CHISINAU: Lured by free travel, haute cuisine and the prospect of millions in scholarships, hundreds of young people from Moldova have taken part in a Russian outreach program with links to Russian officials and a fugitive Moldovan oligarch that aims to re-image Russia and “re-befriend” a new generation of politicians, journalists and beauty queens.
Organizers from the Russia-based nonprofit Evrazia asked participants from Moldova and other former Soviet republics for little more than enthusiasm and lots of personal information. RFE/RL confirmed that there have been at least 10 such reimbursed trips to Moscow in the past four months.
Once in the Russian capital, the young people were addressed by “experts,” including some who are at the forefront of the Kremlin’s ongoing hybrid war against Western institutions and their partners in what Moscow once called its “near abroad.”
Artem, who gave only his first name, is one of several people who made such a trip and agreed to speak to RFE/RL’s Moldovan service and Systema, RFE/RL’s Russian investigative unit, while remaining anonymous so they could speak freely about the experience without fear of reprisal. “Many of my colleagues enjoyed the trip because, first of all, nobody paid anything and none of them wanted to participate in it in any way outside of the trip,” Artem said.
Others, however, have expressed interest in returning to Russia and “becoming more involved in the organization,” he added.
Evrazia is led by a Russian politician who grew up in Moldova’s breakaway region of Transnistria. The organization was founded by a former accountant for the Orhei city administration during the tenure of Ilan Shor, a 37-year-old fugitive businessman who was convicted in Moldova of plotting to steal around $1 billion worth of bank assets in 2014.
Moldova’s pro-European President Maia Sandu and her allies in the government have urged “maximum vigilance” and has taken increased measures to counter what it and experts described as well as intense Russian efforts to destabilise Moldova and interfere in recent or upcoming elections, including through alleged vote-buying and other interference linked to Shor, who recently obtained Russian citizenship but continues to lead an anti-government alliance from outside.
Russia denies trying to destabilize Moldova, an aspiring EU member whose constitutionally mandated neutrality Tested by fears They result from Russia’s ongoing large-scale invasion of neighboring Ukraine and the fact that hundreds of Russian soldiers still occupy a Soviet-era weapons depot in the breakaway Moldovan region of Transnistria.
Agents of change?
RFE/RL journalists gained access to a closed Telegram chat group where the Evrazia administration had gathered around 30 young people to prepare for one of at least 10 trips over the past four months. They shared detailed plans for a June stay in Moscow as part of the “Let’s Get to Know Russia” program. Twenty-six of those registered were Moldovan citizens, two were from Uzbekistan and one from Tajikistan.
Several participants of Artem’s Evrazia trip who spoke to RFE/RL said they were encouraged by their handlers to “promote Russian culture and the direction of Eurasian development” in their home countries. All had to provide personal information that was posted in the closed chat for others to see: passport numbers, expiration dates and phone numbers. They were also asked to choose between options such as applying for a scholarship, enrolling in Evrazia’s media school or becoming a politician or “ambassador of Eurasia.”
During the trip, they were repeatedly urged to apply for Evrazia’s supposedly guaranteed grants of up to one million Russian rubles ($11,600) per project. “It was just a matter of applying,” Artem said they were told.
Financial transfers between Russia and Moldova are prohibited, and officials have reported a rise in the amount of cash confiscated from Shor supporters returning from Moscow since the formation of Pobeda (Russian for “Victory”), the pro-Kremlin and anti-Western electoral bloc that Shor founded in April. Returnees from the Evrazia program have complained from airport searches upon their return.
Thirteen of the 73 grants the organization lists from a recent competition have gone to Moldovans. Among them is one for repairing monuments to soldiers killed in World War II, an issue that has particularly enraged Russia as state and local governments behind the former Iron Curtain have dismantled, relocated or simply contextualized Soviet-era monuments to Red Army soldiers. Another, for example, involves organizing an unspecified film “marathon,” and a third promises to open a care center for mothers of disabled children.
