The Sum Total of EU Power is 50.2% in Moldova
On a Particularly Pathetic Influence Operation
“In viewing this monstrous tragi-comic scene, the most opposite passions necessarily succeed, and sometimes mix with each other in the mind; alternate contempt and indignation; alternate laughter and tears; alternate scorn and horror.” - Edmund Burke [Reflections on the Revolution in France]
In one of the dumbest and most transparent information operations we have yet experienced, the EU has pulled out all the stops to ensure the “European future” of the tiny and impoverished nation of Moldova. Split between Romanian and Russian speakers after a long history of being pulled at from all sides, the Eurocrats have decided expanding into Moldova is a key priority for the bloc and have made up endless stories about how Russian pressure on this election was unprecedented. Leading the charge is Moldova’s “Pro-Western” President Maia Sandu, who was probably created in a test tube in the basement of Columbia SIPA, though they laundered her education off on the almost equally dreadful John F. Kennedy School at Harvard. The former central banker and World Bank employee has made an art form of screaming “Russia, Russia, Russia” in an attempt to bring Pantsuit Mafia government to Moldova [though it should be noted that she herself prefers a somewhat more old-fashioned dress suit.] I say art form, but she is more like a crude technician: no one could possibly believe her wild claims and like propagandists the world over in 2025, she doesn’t seem to care.
It is long since that anyone who is partially or less retarded figured out that they claim in advance that Russia is trying to steal the election so if they lose they can annul it or send people in the streets and if they win they can all make a big deal about how Democracy™ has won against Oriental Despotism and the country will now be safe for Western capital and sodomy.
In this vein, they are portraying it as a big victory that with the support of the entire NGO blob, corporate media, and EU political establishment her party pulled 50.2% while the “Pro-Russian” Patriotic Electoral Bloc only got 24% of the vote, after one of their parties was excluded at the last minute. However, it was emphasized repeatedly throughout the campaign that none of the opposition parties could be trusted, making this a referendum on Europe generally wherein the Eurocrats only won by a hair, not an impressive result for an impoverished nation of 2 1/2 million people that Europe put all of its efforts into and also where the ruling party quite openly cheated. Much emphasis was put on the diaspora- one of the world’s largest by percentage- whom we are told are “pro-Europe.” However, the number of Moldovans living in Russia is intentionally obscured, their existence almost never mentioned by the media, and presents a more conflicted picture of how Moldovans abroad actually feel. It wasn’t made possible for Moldovans in Russia to vote easily while endless efforts went into European turnout- the same trick by which Sandu won re-election last year and also how they managed to pass a referendum on joining the EU.
It doesn’t appear anyone genuinely believes joining the EU will help Moldova and a better guess is that those expatriates in Europe want to get their families out. Have half of voters decided to abandon the country- which has already experienced a devastating population decline in the post-Soviet era- to move to Germany to become custodians and prostitutes? Their great replacement will be a swarm of NGO workers tasked with harassing the remaining “pro-Russian” residents over their “unacceptable” views. Whereas the Soviet Union was a “prison house of nations” it seems as if on the barest majority Moldova will be joining the “School Counselor’s Office of Nations” that is the European Union. It is in many ways more funny than it is sad, because almost no one- including half of Moldovans- actually cares what happens to Moldova, it is simply an opportunity to pull out their idiot playbook that was already tired when they debuted it on Trump in 2016 and again claim there are “hybrid threats” against everyone because of Putin’s obsessive drive to save Eastern Europe from domination by Atlanticist retards with Master’s Degrees in Governing Badly.
