Moldova’s Information and Security Service (SIB) has terminated its partnership agreement with Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB). 
Actual cooperation with Russia’s foreign intelligence service was halted in February last year with the beginning of Russia’s war on Ukraine, with the SIB noting that the cooperation agreement was no longer in Moldova’s national interest. The 1994 cooperation agreements allowed Russian diplomats to tend to the 200,000 Russian passport holders who reside in the breakaway region of Transnistria. the FSB will now have to close its office in the Transnistria capital, Tiraspol.
“The SIS does not maintain external partnership relations with similar structures of other states that defy legislation, act to the detriment of national security and carry out subversive activities against Moldova,” said the SIS in a statement. “Starting on February 24, 2022, with Russian invasion of Ukraine, cooperative relations between the SIS and the Russian special services stopped, so that the agreements have no practical applicability and are actually non-functional,”
A statement issued by the Russian embassy said new appointments would be suspended from Aug 5 „for technical reasons,” and reducing staff from to 25 from the current level of more than 80 would put Russia’s Chisinau embassy on par with Moldova’s embassy in Moscow. But the reduction has been ordered after reports became public of more than two dozen antennas installed on the Russian embassy’s roof for surveillance purposes that resulted in 45 staff being expelled from Moldova. Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova has said that Moscow is formulating a retaliation.
Moldova has been torn between Russia and NATO since it ceded from the USSR. The  Moldovan Pro Russian opposition leader is in exile and pro-European Moldovan President, Maia Sandu, has denounced Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and has accused Moscow of trying to destabilise her country.