Early July, Fabian Sommavilla, a reporter from Der Standard, and András Németh, a journalist from HVG, had a conversation with Moldovan President Maia Sandu in Chisinau on behalf of the PULSE media network. A strong advocate for her country’s accession to the European Union, Sandu, 53, was re-elected on 3 November 2024 and narrowly won a referendum on Moldova’s EU accession held two weeks earlier.
On 28 September, the country, which borders Romania and Ukraine, will hold a general election marked by suspicion of massive Russian interference to destabilise the country and in support of pro-Russian parties.
Sandu and the pro-EU parties fear that Moscow will try to capture Moldova and use it against Ukraine and as a launchpad for hybrid attacks in the EU.
How satisfied you are with the progress that has been so far achieved towards this path and what are the main standing blocks on the road for full EU membership.
Maia Sandu: As you know, we have set a timetable for the EU integration, this is 2030, and since the day we submitted the application to the EU, we had been working very hard, and we had the full cooperation of the EU institutions, and we have seen the support of the member states. We believe we could finish the screening process by September. We believe both Moldova and Ukraine have fulfilled their commitments and we’re ready and we do hope that the Commission and the member states will take a decision soon so that we could start the negotiations of clusters.
So it means that you believe that it’s still realistic to join EU in 2030?
Absolutely. We will do our best. In the last three years we proved that we have the technical capacity and we have the political will and we do hope that the same strong political will will continue after the parliamentary elections.
We do believe that it’s in the interest of every citizen on the continent, in the EU, to have Moldova and Ukraine in the E.U. Because this is about peace and this is about security and… Having a democratic Moldova and a democratic and resilient Ukraine is contributing to consolidating peace and security on the continent.
EU membership often goes, we saw that hand in hand with NATO membership. Moldova is neutral: do you still consider neutrality to be a smart option?
We have neutrality enshrined in the Constitution and most of the or the majority of Moldovans believe that Moldova should stay neutral. We do respect the will of the people. Of course, we are concerned with the security and issues and we’re doing a lot to strengthen the resilience of our country.
As of now, Moldova’s security is defended by Ukraine. We are very grateful for that. We will do everything to make sure that Russia does not get to control Moldova and to use it both against Ukraine and against the EU member states. If Russia gets to control power in Moldova, it can transform it into a launching pad for its hybrid operations against the EU.
Could you give more examples of some collaboration between Ukraine and Moldova?
We are trying to help Ukraine as much as we can. In addition to hosting the refugees, we now have cooperation on energy. We are now reducing the transit tariffs for the Ukrainian gas, and at the same time we buy energy in Ukraine when this is available. We are working on transit corridors, on joint customs control, exchanging information, on threats at the border, but also on cyber security and on economic issues.
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In the perspective of the 28 September general elections, you have warned of Russian destabilisation efforts. What exactly do you fear could happen?
Russia is using a wide range of instruments to interfere with our political processes and with our elections. We have seen it last year and we will probably see more of it this year because there is a lot at stake in these elections.
Russia is illegally financing political parties and election campaigns in our country. It is using the Transnistrian region as well as the Gagauz autonomy in its destabilisation efforts. We saw how it punished the people in the Transnisian region in the winter when they stopped the gas supply, and of course they can try to do this again. They use disinformation and cyberattacks as we see in between elections. In the past there have been vote buying schemes, in which Russia did manage to buy some votes by approaching some people with low incomes. We do have proof for 140,000 voters, which is quite a number with respect to the total number of voters in Moldova.
‘If Russia gets to control power in Moldova, it can transform it into a launching pad for its hybrid operations against the EU‘
Last time, Kremlin proxies tried to interfere with the election processes in the diaspora, with the false bomb alerts in different polling stations across Europe, just to stop or to delay the voting process and to try to reduce the number of people who would cast their vote. They paid some young people from the Gagauz autonomous region or from other regions of the country to set fire on the Central Electoral Committee building or on police cars to create the perception of chaos and to try to overwhelm government institutions and to scare people so that they would vote driven by fear.
We were surprised by the results of the referendum and the 2024 presidential election because the overall support for EU membership is more than 60 percent, but the “yes” in the referendum on EU accession only got 50.4% of votes.
You’re right. And the polls before and after the referendum showed much higher support for EU integration. There were two issues that influenced. One is the buying of votes, which concerned between 8% and 10% of the ballots. The second is the disinformation campaign run by Russia in the few months prior to the referendum. The Kremlin supported a massive disinformation campaign about the EU and many people just got scared. It was about LGBT, of course, or the fact that the EU is going to confiscate their land and so on. Somehow these narratives actually managed to get to many people; even the Church was massively used to spread them. But now most people understand that they were fake news.
The 28 September general elections will be a very important date. How are you prepared to fend off Russian most likely attempts to interfere?
We have been working hard in the last few years to increase the resilience of our institutions, but also to increase the resilience of society. Institutions have to fight the cyber attacks, to be able to identify the channels through which the Russian illegal money gets into the country and then is being used against our law to finance campaigns and political parties and to corrupt voters. Our media have to be strong, as we do need to have more news coming from the free media. We also need more awareness on the projects that the EU has been supporting, about how people live in the EU. From this perspective, the diaspora is useful because most of the Moldovans now live in the EU countries so they can talk to their relatives at home and tell them what the real situation is, and not what Russia is saying about the EU.
In Romania, many people support the unification of Romania and Moldova. What do you think about unification in the long run?
The unification is an important decision which has to be taken by the majority of people. If you look in the polls today, it is being supported by 30% to 40% of the population. So as long as there is not a majority, this is not a subject that can happen. And this is not an issue. We do have very good relations with Romania, Romania is our closest friend and our strongest supporter for EU integration. Romania has been helping us again and again through all the crisis situations. We are working hard to implement projects for infrastructure and economic integration in the perspective of the EU accession.