I don’t want to do deep background here, particularly because I am assuming readers are familiar with how this racket works, and possibly my prior writing on it, and further because this is too goddamn stupid to treat seriously. In short, though, unlike Romania which is one of the largest and most strategically important countries in Europe, or Georgia which borders Russia and controls an important land route out of the country, there is no reason whatsoever for Russia to care about Moldova to the extent the Eurocrats and Atlanticists want to pretend it does. No offense to any Moldovans who should happen to read this, but Romania and Georgia are also proud, unique, and in Georgia’s case, very ancient, nations, whereas if Moldova had ended up in Ukraine or Romania when the USSR fell it would already be more or less forgotten. The country has no strategic value whatsoever, it’s just a fake battleground Brussels invented to act like something went right for them for once. They rarely bother to try to justify their claims that Moldova is important, though they are largely based on the premise that Russia, the gas station with nukes that fights its wars with shovels, will try to steamroll Europe and mighty Moldova will stand in its way- particularly amusing given that it isn’t even on the way to Brussels. Ignore the fact that Russia has never expressed implicitly or explicitly any goal of ending Ukraine as an internationally recognize sovereign state or conquering its west, Moldova is right on the border! Since only a real nerd or someone actually from Eastern Europe knows where Moldova is, I suppose I should show a picture here to demonstrate that I am not exaggerating: in a theoretical blitzkrieg Russia would just go around this shit to Bucharest and then the country would capitulate if Ukraine and Romania had fallen:
It is said that to the EU this presents an important “buffer state” between the Romania and its client state of Ukraine but even that doesn’t make sense when you consider that Romania touches Ukraine on both sides of Moldova and also has borders with three other EU states [granted, two of which, Hungary and Slovakia, are lead by politicians who don’t want to get everyone killed and are thus are considered evil, pro-Russian, dictators.] The best argument for Moldova’s usefulness besides as a fake win is that you could perhaps lie about its neutrality to move materiel through it without the risk of Russian air strikes, though given the vast open plains of Ukraine that such materiel would still have to traverse, that still doesn’t accomplish much.
Anyway, all of that said, I do need to give a small amount of background. Moldova was in the past something of a borderland passed around between Empires. It was in the outer reaches of the Ottoman Empire, conquered by Russia in the late 19th century, mostly controlled by Romania between the world wars and then annexed by the USSR, which attached it to Transnistria, an area between the rivers, as well as to a bit of modern day Ukraine; currently, the eastern river defining Transnistria is the border of Ukraine. When the Soviet Union fell it is said that some hardcore remnants of the Red Army went and set up camp in Transnistria, which has never been part of Romania. It should be noted here that much of Moldova’s pro-Western ruling class are dual Romanian citizens and thus already have EU passports without doing all this nonsense; there is periodic discussion about joining up with Romania as Moldova’s independence is kind of a historic fluke in the first place. Regardless, there was one of those post-Soviet collapse wars over Transnistria and it has been self-governing with a small contingent of Russian peacekeepers in the territory ever since. Transnistrians are meant to be able to vote in Moldovan elections as Moldova says they are citizens, though it seems that their franchise is now more true in theory than in practice. You will notice on maps of the Ukraine War that Transnistria is generally shaded as Russian controlled territory, and we are meant to believe one of Russia’s key goals in Ukraine is that Russia, the world’s largest country with a population of 140 million, should make a land connection to this miserable little “island” that has perhaps a bit over 350,000 residents.
I need to go on a slight digression here to note that a key part of the “Russia is the cause of all global instability” theory is that Russia is obsessed with this network of breakaway regions and uses them to accomplish I don’t even know what. You have to understand that the entire discipline of “geopolitics” is based on three largely fallacious ideas: 1) control of the globe is decided by Central Asia [amusingly, they came up with this before anyone knew or cared about all the oil there]; 2) Russia is obsessed with warm water; 3) Russia has some sort of inherent need to constantly expand that differentiates it from other states such as Britain, which once controlled 1/4 of the Earth’s surface. While people who believe the third part of the theory may be armed with having once watched a documentary about Ivan the Terrible in high school, the reality is that in the modern world Russia’s population is not growing and it is generally keen to find new settlers for land it already has and has shown no interest in expanding for its own sake.
