A trove of sensitive materials obtained by Ukrainian intelligence and reviewed by The Washington Post illustrates how Moscow continues to try to manipulate countries in Eastern Europe.
CHISINAU, Moldova — When thousands of protesters gathered last month outside Moldova’s presidential palace calling for the country’s pro-Western leader to step down, the man behind the demonstration — an opposition party leader in exile in Israel — soon received plaudits from Moscow.
intercepted communications show, the FSB sent a team of Russian political strategists to advise Shor’s party. And, according to the documents, the FSB oversaw a deal in which a Russian oligarch acquired one of Shor’s main assets, to shield it from the Moldovan authorities. “They are very embarrassed about the entire Ukraine operation, and they need a success somewhere,” Oleg Serebrian, Moldova’s deputy prime ministersaid in an interview. “My personal fear is that Moldova is an easier target than Ukraine. So, for a kind of moral rearmament of Russian society, they could use different tools in Moldova. The first one is the economic one.”
“is breaking Moldova’s neutral status and bringing harm to the people of Moldova because today, for normal people, [good relations with Moscow] is the basis for getting normal gas prices.”The documents provide a rare glimpse inside the shadowy world of Russia’s influence operations in Moldova and the twin instruments of natural gas and illicit financing that the Kremlin wields here.
Milyutin communicated with Chaika more than 6,000 times between December 2020 and June 2022, according to the Ukrainian intelligenceThe FSB was “checking with [Chaika] what needed to be done at any moment,” a Ukrainian security official said, referring to the documents. Chaika “is like a wallet for them.”The FSB, Milyutin and Chaika did not respond to requests for comment.
In response, the FSB drafted a plan — dated Nov. 21, 2020, and reviewed by The Post — to use the Socialists’ position as the largest party in Parliament in conjunction with Shor’s party was viewed by pollsters working for the FSB as something of a showman populist, but manipulable, the documents show. He’d won early success in 2015, when he was elected mayor of the Moldovan city of Orhei. But two years later, he was found guilty of looting $1 billion from the Moldovan banking system — a 2014 heist that left the Moldovan government with a budget deficit amounting to 8 percent of gross domestic product.
Shor also received FSB assistance for another part of his business empire. Amid a conflict with the Moldovan authorities, the FSB closely coordinated a 2020 deal in which Shor’s controlling stake in the company running Chisinau’s strategically important airport was transferred to a powerful Russian billionaire, Andrei Goncharenko, the documents show. Goncharenko “has been instructed in everything,” said a senior FSB officer in one discussion about the deal, the documents show.
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