What a long strange trip it’s been. 2024 was a big year in Moldova with a veritable deluge of news. Over 124 articles we’ve followed these events together at Moldova Matters and now it’s time to look back and try to make sense of what it all meant.
Quick Note: All the links in this article are to past Moldova Matters articles from the year unless otherwise noted.
January: Transnistria and Lions
While January was a slow news month in Moldova it foreshadowed challenges to come. The year started with stories about officials in Transnistria becoming more and more agitated about the government’s plans to levy taxes on some of their imports and exports. While this issue was not very serious itself, it started the year off with the idea that Chisinau and Tiraspol might be at loggerheads.
In January I wrote an article titled “2024 - The Year Ahead” which attempted to forecast the main challenges and turning points for Moldova in the coming year. In that article I noted 4 main challenges / themes of the year: The War in Ukraine, Transnistria, EU Negotiations and Elections (Presidential, EU Referendum, US elections). As we’ll see in this article this framing turned out to be pretty accurate - especially the focus on what happens on December 31, 2024 when Ukraine stops transiting Russian gas (today actually)1.
Back to January, the only other real news of note was the re-emergence of lion man. In my 2023 year in review article I mentioned how January 2023 brought with it a strange situation where residents of Stefan Voda called the police to report that they saw a man walking through the woods with a lion cub. In the year in review I wrote a bit about this quirky story and how it had vanished from the headlines.
Two days after publishing, on January 2nd, residents of Stefan Voda made the news again by calling the police and reporting a man walking through the woods with… 2 lions. The man is named Vasile Mereuta and he has a full grown lion named Baghira and her cub named Oscar. He also offhandedly mentioned to journalists that he has a panther named Selina (causing nervous looks over the shoulder no doubt). The police fined the Mr. Mereuta but had no idea where else to put the lions so they let him keep them for the moment. Undeterred Mr. Mereuta explained to journalists that he is in the process of obtaining quote “more tigers.”
More tigers?
It seems that Mr. Mereuta is becoming a January tradition in Stefan Voda so we’ll check in whenever more news of his menagerie breaks.
February: The International Press Panics about Transnistria
In February Transnistrian “leader” Vadim Krasnoselsky called a "Congress of Local Deputies at all Levels." This gathering, meant to bring together all the “elected” leaders of the (very undemocratic) region was initially seen as a serious political protest to Chisinau levying limited import and export taxes on companies in the region. Basically they would all get together and vote on how much they didn’t like paying taxes.
This type of political show event is not unheard of in Transnistria and Moldova collectively shrugged at the announcement and moved on with life. Things took an unexpected turn when a single facebook post by a Transnistrian “activist” speculated that the real reason for the congress was to officially ask Russia to annex the region. The post noted that the congress was on February 28th and that Putin was set to deliver his annual State of the Union speech on the 29th - the idea being that they ask to be annexed and Putin quickly obliges.
At no point did this make any real sense. But that did not stop a sudden social media frenzy on X (Twitter) and elsewhere, driven by blue checkmark accounts, speculating that this was all very serious indeed. CNBC ran a laughable article implying that Putin would announce that he accepted the annexation request and immediately send in tanks. Otherwise credible outlets wrote things explaining how Russia would have to send troops via “Ukrainian or Romanian” territory and noting that this would be “difficult.”
This all seemed to imply that Russia wasn’t yet able to fully defeat Ukraine because they were not yet motivated by a request from Transnistria for annexation, or that Russia would invade a NATO country as a means to sending more troops to Transnistria for… some purpose?
The Moldovan government was slow to pick up on the fact that a social media and press frenzy was occurring on the English speaking internet (and French and German). In Moldova no one took any note of this panic and the "Congress of Local Deputies at all Levels” came and went without producing any real news.
The choice of much of the press to write histrionic articles without the benefit of looking at a map also brought the first Shakespeare quote into a Moldova Matters article when I summarized the event as:
It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.
— Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17–28)
In reality the events of February foreshadowed major challenges that would face Moldova during the election season. Much of the international press proved that it was easily rolled by a Russian influence campaign. They also proved unwilling to take corrective information from local journalists and the Moldovan government when there were Twitter rumors available.
March - Justice Reform Shows Signs of Trouble
Moldova failed to appoint a Prosecutor General (again) after a “de-pointing” scandal whereby one of the members of the jury tasked with evaluating candidates gave an unreasonably low rating to a candidate in a way that skewed the whole jury’s averages. At first this was passed off as an “oops” with the jury member saying that anyone can make an arithmetic error (never-mind that there was no math involved). It later became clear that there were corrupt motivations at hand and that this member of the Jury was attempting to sway the selection of the Prosecutor General, allegedly for payment.
Given that this whole process was supposed to be conducted by people who passed vetting it didn’t look good.
