The Moldovan police, Security and Intelligence Service (SIS), and the prosecutor’s office said in a joint statement on Thursday that the individuals, operating in groups of 20, were taught how to provoke riots during protests and resist law enforcement officers.
According to Chișinău, these individuals were trained by foreign instructors linked with dangerous formations such as Wagner mercenaries, among others.
On Wednesday, police and prosecutors conducted 88 searches across the country, resulting in the arrest of four individuals.
The announcement came days ahead of the first round of
presidential elections coupled with a referendum to amend the country’s constitution to include a provision of the country striving to join the European Union.
Polls indicate that the pro-EU Maia Sandu is likely to be reelected as the head of state and that the majority of Moldovans also support the constitutional change.
Moldova applied for EU membership in March 2022, was granted candidate status in June of that year, and received a European Commission’s recommendation to open accession talks in November 2023.
But not all legal reforms introduced by Moldova have met with the EU’s approval, among them the proposal made earlier this year in spring, to introduce a controversial ‘foreign agents law,’ which would require all NGOs and media who receive more than 20% of their income from abroad much identify themselves as serving foreign interests.
A similar law was passed after much contention by the parliament of Georgia, another EU hopeful, by the ruling ‘Georgian Dream’ party
over the objections of the Georgian president Zourabichvili.
The difference between the two former Soviet republics is, however, that the Georgian ‘foreign agents law’ is seen even by the Georgians themselves as a way to gag the opponents of the ruling party who
seek rapprochement with Moscow following the 2008 Russian invasion of the country, which resulted in Tbilisi’s loss of control over the autonomous regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia to pro-Russian separatists.
Meanwhile, Moldova, which similarly struggles with having a portion of its territory controlled by the pro-Russian separatists in Transnistria, has to struggle against actual foreign agents working at the behest of the Kremlin, among them Ilan Șor, a Moldovan oligarch holding Russian citizenship, who fled to Israel and then Russia to avoid imprisonment over corruption charges.
Șor, who has been convicted for his crimes in Moldova, has been named by the Moldovan authorities as the person financing the training of Moldovan citizens to destabilize the country. He is also involved in a purported
vote-buying scheme, in which Moldovan citizens were offered payments to vote against the pro-EU constitutional amendment.
Destabilization training
According to the findings of the Moldovan authorities, the training of the agents provocateurs began in June 2024 at the outskirts of Moscow. The recruited individuals received “instruction in protest tactics, including how to provoke law enforcement, confront security cordons, seize objects or weapons from officials, and quickly retreat into crowds,” Euractiv reported citing Viorel Cernăuțeanu, the head of the General Police Inspectorate.
Another group was reportedly trained in camps in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Serbia, with the costs of travel costs covered by Șor through the Evrazia NGO, Alexandru Musteață, director of the Intelligence and Security Service, said.
According to him, individuals trained at these camps were taught how to organize protests and carry out “violent, radical, and even extremist actions during the elections,” Euractiv reported, which training involved foreign nationals, 11 of whom were identified, by Moldovan authorities.
Musteață said that “These camps were led by foreign instructors connected to entities associated with the Wagner private military group and another group called ‘Ferma,’ previously established by Yevgeny Prigozhin.”
Prigozhin, once a close associate of Russian leader Vladimir Putin who fell from grace following an abortive mutiny in June 2023, died in a plane crash along with other leaders of the notorious Wagner mercenary group in late August that year. The group’s operations have since been brought under tighter control of the Kremlin.
