Moldova – Wedged between Romania and Ukraine, the former Russian (1812-1917) and then Soviet (1940-1941 and 1944-1991) Moldavia, which has been independent since the collapse of the USSR – three-quarters of its population is ethnic Romanian – continues to be torn between pro-Russian and pro-Western tendencies.
Șansă party excluded for having tried to buy elections
On 5 November, Moldovan Prime Minister Dorin Recean announced that the Emergency Situations Commission had decided to exclude the Șansă party (Chance in Romanian language) from taking part in the local elections on the basis of the National Security Act: “activities aimed at influencing electoral processes have been identified in order to promote the interests of the Russian Federation through an organised group led by Ilan Șor through the Șansă party. […] For the first time in the country’s history, they have started to literally buy elections, that’s what they do – money for candidates, for votes, for election officials.”
According to the Commission for Emergency Situations (Comisia pentru Situații Excepționale), the Sansa party is financed by the Russian Federation through intermediaries in third countries, including Kazakhstan and Turkey. Party leader Alexei Lungu and Ilan Sor formally deny these allegations.
Reconstitution of the banned Șor party
The Șansă party (Șansă, Obligații, Realizări = Chance, Duties, Realization), founded on 26 June 2023, is the reconstitution of the Șor party, dissolved on 19 June 2023 by the Constitutional Court of Moldova for illegal financing and in particular by a criminal group. Its chairman is Israeli-Moldovan businessman Ilan Șor, born in 1987 in Tel Aviv to parents from Chișinău, exiled in Israel since 2019 following a 15-year prison sentence for fraud and money laundering.
The separatist region of Transnistria, a de facto Russian entity
It should also be remembered that the part of the former Soviet Moldavia on the left bank of the Dniestr that (apart from the towns of Dubăsari and Bender/Tighina) belonged to the Russian Empire well before the annexation of the eastern half of the Principality of Moldavia in 1812, and of which only a good third of the population is Moldovan, declared itself independent in 1991 under the name of the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (Transnistria) and has since been governed by a pro-Russian regime recognised only by South Ossetia and Abkhazia (separatist regions of Georgia under a de facto Russian protectorate) and by the Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh, which recently ceased to exist following its re-conquest by Azerbaijan. A referendum held in 2006 called for the territory to be annexed to Russia.
