Russia’s Latest Target: Moldova

By Eva Maitland, Madeline Roache, and Alice Lee | Published on July 15, 2025

Russian propagandists are flooding the internet with fake claims targeting the Eastern European country of Moldova, which has a population of 2.5 million, in a concerted effort to discredit its pro-European Union government ahead of upcoming parliamentary elections. Promoting claims including that Moldovan President Maia Sandu embezzled $24 million and that she is addicted to “psychotropic drugs,” one Russian campaign alone targeted Moldova with 39 fabricated stories in just three months, compared to zero in the entire previous year, NewsGuard found.

The 39 false claims were spread by a Russian influence operation known as Matryoshka, named after the Russian nesting dolls, which has previously targeted the U.S. 2024 presidential election, the February 2025 German elections, and Ukraine. The false Moldova narratives identified by NewsGuard from mid-April to mid-July 2025 took the form of fabricated video news reports and articles that mimicked 23 legitimate media outlets, including the BBC, The Economist, Fox News, Euronews, and Vogue. Collectively, they gained nearly 2 million views on Telegram.

Many of the claims in the phony news reports accused Sandu and her party of corruption. For example, an April 2025 video bearing the BBC logo claimed that the investigative journalism organization Bellingcat had reported that the Moldovan president had a secret mistress, who stole $24 million in government funds, with Sandu’s help. There is no record of any reporting on these claims by BBC or Bellingcat, and NewsGuard found no evidence that they are true. 

The false narratives are spread in Romanian, which is the majority language in Moldova, in  Russian, which is regularly spoken by about 20 percent of the population, and in English.

The top five Matryoshka false claims collectively gained nearly 1.5 million views on Telegram, the platform where many of the 39 false or baseless claims emerged. The campaign has been bolstered by pro-Kremlin news sites and networks of seemingly inauthentic accounts on social media platforms, including TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. NewsGuard identified 50 accounts on TikTok alone that in June amplified a false claim that originated in the Matryoshka campaign, gaining more than 50,000 views. The same false claim, which said that the BBC reported that thousands of absentee election ballots were cast by dead people in the 2024 Moldovan Elections, was repeated by ChatGPT, NewsGuard found. (More on this below.)

Political analysts say the recent flurry of false claims shows that the Kremlin will not easily allow Moldova, which is working toward European Union membership, to turn to the West. “Russia considers Moldova part of its historical and rightful zone of influence,” Eugen Muravschi, an expert on Russian influence campaigns at WatchDog.md, a Moldovan think tank that monitors foreign state influence operations, told NewsGuard in a June 2025 email. “It cannot tolerate Moldova’s moving away from Russia and towards Europe.”

Russia Unleashes a Flurry of Falsehoods

Nestled between Ukraine and EU-member Romania, the former Soviet republic of Moldova has an electorate split between pro-Europe and pro-Russian factions. It has been targeted by Russian influence operations before. The November 2024 presidential election that led to Sandu’s reelection was marred by what Josep Borrell, at the time the EU’s top foreign policy officer, described as “unprecedented interference by Russia,” including online propaganda and vote-buying schemes.

However, since April 2025, when Moldova’s parliament voted to hold parliamentary elections on Sept. 28, 2025, Russia has escalated its efforts, launching an unprecedented campaign that uses multiple arms of the Kremlin’s foreign influence apparatus. Matryoshka has published an average of three fabricated stories a week since Moldova’s parliamentary elections were announced in April, NewsGuard found. Just a few months ago, the campaign was not targeting Moldova at all.

Other pro-Kremlin campaigns monitored by NewsGuard have not come close to Matryoshka’s output. For example, FondFBR.ru, a website founded by the late Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, published just three false claims targeting Moldova in the same April to July three month period.

Diverting Fact Checkers

Matryoshka often generates little engagement when it first creates the fabricated content. However, David Chavalarias, research director for an EU anti-disinformation project, told Agence-France Presse that the campaign is partly aimed at “occupying [fact checkers] with crude, difficult-to-verify topics.” Indeed, Matryoshka typically emails its fabricated content to multiple fact-checkers and media outlets. 

In a related finding about Matryoshka taking aim at Sandu, Finnish software company CheckFirst and international non-profit Reset Tech said in a June 2025 report that during May, the Moldovan president was targeted far more than Russia’s arch enemy, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and French President Emmanuel Macron, Ukraine’s most ardent advocate in Europe. CheckFirst’s analysis found that the emails they received from Matryoshka in May mentioned Sandu 75 times, compared to 28 mentions of Macron and 22 mentions of Zelensky.