The issue with Russia and these breakaway regions is that when an empire collapses the successor state tends to feel a degree of responsibility for their people or others loyal to them who are left behind and a responsibility to settle various small conflicts that arise between the new states. However, a simple observation of modern history demonstrates that Russia has largely viewed these statelets as something like a troublesome family obligation, hence still not having annexed Abkhazia or South Ossetia in internationally recognized Georgia- even after the 2008 war- and refusing to annex the DPR and LPR until the Russia-Ukraine War began and progressed to such a point where they needed clear territorial goals. Alternately, Russia immediately annexed Crimea when events made it possible to do so, as a region of genuine strategic importance and unique historic value to Russia. Further, and perhaps more importantly, while Russia may not be a Democracy™ because they don’t let foreign NGO employees come in to groom their children and they try to avoid their assets being bought up by international capital, the government does largely rely on public consent and it is a domestic political problem if Russian speaking citizens of other states are mistreated. This has been massively downplayed by the usual propagandists but was a key way that Russia was provoked into invading Ukraine. Ukraine having a large ethnic Russian population, some of which was on territory that was historically Russia proper, was fine if they were treated with respect. Once the Kiev regime began cracking down on ethnic Russians and attacking their language and religion, this became a substantial domestic problem for Russia’s government, and ultimately it was one of the reasons they chose to “continue diplomacy by other means.” The point here is that Transnistria is a minor obligation that Russia ended up with, and this sliver of land is not actually part of some vast plot for world domination. However, the Kremlin presumably very much does not want Artsakh-type videos of the region being ethnically cleansed. The premise that Russia uses such breakaway regions to cause instability is wholly made up and in fact Russia keeps them as well-behaved as possible.
Anyway, back to the matter at hand, Moldova has sputtered on as a weak, impoverished, dysfunctional, and partitioned state for some 35 years. Like Ukraine, it never really left post-Soviet hell, and in fact also never recaptured the “prosperity” of the late Soviet Union. Of course, they want to blame Russia for this, but you can see this chart comparing its economy to Belarus, which stayed firmly in Russia’s orbit and which reformed as little as possible, that it is Moldova that has under-performed, to put it mildly:
According to the IMF, Moldova is poorer than either Ukraine or Kosovo by the measure of GDP per capita PPP, and it needs to be added that their purchasing power will drop precipitously if they are meant to use Euros and join a common market with Germany and France. Also, like Ukraine, since the fall of the Soviet Union, Moldova’s main export has been humans. They have already- without free access to the EU- lost perhaps 1/3rd of their population in the last 35 years:
This is the Moldova into which Brussels has a maniacal desire to expand.
Moving on to this actual election, I have been saved from the necessity of giving the ins and outs of it by the great Italian journalist Thomas Fazi, who specializes in this sort of thing. His article which came out while I was already at work on this covers all of the details you would expect from me that I didn’t want to do because this is all so tiresome. You can read it if you are so inclined, though I can also tell you that only the names have changed and if you are used to this specific delusion the story is everything you would expect:
The basic plot is this: after the invasion of Ukraine, Moldova was given EU candidate status. Last year, Moldova re-elected President Sandu and also had a constitutional referendum on joining the EU. The government barely won both elections with all the same breathless accusations about Russian “hybrid threats” and professions of a “Democratic future” as well as the “European aspirations” of the large diaspora. Similarly, as well, there was little mention of the part of the diaspora which is in Russia and their struggles to vote, it being generally considered by the Eurocrats and the Western corporate media that Moldovans choosing to live in Russia shouldn’t be allowed to make such decisions. Now, they just had parliamentary elections, the third “most important election ever” in the last two years. Each time there are endless headlines about Russian interference and “moving towards Europe” and then far down there are notes about inconsequential matters such as the country’s cost of living crisis or how people prefer peace with Russia. Here are some sample headlines from Google News about the election which just took place. The first is the very top in the interest of impartiality, the second is the best group of 5 I happened to easily find:
I particularly love the last one because pre-approved Russian OSCE monitors were not, in fact, allowed to participate. Anyway, this shit is what happened to Boomer brains everywhere. The average old person who still follows the news in a relatively old-fashioned way has been drowning in this nonsense for a decade now, and of course they grew up in the Cold War so the “Russia bad” switch was able to flip back on pretty easily. We’re now in the fake and gay version of the Cold War, and the real Cold War was already pretty fake and gay.
