A Russian Non-Profit Interferes in Moldova’s EU Referendum — And Builds an Anti-Western Influence Machine

By Ilya Lozovsky (OCCRP), Liuba Sevciuc (CU SENS), Olga Ceaglei (CU SENS, Malvina Cojocari (CU SENS), Dmitry Velikovsky (Important Stories), and Robert Denis (OCCRP) (Lozovsky is a Fletcher alum, and writer and senior editor at the Organized Crime and Corruption Project)

The sun is shining on the Moscow River, and the vibes are good. One after another, posing in front of a thousand-ton monument to Peter the Great, smiling young visitors from Moldova gush to the camera about their trip to the Russian capital.

“I just went completely nuts over the VDNKh [exhibition center],” says Vitaly. “I’ve always dreamed of getting to know the culture and history of Russia.”

“My name is Mikhail, and I’m from Moldova,” says a bearded young man in a backwards baseball cap. “During my time in Moscow, I liked the Kremlin the most. You know why? Because this is another goal we achieved thanks to Evrazia.”

Evrazia, which means “Eurasia,” is the Russian non-profit whose Telegram account posted this upbeat video. The organization’s website says it’s dedicated to “strengthening mutually beneficial integrational processes in the post-Soviet space.” And the cheerful sponsored trip to Moscow is just one of its many, many projects.

Though it was founded just six months ago, Evrazia’s frequent Telegram posts attest to the dizzying pace of its activity: “Evrazia marks Astronomy Day in Armenia.” “Evrazia has sent Kyrgyzstan 100 school buses.” “Evrazia was at the international cultural forum in St. Petersburg!”

But Evrazia is not just a feel-good effort to cultivate international friendship. Nor is it simply a way to promote Russian “soft power.”

Reporters from CU SENS, an independent Moldovan outlet and OCCRP partner, have spent weeks investigating the organization. They found that Evrazia is at once an anti-Western propaganda vehicle, an alleged conduit for illegal financial flows amounting to tens of millions of dollars, and an election interference instrument aiming to sway an upcoming vote on whether Moldova should join the European Union.

In fact, the “autonomous non-commercial organization” is a key component of a relentless pro-Kremlin influence effort led by fugitive Moldovan oligarch Ilan Shor.

At home, Shor is notorious for his role in masterminding the theft of a billion dollars — more than ten percent of Moldova’s annual GDP — from three of the country’s banks in 2014. But the prison term he was handed in absentia has failed to dim his ambitions. In recent years, the 37-year-old has become the highest-profile political avatar for Moldovans who yearn to see the country more closely aligned with Moscow.

From Russia, he has pressed on with an all-out campaign to discredit Moldova’s pro-Western president and get the country to turn its back on Europe.

That campaign has now gone into overdrive. Earlier this month, Moldovan police and prosecutors announced that some 130,000 citizens had received a total of $15 million from Shor in exchange for voting “no,” or helping persuade others to do so, in a referendum set to take place this Sunday on joining the European Union.

The payments, the police say, were made illegally through a sanctioned Russian bank — which received the funds from Evrazia. Organized through Telegram, the payments ranged from the equivalent of $50 per month for “supporters” to over $2,500 per month for “leaders” in the anti-EU campaign.

But despite Evrazia’s ties to the Kremlin — its board chair Alyona Arshinova is not only a legislator in the Russian Duma, but the vice president of the ruling United Russia faction — the organization is strikingly open about how it is pumping money into Moldova.

“Our scale is much bigger, all these numbers are understated,” Shor bragged in a Telegram post after police and prosecutors aired their accusations. “You’re counting like preschoolers.”

In another public message posted a few days later, he insisted that Evrazia’s activity was legal because it was simply hiring people and paying them “salaries” for “explaining to people the advantages of the Eurasian economic space.”

Nicolae Panfil, a Moldovan election monitoring specialist with the Promo-LEX Association, described Shor’s activity as an assault on the integrity of the Moldovan state: “What we are observing at the moment is an abrupt, direct involvement in an electoral campaign in the Republic of Moldova of a foreign state, of money from the Russian Federation, which is a very, very serious violation.”

The October 20 referendum, which takes place on the same day as a presidential election, is widely seen as a pivotal moment for Moldova, which has swayed between pro-Russian and pro-Western governments. 

President Maia Sandu, a strong proponent of integration into the European Union, says that a yes vote would prevent future governments from derailing Moldova’s current pro-European trajectory. She has also warned, repeatedly, of the destabilizing effect of Russian propaganda aimed at her country.

Though Moldovan authorities have carried out repeated raids, arrests, and confiscations, they concede to being overwhelmed by the scale of Shor’s efforts.

“Unfortunately, at the current stage, legal and law enforcement bodies … are not fully managing to fulfill their duties related to the investigation of this phenomenon,” said Arcadie Catlabuga, head of the National Investigation Inspectorate of the Moldovan police. “I’m talking about hundreds and thousands of crimes. We just can’t do it.”

Last Friday, Telegram blocked channels belonging to Evrazia, Shor, and several related Moldovan politicians because they “violated local laws.” 

But the money-for-votes scheme is just one of the Russian organization’s many ventures.

Evrazia has also found other ways to funnel money to Moldova. It provides regular “humanitarian assistance” to tens of thousands of pensioners in several regions. It offers grants of up to three million rubles ($31,000) to activists who propose ways to help build “friendly relations between the peoples of the post-Soviet countries.” And it has promised an impressive $250 million for unspecified Moldovan infrastructure projects.

Evrazia is also working to enlist young people in a broader ideological mission. The trips it offers to Moscow, and not only to Moldovans, are just part of a larger effort to build an international network of young supporters. At the center of it all is a project to promote the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) as an alternative to the West: Not just as an economic space, but as a distinct civilization founded on traditional values and united by a common history tied to Moscow.

A representative of Evrazia, and Ilan Shor himself, did not respond to requests for comment.

Read more here.

(This post is republished from OCCRP.)