Background

Let us cast our memory back to August 2020. In Western Europe, we were dealing with the Covid pandemic.

Few of us were watching the news about Belarus, where on Sunday 9 August, Lukashenko lost the elections to Sviatlana Tsikanouvskaya (wife of the blogger Sergeij Tsikanouvsky, the original challenger, who had already been arrested by the regime).
State television reported totally improbable figures that accorded Lukashenko an 80% victory. Outrage erupted, protests lasted for weeks.

Putin wasted no time. On Thursday 20 August he poisoned Alexej Navalny, the leader of an anti-corruption movement that had run against him in the upcoming Russian elections.
He then rushed to offer military and police support to his vassal in Minsk to crush the protests.

We had won

August 2020, in short, was the month in which the fair international confrontation between the partisans of the European social model and the partisans of the Russian social model ended with the victory of the former.

Tsikanouvskaya had won in Minsk and Navalny would have reopen the game in Moscow. Two months later, the ruling party in Tbilisi also falsified the election results to stay in power, inflaming the mobs.

If in that year Putin and his allies had not decided to deliberately sabotage the electoral processes, disallowing the results and sometimes eliminating the oppositors in advance, the last remnants of the Soviet empire would have finally come to the West.

But Putin, ready for anything to survive, chose to raise the level of the conflict. For Russia, Belarus and Georgia he reserved violent repression, while for Ukraine, the only one whose palaces of power he no longer controlled, he even began preparing a full-scale military invasion.

The Maia Sandu case

Among these upheavals, nobody paid attention to the small Moldavian Republic (an artificial name invented by the Soviets to refer to Bessarabia, a region that was originally part of the Romanian principality of Moldova and where most of the inhabitants proudly hold Romanian passports).

Between November 2020 and July 2021 , Maia Sandu’s pro-Europe and anti-corruption movement managed to win both rounds of elections, the presidential and the parliamentary one, taking advantage of the weakness of the pro-Russian candidate Igor Dodon.

The Moldovans, while still very poor, have a few more advantages than the other former Soviet peoples.
First of all, they live in constant confrontation with the Romanians, who have increased their prosperity thanks to EU membership and their security thanks to NATO membership.

In addition, they have the largest diaspora relative to the resident population: 1.2 million against 2.4. This diaspora is well acquainted with both the merits of Europe and the shortcomings of Russia, and they willingly turn out to vote, with turnout often exceeding 300,000.

Finally, the Moldovans have a thorn in their side: Transnistria. It’s a strip of territory along the Dniestr river where the Russians have installed a puppet state since 1992, protected by over 1,500 soldiers and still petrified in the Soviet era. Until last January, Putin supplied free gas to Transnistria, part of which was then burnt to sell energy for a fee to the rest of the Moldovans.
A treatment that certainly did not arouse sympathy for the Kremlin.

These factors, combined with Maia Sandu’s political skills, allowed the small republic to escape Russia’s grip for a few years.
But the invasion of Ukraine put everything back into question.

The shadow of Ukraine

Moldova has had to take in hundreds of thousands of refugees: today it is by far the country that hosts more of them per capita, as well as the one that struggles most to support them with the resources of its meagre budget.

While the closure or destruction of Russian gas pipelines has effectively annihilated Transnistria (now depopulated, without electricity or heating), it has also caused Moldovans’ bills to soar by 600%.

Finally, little Moldova is a temptation for Putin, because it could become the launching pad from which to attack the Ukrainian port of Odessa from behind. Remember: if Ukraine still exists as an independent nation today, it is mainly because Odessa was not taken in 2022.

Thus, immense Russia unleashed the most aggressive of its hybrid war campaigns against tiny Moldova.
The Moldovan elections were to hand over power to pro-Russian parties, no matter at what price.

As Marco Lombardo, an Italian senator familiar with the Moldovan Centre for Strategic Communication and Countering Disinformation, put it: ‘Maia Sandu didn’t have to win elections, she had to foil a coup d’état’.

Goliath versus David

Over EUR 100 million were invested by Russian intermediaries to buy votes (in a country where the average salary is EUR 630 per month).
Not only various political parties, but also many Orthodox priests received funding from the Kremlin to propagandise against Sandu.
Tens of thousands of anonymous social media accounts acted as a sounding board for Russian propaganda.
From Serbia, a network of criminal associations was being recruited to provoke riots in case of defeat. In European countries, on the other hand, agents of Russia were preparing to launch false bomb scares in embassies and consulates, to shut them down and prevent emigrants from voting.
4,000 sites were hit by hacker attacks the day before the vote.

Maia Sandu and her prime minister have always described the situation with the utmost transparency, and in recent weeks they have invited major European leaders to Moldova to update them on the topic and ask them for support.
Ukrainian President Zelensky helped them, declaring before the UN General Assembly that Moldova was ‘ about to be ‘lost like Georgia’ and that the international community should not allow this.

The counter-attack

Once the ground was prepared, Sandu unceremoniously used the iron fist.

He banned two (minor) parties from the electoral competition the day before the vote.
He only opened two polling stations abroad in Russia, compared to hundreds in Europe.
He ordered 600 searches to seize weapons and funding from criminal groups Russia was hiring.
He had most of the accounts that relayed Russian propaganda blacked out.
In short, he abandoned all sportsmanship and decided to give his opponents a taste of their own medicine. She was successful, winning 55 parliamentary seats out of 101.

After all, what sense would it have made to leave full room for manoeuvre to pro-Russian parties, when Russia, Belarus and Georgia have left no room for manoeuvre to pro-European parties for years?

What would have been the point of continuing to fight on equal terms only in countries aligned with Europe, while Russia cunningly prevents it from doing so in countries aligned with it?

Was Maia Sandu’s moral integrity really worth so much that she would sacrifice more than two million Moldovans to it and (a few months later) 40 million Ukrainians who would be attacked from behind?

But it would be better not to force

Of course, it would be unacceptable for a great democratic country like Italy to find itself having to take the same measures as Sandu in order not to fall victim to Putin’s hybrid war.
‘Action must be taken to prevent these extreme situations,’ says Senator Lombardo. ‘We must prevent the hybrid war from succeeding to the point where our country is forced to make similar choices’.

On Wednesday, 1 October, a resolution will be debated in the Italian Senate. The Senate, at the end of the assigned business on foreign interference, could recognise the existence of hybrid warfare tactics by hostile state actors and could commit to adopting a protocol on countermeasures.
Several proposals have already been tabled in this regard, including that of the ‘Democratic Shield’ of which Senator Lombardo is the initiator.

‘This is not an attack on freedom of speech,’ he argues. “Anyone in Italy can continue to say whatever they want, even in favour of Putin. But it must be avoided that this propaganda can count on opaque funding from abroad, or on a digital environment structured in such a way as to give it an advantage over the opposite.’

Having one or the other opinion will never be a problem. The problem is being able to spread one’s opinion with tools that are actual weapons designed by other countries to harm ours.