The message one would get from these headlines is that Moldova has taken on the mantle of a pawn between the EU and Russia, which I suppose under Sandu’s leadership is true. Russia presumably does have some pull with various figures in Moldovan politics given the country’s large Russian speaking population, its diaspora within Russia, and that some political parties do want better relations, but no evidence is ever provided. Instead, we are supposed to trust people like my old friends at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab. One of their apparatchiks had this to say, of Russia supposedly paying people throughout Europe to report fraud, “They are basically incentivising people to report any type of violation in exchange for money. We think that it might be a preparation to say the election was rigged.” Note that she doesn’t even bother to imply they are incentivized to make false reports, her sentence read as written is that they are incentivized to report any real election fraud they see, which is in her view a bad thing. Of course, the entire point of this information campaign is this exact thing, to claim fraud if the ruling party should happen to not win. I know “every accusation is a confession” is overused, but in this instance it’s not even a “confession” because they don’t see themselves as being held to the same rules as Russia whatsoever and go about life as if its impossible they could be guilty of anything.
The EU’s interference was myriad, as well as their Pantsuit Mafia of NGO employees being cranked up to maximum pressure, all the top Eurocrats got together, many openly taking a partisan position in the election or even travelling to Moldova to support the ruling party. They also deployed some sort of team out of Brussels to make sure things went their way. Here is how Fazi described it,
“European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has repeatedly praised Sandu’s “fight for democracy”. Other EU leaders have gone further, traveling to Chișinău and effectively campaigning on PAS’s behalf while framing the election as a battle with immense geopolitical stakes. “Russia has constantly tried to undermine freedom, prosperity and peace in the Republic of Moldova”, declared German chancellor Friedrich Merz during a visit just before the campaign began, warning that Vladimir Putin seeks to pull the country back into Moscow’s “sphere of influence”. Polish prime minister Donald Tusk was equally blunt: “There will be no secure Europe without an independent and secure Moldova”.
Meanwhile, Brussels openly celebrated the deployment of a hybrid rapid response team to assist Moldova against “foreign interference”. In practice, this meant the EU directly inserting itself into the political process — seemingly unaware of the irony (and hypocrisy) of engaging in foreign interference in order to fight foreign interference.”
I would gently correct him that it isn’t “hypocrisy” because they genuinely do not believe that the same rules apply to themselves as apply to Russia, and they aren’t really claiming they should. To help make this clearer, I direct you back to what is perhaps one of the most important political essays of the last 5 years, “It’s not Hypocrisy, You’re Just Powerless” by N.S. Lyons. This is about domestic political life, but also wholly applies to how the EU sees itself compared to Russia and really anyone else who isn’t in the vaunted “International Community,”
“You see, it’s possible you are under the misapprehension that you are not supposed to notice what you described as the “double-standard” in acceptable behavior between Team A and Team B. And that you think if you point out this double-standard, you are foiling the other team’s plot and holding them accountable. This might be because, in your mind, you are still in high school debate club, where if you finger your opponent for having violated the evenly-applied rules a neutral arbiter of acceptable behavior will recognize this unfairness and penalize them with demerits.
Except in reality you are not holding Team A accountable, and in fact are notably never able to hold them accountable for anything at all. Even though Team A gets to hold you accountable for everything and anything whenever they want. This is because unfortunately there is no neutral arbiter listening to your whining. In fact, currently the only arbiter is Team A, because Team A has consolidated all the power to decide the rules, and to enforce or not enforce those rules as they see fit.”
The EU’s actual power may be quite weak, but in the minds of Atlanticist think tanks, media hacks, and what passes for heads of state/government in Europe, this is still the level on which they operate.
Also, of course, they used Russia claims to eliminate some candidates. Again from Fazi,
“Just days before the vote, the Central Election Commission (CEC) barred two pro-Russian parties — Heart of Moldova and Greater Moldova — from competing, citing allegations of illicit financing, voter bribery and undeclared foreign funds. Both parties had campaigned on strengthening ties with Moscow and directly challenged the pro-Western government. The CEC also struck all Heart of Moldova candidates from the Patriotic Electoral Bloc, PAS’s main rival, giving it just 24 hours to reconfigure its candidate lists.”
