade Moldova to make Moldova weaker.
Moldova does not need to become less democratic to make itself harder to weaken.