In other news Ilan Shor settled in Russia after spending the last few years hiding in Israel and Bashkan Gutsul joined hundreds of youth activists from pro-Russian political parties at a fascist rally in Sochi. Patriarch Kirill gave speeches about how holy the war against Ukraine is and former Russian President (and current drunk tweeter) Dimitry Medvedev appeared in his best Dr. Evil outfit in front of a map purporting to show a partitioned Ukraine.
Also, someone (Russia) staged an attack against a defunct helicopter in Transnistria. The regional authorities tried to blame Moldova and Ukraine but the poorly forged provocation was uncovered pretty quickly and the news just moved on.
April - The Song that Keeps Coming Back
Technically April was a busy month for the pro-Russian opposition as Ilan Shor gathered the “Congress of Moldovan Politicians and Social Activists Supporting Moldova’s Entry into the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU)” in Moscow. There he declared the Pobeda (Victory) block merging together his various cutout political parties.
More interestingly DJ David Guetta & OneRepublic released a song titled “I Don't Wanna Wait” which is another major remake of Moldovan band O-Zone’s 2003 hit Dragostea Din Tei.
In addition to One Republic, TI and Rihanna previously utilized the same song and Gary Brolsma made his own viral lip-synch hit in one of the internet’s first viral videos.
In our Moldova Matters readers poll 70% of the audience voted for the original Dragostea Din Tei as the best rendition of the song and I was pleased to see Gary Brolsma tie with One Republic for second.
We don’t usually talk about Moldova’s global cultural footprint but there are times when this small country can have quite a surprising impact.
May - Crime and Justice Reform
The month opened with the story of the kidnapping, rape and murder of Ana-Maria. Initially hundreds of volunteers assisted police in searching for the missing 19 year old pregnant woman who disappeared from a bus stop on her way home from a meditation class that she organized for children.
This case shocked the country as her body was found and police quickly focused on Gheorghe Cotorobai, a former police officer, as the main suspect. Reporting showed that Mr. Cotorobai and his brother Alexei both had a checkered past and a history of not being held accountable for their actions. Alexei, who stood as a candidate for the Shor-linked Chance party, had allegedly murdered a 10 month old baby 14 years earlier in the process of assaulting a 17 year old girl.
This horrible case of gender based violence, and the fact that these brothers allegedly had manipulated the justice system to their own ends for years, highlighted Moldova’s ongoing challenges with the courts.
In a rare bit of good news on the justice reform front May also saw the vetting process inspire the largest mass resignation of judges in the country’s history. The choice of judges to resign (and keep their pensions) rather than face vetting proved the theory that even the threat of financial audits and transparency would create a self-cleaning moment in the system.
The good news did not last long as Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Veronica Dragalin then created a scandal by accusing a member of the vetting commission of being controlled by oligarchs. She sent this letter to all the people who failed vetting - essentially giving them a tool of appeal and undermining the whole process. This caused many groups to criticize Dragalin for not following normal procedure and for her to lash out at perceived enemies in a series of colorful facebook posts.
Not for the first (or last) time key players in the Moldovan justice sector engaged in a public food fight on facebook - and no one came out looking good.
June - Shor Departs Facebook
At the end of May US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Moldova and appeared to be blindsided by a journalist’s question about facebook. He was asked why Ilan Shor and other sanctioned oligarchs are freely spending money on facebook and other US owned platforms if they are under American sanctions? Secretary Blinken clearly had no good answer to this and basically promised to look into it.
Shortly thereafter facebook suddenly got very serious about banning Shor, his network and various other Kremlin linked figures who were interfering in Moldova. Sadly, this did not actually stop the flow of Russian money into American platforms.
In other news Russian independent investigative outlet The Insider dropped an investigation showing that Moldova's former Chief of the General Staff of the Moldovan Army is a Russian spy. Mr. Igor Gorgan was a GRU agent for 2 decades and texts between him and his handler show that he cheered the invasion of Ukraine, and promised to keep the army in line when Russia arrived in Moldova. He clearly saw himself as a potential strong man and promised to deal "with the politicians quickly."
July - Presidential Candidates and Crazy Stories
Igor Dodon announced that the Socialist Party would support Alexandr Stoianoglo in the fall presidential elections. Initially Dodon tried to gather the opposition around Stoianoglo as a common candidate but when this broke down he just became the Socialist candidate.
Also in July Moldova found itself wondering “Who is Vasile Tarlev?” as the former Communist prime minister came out of a long political slumber to appear as a Shor backed candidate in the election.
Also in July, Moldova had 2 incredibly odd criminal stories within a week of one another. In the first, 41 year old Turkish citizen Izzet Eren was gunned down outside a Chisinau cafe by a man who made his escape on an electric scooter. This triggered a massive manhunt for the shooter - which was ultimately unsuccessful.