Campaign Mounts a Multi-Pronged Assault

Matryoshka has been aided in its efforts to undermine Sandu by websites with links to the Kremlin, social media bot farms, and other well-documented Russian influence operations. Seven of the fabricated videos and images from Matryoshka identified by NewsGuard were amplified by the Pravda network, a Moscow-based influence network named after the Russian word for “truth.” The network consists of approximately 150 anonymously owned websites that launder false claims in multiple languages in an apparent effort to influence web crawlers and generative AI. 

For example, the Romanian-language website MD.News-Pravda.com published articles about seven of the fake Matryoshka videos, including a video about Sandu’s supposed “psychotropic drug” addiction that usurped the logo of the American Psychological Association, the largest professional organization for psychology in the U.S.

How an ‘Election Fraud’ Claim Went Viral

Among the false narratives aimed at Sandu’s government, one of the most viral attacked her legitimacy as president, claiming she won the presidential election by rigging absentee votes. The claim followed a well–trodden Matryoshka path. It first appeared in late May 2025 on a pro-Kremlin Telegram channel that shared a video falsely bearing the BBC logo to claim that 42 percent of absentee ballots in Moldova’s November 2024 presidential election were cast fraudulently using the identities of dead people. 

The video attributed the claim to Bellingcat and quoted Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins as stating, “This information will be very revealing for citizens of Moldova, who should take note of it and take action.” The video was entirely fabricated, Higgins told NewsGuard, and the claim is baseless.

The fabricated video was then amplified in late May 2025 across social media, including Instagram, Telegram, Facebook and X. By early June, the false claim was picked up by the Pravda network, which published four articles repeating the claim in English and Romanian.

The Pravda network articles were subsequently cited as evidence by ChatGPT, a popular AI tool owned by OpenAI. Asked by NewsGuard in July 2025 why 42 percent of absentee ballots in Moldova’s 2024 presidential elections were cast by dead people, ChatGPT said that the reason was “outdated voter lists” and a “fraud risk in absentee voting,” citing a June 2025 article by MD.News-Pravda.com. That article featured a screenshot of the fabricated BBC video, and stated, “42% of remote [votes] are from the dead. This is not a tabloid headline, but the result of an analysis of voting data in the Moldovan presidential election conducted by a neural network in collaboration with Bellingcat.” 

Citing the Pravda article, ChatGPT stated, “A June 2025 model-based analysis (possibly linked to Bellingcat) flagged that 42% of ‘remote’ (diaspora) votes matched the profiles of deceased voters.”

The claim was next repeated by a network of 50 anonymous TikTok accounts that posted similar videos in a 24-hour period in mid-June 2025. The accounts showed near-identical patterns of behavior, including regularly posting videos on the same topics in the same 24-hour periods, using similar phrasing in both Russian and Romanian, and using the same Russian and Romanian-language hashtags.

NewsGuard identified a similar campaign on Instagram and Facebook, though on a smaller scale, with fewer than 10 accounts on each platform. 

A Nation On Guard

Russia already retains a foothold in eastern Moldova — the breakaway, Russian-speaking region of Transnistria, which has hosted Russian troops since it became de facto independent in 1992. The region is only able to sustain itself due to “Russian military, economic and political support,” the European Court of Human Rights stated in 2016. 

The Moldovan government is “genuinely concerned” about hostile Russian information operations targeting its people and has taken steps such as banning Russian state media TV channels, Russian influence expert Eugen Muravschi told NewsGuard. Still, he warned that slow and ineffective communication from the Moldovan government often leaves space for Russian false claims to take hold. 

The parliamentary elections provide Russia with an opportunity to stop Moldova’s current pro-Western trajectory, and are “perhaps even more important” than the November 2024 presidential vote, Muravschi said, adding that “Russia wants to install a government that will stop or slow down Moldova’s EU integration process …The Kremlin does not want to lose Moldova.”

NewsGuard contacted Igor Zaharov, spokesperson for the Moldovan president, as well as  Moldova’s Security and Intelligence Service and Moldova’s Center for Strategic Communication and Countering Disinformation for comment, but did not receive any responses.

Moldova’s presidential advisor on defense and security, Stanislav Secrieru, said in a June 13, 2025, Facebook post, “Modern warfare no longer begins with tanks at the border, but with soldiers in jeans and online propaganda.”

Edited by Dina Contini and Eric Effron