teacup schreef op maandag 14 oktober 2024 @ 22:20:
Het vizier draait even naar Moldavië. Ook daar is Rusland nog driftig aan het beïnvloeden. Een newsletter uit Moldavië wijst de Moldaviërs hierop. Naar het Engels vertaald vanuit het Moldavisch, dus soms een beetje krom.
www.zdg
(gisteren)
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Voor deze undercover was een niet bestaand persoon gecreëerd, met een Russische bankrekening, en een gecloonde indentiteitskaart. Na twee maanden dienst te hebben gedaan als protesteerder kreeg ze 15.000 roebel uitgekeerd (~143 Euro). Maar, zoals dat in de Russische samenleving werkt, de beide bij de transactie betrokken banken en haar begeleiders trokken daar hun commissies nog vanaf. Ze kreeg in die periode nog wel regelmatig bedank telefoontjes uit Moskou om haar te bedanken voor haar inzet.
Maar dit verhaal is anekdotisch. De schaal wordt pas goed duidelijk wanneer de politie en het openbaar ministerie in Moldavië de hand legden op een plan van Ilan Shor's organisatie om stemmen te kopen voor het EU lidmaatschap referendum in Moldavië op 20 oktober (Zie voor info:
Reuters):
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De pers en overheid gingen vol op het register om de Moldaviërs hierover te informeren:
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Ook internationaal maakt Moldavië al even duidelijk (veel van het onderstaande is van 3 oktober jl.) wat er in haar land gebeurt, al is het land dus heel recent in staat gebleken om dit ook te bewijzen en het aan haar bevolking toe te lichten.
Moldavië vecht dus momenteel als een leeuw in een frontlinie om haar vrijheid te behouden. Een voorbeeld voor ons slaperige Nederland. Ik doel dan op zowel onze overheid als onze pers. Misschien iets voor een uitwisselingsprogramma?
Nog wat aanvullende context met bronnen.
Meta has taken down a network of fake accounts engaged in a disinformation campaign targeting Moldova a week before the small Eastern European country is set to hold presidential elections and a referendum to join the EU.
The network used fake accounts to manage pages that posed as "independent" news entities.
They posted content primarily in Russian that criticized the country's current president Maia Sandu, Moldova's pro-EU politicians, and the country's ever-increasing closer ties to neighboring Romania.
Naturally, the accounts posted positive and supportive comments about Moldova's pro-Russia parties and about Ilan Shor, a Moldavan businessman who fled the country after he was charged in a
massive bank fraud case. Shor is Moscow's favorite "nationalist" in Moldova, and his party has often received backing from the Kremlin.
The accounts would often take snippets from legitimate Moldavian news outlet Point.md but modify the text to add pro-Russia and anti-EU slants.
Meta says the network was part of a larger disinformation network cluster that had a presence on other social networks, such as Telegram, OK (Odnoklassniki), and TikTok.
The Facebook and Instagram accounts would often attempt to drive their audiences to the other platforms. They also offered money, food, or concert tickets for new followers and for people to post graffiti their brands across Moldova.
Meta says the accounts were primarily managed from Transnistria, a region of Moldova occupied by the Russian Army since 1991.
Some of the individuals involved in the campaign are also behind a fake engagement service that offers fake likes and followers on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, OK, VKontakte, X, and the petition platform Change.org.
In total, Meta suspended seven Facebook accounts, 23 Pages, one Group, and 20 Instagram accounts.
The company says it uncovered and disrupted the network based on its own research, but last Friday's takedown comes three days after the Moldovan government also moved on Russia's disinformation efforts elsewhere.
Last Tuesday, the Chisinau government ordered
Telegram to take down 15 channels and 95 chatbots associated with Ilan Shor and other pro-Kremlin politicians.
On Tuesday, Moldovan authorities ordered
Telegram to take down another nine channels that the Shor party created to replace the old ones.
Officials from Moldova's National Investigations Inspectorate said the accounts broke local election laws. Specifically, the accounts were used to bribe locals for their votes and to funnel money into Shor's and other pro-Kremlin parties.