The case highlighted major flaws in Moldova’s legislation around asylum and extradition. Eren was wanted in the UK for gang related violence and had previously been involved in a violent escape attempt from British custody. He was extradited to Turkey to stand trial for murder where he escaped in 2019. After hiding in Ukraine for a few years he entered Moldova via Transnistria once the full scale invasion began. He was able to tie up the extradition process by applying for asylum and due to legal technicalities he lived freely in Chisinau with his family while the courts dithered.
In the second wild criminal case that same week Moldovan police arrested a Georgian neo-nazi named Mikheil Chkhikvishvili, aka "Commander Butcher" leader of the “Cult of Maniac Killers.” The operation was jointly conducted with American law enforcement where Chkhikvishvili is wanted for planning mass casualty terror attacks in New York City. We still have no idea why he was in Moldova.
August - Bolea for President!? (nope)
Ilan Shor entered 2 more of his candidates into the presidential race in August. First, Victoria Furtuna announced her candidacy with a strange video where she released a dove in the center of Tiraspol.
Then, MP Vasile Bolea’s candidacy was announced as the leader of the Pobeda (Victory) block by Russian state owned RIA Novosti. The announcement potentially took Bolea himself by surprise given his reaction but he quickly accepted the nomination amidst massive pomp and circumstance. Shor organized a convention for the candidate at the WW2 museum in Moscow replete with Pobeda’s red party colors and yellow stars. Bolea claimed that the second world war was Moldova’s true history - not gay pride parades. Later the grandson of Vyacheslav Molotov gave a rambling speech about how Moldovans and Russians have “good genes” as opposed to those in western Europe who have “bad genes” and are ruled by a "gynecologist" (Ursula von der Leyen). The whole thing was highly produced with Bolea and Shor riding around in an antique Pobeda car and lots of fascist-adjacent speeches.
Shortly thereafter the Central Election Commission (CEC) ruled that Pobeda was just the Shor party by a different name and was not allowed to run - and neither was Bolea. The end.
In a more fun bit of news Moldova took home 4 medals from the Paris Olympics including Silver in Women’s Freestyle Wrestling!
September: Election Season Begins
Throughout this month candidates gathered signatures and the CEC began approving participants in the presidential elections and the referendum. Storm Boris caused insane flooding in Chisinau and Maia Sandu was caught live on TV during an earthquake which she mostly shrugged off.
I published the most popular Moldova Matters article of the year explaining why the recently released report from the International Crisis Group was… bad. I also had a few more interesting articles about justice reform and the paths not taken and the historical relevance of Russian Prince Grigory Potemkin’s death in a Moldovan field more than 200 years ago.
Then campaigning launched at the end of the month and we were off to the races.
October - November: Elections
These 2 months basically blur together so we’re just going to treat it as one long election nightmare. Polls in the lead up to the election showed Maia Sandu comfortably ahead in the presidential race and a strong majority for voting “Yes” to European integration. There were worrying signs about increased attempts at voter bribery, and a number of really odd disinformation campaigns, but mostly the question being debated was whether or not President Sandu would win outright in the first round.
ZdG then dropped their first bombshell investigation of the election season where their reporter infiltrated the Shor network under an assumed identity and exposed the bribery and illegality being planned.
At Moldova Matters we released our first investigation tracking Shor’s spending on western PR firms and information campaigns in English.
A Stunned Silence in Moldova. October 20th shocked the nation with Maia Sandu failing to win reelection in the first round and the referendum passing by a fraction of a percent. Like most people I went to sleep on the night of the election thinking that the referendum had failed only to learn in the morning that high turnout in the diaspora had *barely* saved the result. This led to some days of introspection and debate about what happened - and I feel my article from the time still basically holds up.
There was only a moment to pause and take stock because the second round of the presidential election was ongoing. President Sandu challenged second place winner Alexandr Stoianoglo to a debate under any conditions he wanted. After some dramatic back and forth (including the press threatening to boycott the broadcast due to the moderator) she challenged him to a head to head debate without moderators. Mr. Stoianoglo accepted and proceeded to get crushed by the incumbent president.
On October 26th Moldova reeled from the news that Georgian Dream had stolen the elections in that country and was pivoting the country towards Russia and away from the EU. The region began to feel like dominoes coming down.
Excellent journalistic investigations kept coming in this period with ZdG releasing a phase 2 of their undercover reporting from inside the Shor machine and TV8 reporting on links between Stoianoglo and Shor.
