Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, announced on Thursday that his nation has discovered Russian secret service plans to destroy Moldova. According to The Washington Post, he claimed he recently notified Moldovan President Maia Sandu about the alleged plot when speaking to European Union authorities in Brussels.
“I have informed [Sandu] that we have intercepted the plan of the destruction of Moldova by the Russian intelligence. This document shows who, when, and how Russia is going to break their democracy and establish control over Moldova.”
Zelenskyy has made similar accusations in the past as well. He asserted that Russia’s obvious intention is to destabilize and “threaten Moldova by showing that there will be these or those moves if it supports Ukraine” in April of last year, Brussels Times reported.
Zelenskyy didn’t offer any clear proof to support his most recent claim, but remarks made by Russian and Moldovan officials in recent weeks most obviously indicate that, at the very least, ties between Chișinău and Moscow are deteriorating to a worrisome degree.
Natalia Gavrilița, the prime minister of Moldova, told Euronews on Tuesday that “pro-Russian elements” are waging a “hybrid war” against her nation by inciting large-scale rallies, conducting cyberattacks, and threatening to detonate bombs.
“We are seeing pro-Russian forces trying to destabilize the country politically through paid protests. These quickly subsided when the oligarchs that fled Moldova were put on the sanctions lists and their money flows were restricted,” Gavrilița said.
She added: “We are seeing cyber attacks. We’ve had the biggest cyber attacks in 2022 in the history of our country, and we are seeing bomb threats.”
Zelenskyy claimed that the strategy was highly reminiscent of Russia’s intention to annex Ukraine. He stated that he didn’t know whether Moscow eventually gave the command to carry out the plan.
Last week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused the West of considering making Moldova “another Ukraine.” He said that the West had supported Sandu’s bid for office in 2020 because she was pro-Western and anxious to join NATO, combine Moldova with Romania, and be “practically ready for anything.”
Moldova’s national intelligence service issued a warning in December that Russia would start a fresh attack this year with the intention of opening a land route via southern Ukraine to the Moscow-supported separatist province of Transnistria in Moldova.
Despite secession following a civil war in 1992, most nations do not recognize Transnistria. It stretches over around 400 kilometers (250 miles) from the Dniester River’s eastern bank to the Ukrainian border. Supposedly acting as “peacekeepers,” Russia has roughly 1,500 troops in the separatist territory.
