The unprecedented decision by Romania’s constitutional court last week to annul the first-round victory of far-right firebrand Călin Georgescu marked the latest, startling turn in a series of eastern European elections over which Vladimir Putin has cast a dangerous shadow.
Moscow’s well-resourced attempts to sway elections are elements of what more European Union leaders are now describing as an undeclared, unacknowledged “hybrid war” against the West.
The attacks range from sabotage, to assassinations, parcel bombs, cyber attacks, electoral interference, social-media disinformation campaigns and the testing of military preparedness. Their MOs and links to identifiable Russian sources are evidence, it is argued, of systematic co-ordination and hostile intent.
“We are simply too polite,” Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen said on the sidelines of a Nato summit of the attacks. “They are attacking us every day now.”
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Even “neutral” Ireland has been touched – last month ahead of mysterious sabotage of underwater cables in the Baltic, the navy escorted Russian spy ship the Yantar out of territorial waters away from critical energy and internet pipelines and cables
Determined to sow dissent in the EU and accession states, most particularly to undermine support for Ukraine, Russia massively stepped up its long-running social-media disinformation campaigns to back proxy candidates and bribe voters in three former Soviet states. These states are regarded in Moscow as its “near abroad” sphere of influence: impoverished Moldova, Georgia, both EU applicants, and member-state Romania. It had some success in Georgia and Romania, although a determined fightback means the battle is yet far from decided.
In Moldova last month, pro-EU president Maia Sandu narrowly won re-election after a campaign which, the police say, saw more than $15 million in Russian funds deposited in the bank accounts of more than 130,000 Moldovans. In Georgia’s election – fraudulent, according to EU and OSCE observers - irregularities included vote-buying, multi-voting and extensive Russian disinformation. Pro-Moscow Georgian Dream’s narrow victory saw the opposition walk out of parliament, but nightly protests have brought tens of thousands to the streets of Tbilisi and other cities demanding a re-ballot. President Salome Zurabishvili, an opposition supporter, has branded the election a “Russian special operation”, an ironic nod to the Kremlin’s euphemism for its Ukraine “non-war”.
According to intelligence reports, $381,000 was spent to promote Georgescu on some 25,000 TikTok accounts without being marked as campaigning material as required both by TikTok’s own rules and Romanian election law
In Romania last week, the publication by the country’s intelligence service of detailed evidence of election manipulation led the constitutional court to suspend the second round of balloting.
The campaign of little-known ultranationalist Georgescu, a pro-Russia firebrand and Nato/EU sceptic (and moon landing denier), exploded on the social-media platform TikTok just two weeks prior to the election. He led the first round with 23 per cent and was set to face off against Liberal Elena Lasconi last Sunday. The new election is yet to be scheduled.
According to the intelligence reports, $381,000 was spent to promote Georgescu on some 25,000 TikTok accounts without being marked as campaigning material as required both by TikTok’s own rules and Romanian election law.
A group created on the Telegram messaging app was allegedly also used to co-ordinate the campaign with messages including advice on how to mislead TikTok’s content verification system, for instance, by recording screens and changing content so the platform perceives it as original content.
Paid influencers, along with members of extremist, right-wing groups and organised crime figures promoted Georgescu online. These influencers, who failed to disclose such payments in line with election law, are alleged to have earned about €80 per post for every 20,000 followers they had.
Last week the European Commission, using its new social-media laws, ordered TikTok to “freeze and preserve data” for investigation. Under the EU’s Digital Services Act the largest social-media companies can face fines of up to 6 per cent of global turnover if platforms fail to act against foreign interference, and the commission has previously sued both X and Meta over inadequate monitoring and mitigation of election interference online.
European nations have witnessed a spate of disinformation attacks. Among them: before June’s European elections, co-ordinated attempts on social media to share targeted pro-Russian, anti-vaccine and anti-LGBTQ campaigns; fake reports in Poland that Poles would be drafted to fight in Ukraine; an anti-Semitic graffiti campaign using star of David stencils across Paris in an attempt to foster divisions over the Gaza war.
Dutch research institute Trollrensics reports that a large disinformation campaign in Germany, exploiting concerns over migration and security, promoted and shared content in favour of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and against supplying arms to Ukraine.
In Lithuania, Moscow used disinformation to undermine the deployment of a German army brigade, part of a Nato effort to shore up its eastern flank, with claims that German soldiers raped women and wanted to occupy Lithuania.
Moscow’s fingerprints are everywhere. The second front in its Ukrainian war is a concerted assault on European democracy, which we would do well not to take lightly.