In Moldova’s 2024-2025 elections, religion became an increasingly visible feature of political messaging. Appeals to “traditional values,” warnings about European moral decline, and claims that Moldova’s “canonical” Orthodox Church was under threat began circulating across social media, parish networks, and political commentary.
This article is the second in a four-part series drawn from a new report published in collaboration with WatchDog on the role of religion in Kremlin-aligned influence operations targeting Moldova. While Part 1 examined the historical roots of Moldova’s Orthodox church divide, here we turn to the election campaign itself.
You can read the whole report online from WatchDog.
Part 2: The Moldovan Orthodox Church and the Elections
In addition to in-line links to investigations in the local press, this section draws heavily from the October 1, 2025 DFL report titled Targeting the faithful: Pro-Russia campaign engages Moldova’s Christian voters1 which is worth reading in full.
In May 2025 Journal TV exposed a Kremlin operation called “Matushka” which sought to use clergy members of the Moldovan Orthodox Church to influence the September parliamentary elections. This was really an extension and adaptation of existing operations targeting the EU referendum and presidential elections in 2024. In all cases, the goal was the same - to defeat President Maia Sandu and the PAS party and to turn the country away from the path of EU integration.
In 2024 the operation worked as follows:
Priests and lay church associates traveled to Russia ostensibly to participate in religious pilgrimages. Once there, they were trained by Russian agents and members of the Shor-network in how to influence their parishioners‘ political views.
Journal TV reported that around 900 priests and 200 lay associates received Russian MIR bank cards in this process. Ilan Shor’s organization Evrazia paid them $300 - $1000 / month via these cards as compensation for their political work.
Shor-network handlers and Russian political operatives arranged followup calls with the priests to instruct them as to which politicians to support. Initially they were told to promote Shor’s candidate Victoria Furtună, then support was switched to Alexandr Stoianoglo in the second round.
The results of this scheme appear to have been mixed. Many priests happily pocketed the money, enjoyed their pilgrimage and then never spoke about politics from the pulpit. In essence, Moscow spent a lot of money but did not have tools to verify the results.
They changed tactics in 2025. Journal TV reported that 19 archpriests (Protopop) were invited to a pilgrimage in the Holy Land between March 30th and April 3rd 2025. There the Kremlin’s political organizers announced a new strategy. Instead of focusing on ordinary priests they created a grassroots network organized around trusted nodes at the archpriest level. This network was mostly laymen and laywomen and operated on a pay-for-results model. “Activists” would organize social projects and events and would distribute a new newspaper called “Salt and Light” (Sare și Lumină).
This network spread information online via various religious affiliated facebook pages and Telegram groups (including the official Salt and Light page) and offline with their newspaper and events.
Whether distributed as a newspaper, via social media or from the pulpit, the messages from this network were consistent. They consisted of a blend of inoffensive religious content and cloaked election messaging with a series of recurring themes. These included:
“Moldova with Faith” versus “Moldova with Europe” - One campaign presented side by side pictures of orthodox weddings vs gay weddings, happy families vs promiscuous hippies and similar themes. In each case true orthodoxy was pitted against European integration which was presented as “moral decay.”
Church Schism & Anti-Romania Messaging - The Metropolis of Bessarabia was consistently painted as a threat to believers’ religious rights. It was framed as a tool of Romanian nationalism, EU integration and western degradation (sometimes even presented as a slippery slope to protestantism or catholicism).
Church “under siege” - They said that the Moldovan authorities are waging war on the Church. In this narrative Maia Sandu and PAS are trying to destroy true orthodoxy, take church property and lead believers into a godless and degraded EU. They suggest that the authorities are promoting the Metropolis of Bessarabia and attacking the Moldovan Orthodox Church to create a “Ukrainian scenario” whereby the state would play an active hand in fully driving out the Russian Orthodox Church and its subsidiaries.
Direct Political Messaging - Readers were told that PAS was preparing anti-church laws for when they were re-elected and messages and videos openly promoted pro-Kremlin candidates. In one video, Archbishop Markell defended Bashkan Evgenia Gutsul and framed her imprisonment as a political attack on innocent religious people. This video was heavily promoted in their network. Other posts promoted Shor-network candidate Victoria Furtuna before her party was removed from the elections. On September 26 on the final day of the electoral campaign readers were told to “follow the star” with a picture of a ballot voted for the Patriotic Bloc.
Many of the posts involved pictures or graphics that were clearly developed with AI. The Salt and Light network extended onto TikTok, YouTube, OK, VK, Facebook and Telegram. Its content was further promoted by other pages, including regional church pages for various dioceses around Moldova.
In addition to Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI), these pages also included calls to action - usually asking readers to click a link and interact with a Telegram bot in exchange for “prizes.” These tactics were used to gather personal information on readers and watchers.
Posts gathered millions of views and tens of thousands of followers across the online social networks. It’s unclear how many Salt and Light newspapers were distributed, but photos and stories posted online show mass distribution in Chișinău apartment buildings as well as across villages. In one instance alone, Police seized 200,000 newspapers from a clandestine print house. Of those nearly 100,000 were religious papers, mostly Salt and Light in Romanian and Russian.
As of February 2026 this network is still operational. While many websites have since been blocked, and follower counts on social media have fallen, the pages are still actively posting content. Now most posts are religious and non-political in nature, but the network is active and capable of reactivating in future elections.
Church “Seizure” Provocations
In parallel with the FIMI propaganda operations, pro-Russian groups have staged a series of occupations and attacks related to churches and priests that have switched to the Metropolis of Bessarabia. This can involve a mob physically expelling a Metropolis of Bessarabia priest and his family from a church and occupying it. Violent issues like these generally stem from a dispute over property rights, with the mob claiming that the church building belongs to the Moldovan Orthodox Church and therefore cannot defect. As many churches are the property of the local governments or the Ministry of Culture, this is a more complex legal issue. The Moldovan government has sought not to take sides in these religious disputes, but the police are often pulled in to maintain order and ultimately side with whichever side the courts rule has the right to use the property.
This leads to scenes of violent confrontations with the police in the middle. Nuance about court orders and multi-year EU-level lawsuits are cast aside in favor of narratives spinning these confrontations as police organized church seizures. These incidents fuel local propaganda and are the nexus of a separate FIMI campaign focused on western audiences.
Taken together, these online and offline campaigns shaped an information space designed as a wedge between voters’ national and economic aspirations with the EU and their faith and traditions. These networks remain active and are capable of shifting back to political messaging in the future.
This article is Part 2 of a four-part Moldova Matters series. In Part 3, we follow the evolution of these efforts and how the “Salt and Light” ecosystem was used to create English language disinformation targeting Moldova for believers in the West.
You can read the whole report online from WatchDog.
Full citation: Victoria Olari, Givi Gigitashvili, Sopo Gelava, “Targeting the faithful: Moldovan Christians caught in pre-election campaign,” Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), September 30, 2025, https://dfrlab.org/2025/09/30/targeting-the-faithful-moldovan-Christians-caught-in-pre-election-campaign/
"As many churches are the property of the local governments or the Ministry of Culture"
This detail was very surprising to me. Is state ownership of religious property the norm in the former Soviet Union?