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Can Moldova – population 2.4m – show the world how to stand up to Putin?

The tiny former Soviet republic’s determination not to be cowed by the Kremlin could provide a template for the west on how to hold back the tide of subversion and corruption

Illustration: Observer Design

Illustration: Observer Design

The Observer

Moldova

How can a democracy defend itself from an attacker who does not respect any democratic rules?

When your assailant uses corruption, blackmail, economic war, cyber attacks, covert campaigns and street violence – while all you have are inefficient courts and even slower international institutions. Can you lose your sovereignty by being too soft? If you respond with censorship or even cancelling elections, don’t you lose your values?

It’s a challenge for any country as the “international rules-based order”, for what it was ever worth, disintegrates. But it is perhaps sharpest in Moldova.

Nestled between Ukraine and Romania, the nation of 2.4 million is being targeted with relentless Russian malign influence operations – a small country made into a vast laboratory of subversion. As the president, Maia Sandu, put it when I met her earlier this month: “Our democratic processes were not designed for these kind of dangers to democracy.”

But Moldova can also be the place where democracies can learn to fight back against such attacks, while remaining true to themselves. As the US retreats from supporting a secure and democratic Europe, Vladimir Putin will become ever more emboldened. Britain and EU countries need to reinvent how we keep ourselves free.

And it’s desperately important to get this right in Moldova, a country that once formed part of the Soviet Union and is now an EU accession country. Moscow’s ultimate aim, Sandu argues, is to help bring its allies to power in Moldova, and then use Moldova to threaten Ukraine from the west and the EU from the east. In the short term, Moscow wants to show that it can use all measures short of outright invasion to keep nations it sees in its “zone of influence” chronically destabilised.

The more it can pull off such acts of malign influence, the more its status as a reborn superpower is enhanced, and the weaker the hopes for liberal democracies surviving in a dog-eat-dog world will seem.

Sandu appears a personification of such hopes. A slight figure in the spare, high building of the presidential palace, she comes across as principled, neat, precise. She has won two presidential elections on a platform of EU integration, institutional reforms, rule of law, transparency and anti-corruption: the bouquet of concepts that were meant to denote membership of “developed” countries.

 

Pro-democracy candidate Maia Sandu at the inauguration ceremony for her second term in office as president of Moldova
Pro-democracy candidate Maia Sandu at the inauguration ceremony for her second term in office as president of Moldova. Photograph: Vladislav Culiomza/Reuters

Author: Editors Desk, Peter Pomerantsev

Source: The Guardian

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