Though the bloc was allowed to put new candidates on the list, moves like this suppress voter turnout. If you’re the sort of person who spends your time reading Substack essays about things like elections in Moldova, you might think that would make you all the more determined to vote, but on many normal people it has the impact of making them accurately assess that the ruling party intends to win by hook or crook and it is not worth wasting your time.
More important than any of this was all of the official efforts to make it easy to let Moldovans across the EU vote while making it difficult for voters in Russia and Transnistria. It is not clear how many Moldovans live in Russia- to the extent that the statistic is obviously intentionally suppressed. Fazi gives the number “More than 300,000” though without a clear citation. Wikipedia’s “Moldovan diaspora” page gives a statistic of 77,509 from 2021, which links to a Russian nationality survey from the Russian government and a Russian language Excel file; from copying some key boxes into a translator it appears they’re accurately representing the data point in the document, however I think that is meant to be a survey of Russian citizens and is saying that 77,509 Russian citizens are ethnic Moldovans [which, by the way, is absolutely not how a “diaspora” should be measured and the page itself says the numbers include citizens abroad.] Meanwhile, according to a Reuters article with the very neutral title, “Kremlin accuses Moldova of preventing hundreds of thousands of Moldovans in Russia from voting,” the Russian government claims there are about 500,000 Moldovans in Russia. Regardless, Reuters acknowledges the following,
“Most large European countries, where fewer Moldovans live than in Russia, had more than two polling stations available for voters on Sunday.
Just over 4,000 votes were cast in Russia, according to the Moldovan authorities, around two-thirds of which were for the main pro-Russian bloc. By contrast, Moldovan citizens living in Germany cast more than 38,000 votes at 36 different polling stations, most of them in support of the ruling party.”
The same Wikipedia page, by the way, reports 122,000 Moldovans in Germany as of 2022, so even if we were to believe the 77,509 number the disparity in voter turnout is enormous. Regarding the result, you have to figure if the polling stations were only in Moscow an above-average percentage of those voters were attached to the embassy and ruling government in various ways. The most conservative possible estimate I can produce is that there are at least 50,000 Moldovan adults in Russia, if 50% voted there would be 25,000 voters, 75% voted for the combined opposition parties, there should be a balance of at least 10,000 more votes for opposition parties out of Russia in an election where the ruling party only came in .2% above 50%. More likely, there would have been at least 100,000 total votes out of Russia if polling stations were opened across major cities, though I would note that Moldovans are very poor and plenty of them in Russia probably work hard labor jobs in oil fields or as loggers or that sort of thing and are so distant that even reasonable accommodations would not have reached them in the vastness of Russia.
Overall, Fazi reports there were at least 300 polling stations abroad, including 73 in Italy. That is one way to “win” an election. Still, it is these voters in Europe we are meant to feel bad for, allegedly there were bomb threats all over the continent! Look at all the brave Moldovans go through to express their democratic will, as per the AP,
“The election day was marked by a string of incidents, ranging from bomb threats at multiple polling stations abroad to cyberattacks on electoral and government infrastructure, voters photographing their ballots and some being illegally transported to polling stations. Police also detained three people suspected of plotting to cause unrest after the vote.”
Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!
Speaking of bomb threats, it seems that is how they stopped the Transnistrians from crossing the bridges to vote. Fazi writes,
“In 2021, more than 40 polling stations were opened for residents of the separatist territory of Transnistria, the breakaway region east of the Dniester, where around 300,000 people hold Moldovan citizenship. This year, that number was cut to just 12, all located on government-controlled land, often far from the demarcation line. Days before the vote, the CEC even moved four of these sites further inland, citing security threats. The main bridge linking Transnistria to Moldova was also temporarily closed over alleged bomb threats. Transnistrian authorities accused Chișinău of deliberately suppressing turnout in a region that leans heavily toward opposition parties.”
