Kremlin’s Game of Thrones: Moldova’s 2025 Elections as Europe’s Hybrid War Battleground

Kiriyenko’s mandate

At the center of it all sits Sergey Kiriyenko (First Deputy Chief of the Presidential Administration of Russia), the Kremlin official now in charge of political influence operations after the dismantling of Dmitry Kozak’s old departments. Kozak, the recently resigned Deputy Chief of the Russian Presidential Administration, failed to manage Kremlin policy in neighboring states and was ultimately sidelined by Sergey Kiriyenko’s team, which fueled rumors that he allegedly opposed Putin’s war in Ukraine.

Kiriyenko’s mandate is simple: unify Russia’s political warfare toolkit and turn Moldova into a proof of concept. This is why, alongside Russia’s intelligence services and oligarchic networks, every Kremlin lever is in play — from Ilan Shor, a convicted fraudster and oligarch running a Kremlin-backed campaign from exile, to Igor Dodon, former president of Moldova and long-time pro-Russian politician, and Vladimir Voronin, ex-president and leader of the Moldovan Communist Party.

These figures are reinforced by intermediaries such as Igor Chaika, a Russian businessman and son of former Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika, recently appointed deputy head of the Russian MFA’s agency Rossotrudnichestvo but in reality operating under Kiriyenko’s supervision, building bridges between the Kremlin and Moldova’s pro-Russian elites, and Vladimir Tabak, a strategist tasked with injecting Kremlin narratives directly into the Moldovan information space.

The Multi-Layered Machinery of Kremlin Interference

The financing side alone tells the story. Promsvyazbank, a sanctioned Russian lender, has been moving tens of millions of dollars into Moldova every month, masked through other countries and increasingly paid out in crypto. A stablecoin identified as A7A5 is used to pay contractors, bot networks, and “volunteers.” For ordinary activists, there is even a Telegram bot, “bankgreenmanager,” that distributes micro-payments and instructions. This financial shadow system is what sustains the whole operation.

Then comes the coordination layer. Moscow’s field operatives use an app called TAITO to manage everything from canvassing to rally attendance. TAITO profiles activists, assigns daily tasks, geolocates activity, and reports back to central dashboards. Tens of thousands of people have been logged in this system, creating a level of micro-management that resembles a tech startup, not a political campaign.

The propaganda machine is just as sophisticated. Telegram is the backbone, with more than 1,500 election-related posts each month spreading across hundreds of Moldovan and Russian-language channels. These posts don’t stay in Moldova — they ricochet into Slovakia, Czechia, Bulgaria, and beyond, amplified by familiar sites like CZ24 and AC24. TikTok adds a younger audience, with paid clips hammering home messages about food prices, migration, or looming war. Fake news sites that mimic Western outlets lend a veneer of credibility, while doctored videos circulate on YouTube and Facebook clones. A network of dozens of websites, operating as part of the Kremlin’s long-running campaign (more on Pravda.com network), is also active around the Moldovan elections, generating hundreds of fake posts daily — both to be cited in Telegram channels and to flood AI chatbots with disinformation through sheer volume.

On the ground, the Kremlin is preparing for what happens on election day itself. EK Stratcom’s monitoring points to planned provocations at polling stations: staged ballot sabotage, planted “discoveries” of invalid votes, orchestrated clashes between agitators and police, and the rapid spread of fake results hours before the official count. These aren’t improvisations; they are pre-planned scripts designed to delegitimize the vote no matter the outcome.

And hovering over it all is a new and dangerous layer: military signaling. In the weeks before the election, Russian drones and fighter jets intruded into the airspace of Romania, Poland, and Estonia. The immediate target wasn’t Moldova, but the message was meant for Moldovans all the same. The Kremlin wants to harden its core disinformation narrative: either you align with Moscow, or Europe will drag you into war. As Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov put it bluntly this month:

“There is a war. The ‘special military operation’ is one thing, but what is happening around us is a war. Right now is the sharpest stage of the war, and it is quite fateful. We need to win it for our children, for our grandchildren, for their future.”

Conclusion

In this light, Moldova’s 2025 election is not a local affair. It is the stage where Moscow is fusing money, code, and coercion into one hybrid arsenal. Money flows through banks and crypto wallets; code runs through TAITO apps, bots, and Telegram networks; coercion shows up both in street actors at polling stations and in military aircraft buzzing EU skies.

The lessons Moscow draws here will not remain in Moldova; they will be exported to European elections — and into everyday life across the continent. The playbook is clear: create a respectable “national” opposition to carry Russia’s message, distract with marginal figures like Shor, flood the digital sphere with fear of war and distrust in democracy, and prepare provocations that guarantee the narrative of a stolen election.

If Europe treats Moldova’s elections as a side show, it will miss the main point: this is the Kremlin’s rehearsal for the destabilization of the continent. The only question is whether we are prepared to counter it before the next act moves onto EU soil.