Moldovan officials moved to suspend the channels days after the Ziarul de Garda newspaper published an
undercover investigation exposing how the Shor Party (the party founded by Ilan's Shor) and some of the newer pro-Kremlin parties were using the Telegram channels to recruit locals for anti-government protests. Locals had to register using one of the Telegram chatbots to keep track of who attended and who brought in new "members." The chatbots were also used to create bank accounts in Russia where participants would receive money for attending protests and for their future votes. Some of the individuals who registered on these chatbots have since complained that their data was used to contract loans in their
names.
Ever since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Moldova's pro-European government has accused the Kremlin of waging a "hybrid warfare" against it, with Ilan Shor being at the center of most of these actions.
While Shor fled Moldova after he was charged and has since received
Russian citizenship, the eponymous Shor party he founded in Moldova has remained behind and continued to be used by the Kremlin in attempts to destabilize the country.
Shor party representatives organized multiple anti-government protests in Moldova's capital, Chisinau, in 2023. They paid locals to attend and used agitators in an attempt to turn the protests violent. According to the
US State Department, the party had help from Russian news agency RT, which had slowly turned into an arm of Russian foreign intelligence over the past years.
This and previous shenanigans eventually got the Shor party
outlawed in Moldova and
seven individuals sentenced to prison for their role in stoking the violence. In the meantime, Shor and his allies have moved those protests from Moldavian cities to
Moldovan embassies across the EU.
The Russian government was not dissuaded by the Shor ban and continued to put pressure on the government through new nAtIoNaLisT parties that continued to spew the Kremlin's usual conspiracy theories that the EU was gonna make everyone a slave and turn their children gay. These groups are currently issuing veiled threats that Russia would bomb and destroy Moldova if they didn't vote for "
peaceful" Kremlin candidates.
As of last month, the Moldovian government has accused Russia of funneling more than $15 million into the country to
bribe voters and vote against the country's EU bid. More than 130,000 are believed to have received some sort of bribe.
Some of this money was promised to Moldavians through the Telegram bots that opened bank accounts in Russia, but some were sent in physical form. Moldovan authorities previously reported about groups of people who were making regular trips to Moscow via Armenia. These money mules returned with stashes of payment cards issued by UAE banks and with piles of cash, just short of the mandatory cash reporting requirement at airports. Officials believed the cards and cash were handed to local politicians and election officials to buy their favors, which eventually forced the government to block
Russian payment systems and UAE cards inside Moldova.
Moldovan authorities have also recently
charged local priests who started pushing their communities to support Kremlin candidates after taking
trips to Russia.
The pro-EU side was also the target of a manufactured hack-and-leak operation named Moldova Leaks where Russian hackers leaked modified Telegram chats from one of the president's security advisors to imply the contest for an anticorruption prosecutor post was rigged.
The Chisinau government was one of the first to block access to Russian TV channels, radio stations, and news sites since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. This included Russian-based organizations but also many local Moldovian proxies that just regurgitated the Kremlin's propaganda. This ban list has been kept up to date, with four new Russian sites being added to it two weeks ago (RuTube, Yandex, and the Dzen and Moldova24 news agencies.).
Over the past two years, Chisinau officials said on several occasions that they denied entry into the country to multiple military-trained personnel who were supposed to help local pro-Kremlin parties seize power in coups. One of them was allegedly supposed to take place using
Prigozhin's Wagner forces, according to Moldovan President Sandu.
Unlike Georgia, where the pro-EU side lost power to the pro-Kremlin party, Moldova has managed to keep its government and pro-EU view intact, mainly because it's landlocked between Ukraine and Romania and doesn't face a direct military threat from Russian forces.
Moldova also received help from Western governments faster than Georgia's pro-EU side. Both t
he US and
the EU have sanctioned Ilan Shor early on in the Russian-Ukraine conflict. This put a dent in the pro-Kremlin side's ability to move large bribes through the regular banking system.
However, poll numbers suggest that the pro-Kremlin side's propaganda might have worked regardless, mainly due to the sheer size and continued effort of its operations. We'll find out in exactly a week if all of this worked and if Chisinau's efforts to keep its infant democracy alive have paid off.