Participants in the Evrazia trips included the newly dethroned Miss Moldova 2023, Diana Spotarenko, who hails from the southern autonomous region of Gagauzia, Nicolai Sicolai, the leader of the Moldovan youth group Next Generation, and Ivan Panea, a member of the pro-Russian Revival party allied with Pobeda.
“We just want to be friends”
Shor fled to Israel in 2014 and resurfaced in Russia earlier this year, where he has since obtained Russian citizenship. In the meantime, Shor, who also holds an Israeli passport, became the target of U.S. sanctions and founded and led a Moldovan political party of the same name, which was briefly banned for alleged destabilization efforts and eventually abandoned in favor of Pobeda. Shor has orchestrated these political activities from abroad.
Nelli Parutenco, a former accountant at Orhei City Hall during Shor’s four-year term as mayor who fled Moldova in 2022 amid ongoing investigations, is Evrazia’s founding director.
Other notable participants from Moldova include Natalia Parasca, the leader of the pro-Russian Revival party, who sits on Evrazia’s board. Moldova’s communist ex-president Vladimir Voronin attended an Evrazia launch event in Moscow virtually in April, and Evghenia Gutul, the governor of the autonomous region of Gagauzia and a political ally of the Shorens, appeared in person at the same event.
“We are peaceful, we just want to be friends,” said Evrazia CEO and Russian MP Alyona Arshinova, who is leading the initiative to “re-friend” the former Soviet republics. said in May on RT, the Russian state-run foreign broadcaster, which is banned in Moldova and the European Union. Arshinova, the daughter of a Russian soldier, grew up in Transnistria, where a Russian-speaking separatist leadership continues to resist Chisinau’s control. Arshinova is on Western sanctions lists for her support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“Expert” speakers
According to recent reports, Russia is increasingly trying to recruit young foreigners through visits and internships in response to the expulsions of prominent figures that have affected intelligence work in the West. While one such report by the Russian-language portal The Insider Although Evrazia was not mentioned, it was said that Russian intelligence was setting up such nonprofit organizations as a “cover” to identify sympathizers and train future spies.
Previous Evrazia events have included appearances by Alexander Dugin, a far-right Russian ideologue and advocate of an authoritarian Eurasian state who is believed to have influenced the geopolitical views of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Among the speakers was Russian political scientist Sergei Markov, a frequent pro-Putin agitator and former political adviser to ousted pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. In the early months of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Markov sparked unfounded rumors that Romanian troops were “already deployed in Moldova” and were planning to invade and occupy Transnistria “with the support of NATO and with the participation of the Ukrainian army.”
According to a chat administrator with the username “Afanasii,” a recent three-day Evrazia trip described as a “gastronomic” tour had no “hidden conditions” other than that participants must “not only eat” but “actively participate and show interest” during the events. “There are no other conditions,” Afanasii said.
Four days before departure, an extensive itinerary appeared in the chat. The travelers would stay in a four-star hotel in a northern Moscow neighborhood and visit the Skolkovo Innovation Center, a high-tech business park that houses Russian government IT companies. Next on the agenda were trips to Red Square and city parks, and a cooking class in a Moscow restaurant.
The participants were promised a “meeting with an expert” on the third day of the trip.
Social media posts by the organizers and several participants confirm that Alexei Samoilov, a former weightlifter and academic from Kharkiv who questions Ukrainian statehood, was among the speakers who addressed the young foreigners. Samoilov is the leader of a pro-Russian movement called “Other Ukraine” and argues that “Ukraine does not have its own state.”
Members of Shor’s pro-Kremlin Shor party supported the anti-government protests last year, which Sandu claimed were instigated by Russia, even before they accused Moscow is exposed to more direct destabilization efforts through a coup plan, the details of which have never been made public.
A subsequent ban on Shor’s party was ultimately lifted by the Moldovan Constitutional Court. However, Shor has since joined the Pobeda alliance, which also includes the Awakening Party, often referred to as Shor’s “clone party”.
Presidential elections are scheduled for October 20 in the Republic of Moldova. At the same time, a referendum on possible accession to the European Union is to be held, which will grant Moldova the status of a candidate country alongside Ukraine in June 2022.