I will say I don’t think it seems reasonable to have polling places outside of government controlled territory, but it appears it was done in the past. It also doesn’t seem hard, besides that they closed the bridge down, to travel from this narrow strip of land into Moldova, but I live in rural America where everyone owns cars and travelling even 10 miles is probably a lot harder for many Transnistrians than I would assume. Regardless, everything described is certainly enough to discourage less enthusiastic voters, and reducing the polling stations from 40 to 12 has an obvious design.
I don’t want to make any claims about what the results of a fair election might have been- though very obviously the ruling party should have got under 50%- but one way or another, with great efforts Sandu and the Eurocrats eked out a Cadmean victory1 and now it seems that Moldovans will add being in the EU to their many sufferings. The EU is years into a legitimacy crisis and every time they use this playbook, particularly so blatantly and unconvincingly, they drive more people away while the necessity of pretending to not know what’s going on makes what supporters remain grow ever dumber and more useless.
Anyway, what will Moldova get from the great honor of future EU membership? That isn’t obvious, though we’re generally supposed to believe it causes some great amount of economic growth, despite that this was primarily true in Poland, which they poured so much money into in order to prove this point that it may overtake Germany in prosperity in our lifetimes [at least if the Poles don’t make some profoundly stupid foreign policy decision and get their entire country destroyed, the most likely actual outcome of any era where things are going well for Poland.] Regardless, there is no reason to believe the EU will bring economic growth to Moldova and every reason to believe it will make things much more expensive while draining the country of its residents:
At this point there is little else to say besides why I think people are doing what they are doing and how it will turn out. I don’t believe anyone thinks joining the EU is actually good for Moldova. The EU isn’t working out for any of the member countries and it only sees a future in constant expansion, like the world’s most boring Ponzi scheme. Ideological Atlanticists believe this will stick it to Russia and that Democracy™ is the greatest value. The Western financial interests who support them want to buy up what assets Moldova has for a song. The pro-EU voters simply want to scurry off of a sinking ship and don’t care about Moldova. The pro-Russia voters actually do want a future for their country and have the sense to realize that integration into the lower cost “Eastern” economy is their only chance for economic growth.
The result will be that the EU voters will leave while hordes of Sorosites pour into the country to try and “de”-propagandize the remnant into sharing the “European Perspective.” What is the “European Perspective”? I am not sure, but based on my observations it appears to have something to do with the citizens trying to hold onto low-paying email jobs while the governments intentionally sabotage electricity production and let in a gorillion migrants and then when the migrants gang rape someone’s daughter a namby-pamby judge attributes the crime to “cultural alienation” and sends the perpetrators to a counselor to talk about their feelings before letting them right back onto the street. Maybe the EU stands for other things. I don’t know, and at this point I frankly don’t want to know.
Those of us who aren’t in the bleak situation of the Moldovans can at least take some comfort in knowing that the power of the EU’s propaganda, manipulation, cheating, coercion, and spending comes out to 50.2% of votes in a tiny and deeply impoverished state. If this is the best the Atlanticists, Eurocrats, and their army of over-educated morons can do, the future does not belong to the European Union.
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This is what Pyrrhic victories were called before Pyrrhus, I have preferred it here because while Pyrrhus was a real man and a great general, Cadmus is a mythical figure who sent a bunch of people to die fighting a water dragon for no good reason. It is a much better comparison to what has been accomplished here.
I laughed out loud several times reading this, but you can't help but pity those poor Moldovans now one step closer to being suffocated entirely by the stupid EU. As if things weren't bad enough there already.
Good analysis. One addition here is how logistics, not persuasion, likely swung the margin. If you audit the infrastructure of voting such as the number and placement of foreign polling stations, hours, ID rules, etc., you will probably find a massive disparity between EU countries (dense, convenient sites) and Russia/Transnistria (few, distant, last-minute changes). A simple metric like votes per polling station abroad or median travel distance to a station would quantify turnout engineering and explain how 50.2% was manufactured. Layer on EU conditionality that will push Energy Community/ETS-lite alignment and CBAM spillovers, raising power and heating costs in a country already hemorrhaging people. That’s a recipe for post-accession buyer’s remorse, not durable consent.