There was another bit of news in this time which got caught up in all of the madness and not very well examined. EU Reporter published a story on “leaked” phone calls between top Stoianoglo campaign official and Socialist MP Adrian Albu and Yuri Gudilin, a “former” FSB agent. The two discuss elements of tradecraft used to evade Moldovan SIS informants and generally about how they can help Ilan Shor and his goals (aka Russia’s goals). The Socialists denied the authenticity of the recordings but most of the press and commentators accepted them as likely authentic.
What was missed by the local press and still hasn’t been reported on locally is the fact that EU Reporter is a fake news site. This wasn’t a leak or journalistic investigation - it was almost certainly information laundering by a foreign intelligence agency. Moldova’s election sure was getting crowded.
When the second round came President Sandu won re-election 55-45% but narrowly lost the vote within Moldova itself. Once again the diaspora had proved decisive in keeping Moldova on a European course.
Rounding out November, America re-elected Donald Trump (which is not likely to be a good thing for Moldova) and Romania also faced a stunning election result, Russian interference and the start of a major political crisis.
All in all, a busy few months.
December - Energy Crisis Again?!
All of which brings us to this month. Following the elections, Prime Minister Recean began a government reshuffle and President Sandu signaled a new direction on justice reform. All eyes seemed to be on next summer’s parliamentary elections with PAS trying to learn lessons from “uneven” election results and make changes. BUT then everything changed and the public was told “We are facing a very difficult winter.”
It’s hard to believe now but back in mid November most people were not expecting any kind of winter crisis this year. It seemed at the time that the government had things well in hand, gas reserves were purchased and there were some handshake deals on how the whole Transnistria thing would play out. I started to wonder if my looking ahead to 2024 article had really overplayed the significance of Ukraine cutting off the gas transit contract today.
Nope. We’re back in a state of emergency, Prime Minister Recean has sacked his top energy officials and we now know for sure that GazProm is cutting off Transnistria on January 1st.
So here we are, 2024 is ending and 2025 is promising to start with a little more drama than anyone wanted.
Moldova Matters in 2024
In addition to following the weekly twists and turns of the news this was a year that Moldova Matters expanded into a bunch of new content. Firstly, back in June I launched the Moldova Matters podcast recording a sort of experimental “first season” in July and September. I wanted to mostly focus on topics that aren’t tied to the daily news but shed some light on how Moldova got where it is today. This led me to a great interview about the history of the Transnistria conflict with former OSCE director in Moldova William Hill. I also did a 3 part interview on the events of April 2009 through the rise of Plahotniuc with George Teodorescu. You can find all the podcasts on the Moldova Matters webpage, apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. I plan to continue the podcast journey in 2025 with some more historical episodes and interviews with experts on the topics driving the daily news. Stay tuned.
Another addition of 2024 was the “Perspective” section where I’ve added a series of articles blending informed opinion and analysis. I also hosted articles from key political voices in Moldova including former Foreign Minister Nicu Popescu and former Prime Minister Natalia Gavrilita.
My proudest edition of 2024 though has been the two original investigations that I released towards the end of the year. It was never my intention to do this kind of reporting at Moldova Matters but occasionally I will get tips from you good readers and those can develop into a story.
The first of these stories was published back in September and dealt with little known Moldovan politician Stanislav Pavlovschi. Mr. Pavlovschi became the face of a westward focused foreign influence campaign designed to convince politicians, think tanks, journalists and other decision makers in the EU and United States that Moldova is rotten. Mr. Pavlovschi, who was Andrei Nastase’s right hand in his campaign, was one element of a multi-pronged strategy to deploy large amounts of money to sway public and elite opinion.
The second Moldova Matters investigation of the year was into Vasile Tarlev and his $85,000 lobbying and public relations contract with a DC based firm. I write about Mr. Tarlev’s well financed efforts at cozying up to western decision makers and the highly suspicious charity paying his bills - a charity that is nominally meant to serve neglected children in Moldova and Ukraine.
I’ll soon be reorganizing the website a bit to add a dedicated tab for these investigations. It isn’t likely that we’ll have many of them but I think it’s important that stories like this which aren’t covered elsewhere have a home.
2024 has been a roller coaster in many many ways. As we look forward to 2025, and wonder what the electricity situation will be tomorrow, it seems that this roller coaster is just gonna keep on rolling. Thank you for your support in 2024 - for subscribing, for sharing and for just being supportive of Moldova Matters. I look forward to lots of new articles (and podcasts) in 2025 - something that is only possible thanks to those of you who subscribe and support this work.
Happy New Year and see you in 2025!!
- David Smith
Relatedly I had an earlier article called “Transnistria is in a Pickle” looking at all of the push and pull factors governing this and other issues between the banks of the Nistru.
Much appreciated, especially the podcast episodes! I know that some of those episodes are a lot of work, but they are extremely helpful.
We’ll be with you all the way, around the corkscrews and even through the water feature (if I can blend a rollercoaster with a log flume…)