The U.S. presidential election isn’t the only election the Kremlin has its sights set on — and, reportedly, wants to get its hands on.
Two of Russia’s neighbors are at a crossroads, with Moscow hoping to steer them toward its orbit rather than toward greater engagement with Europe. As a result, key votes in Georgia and Moldova this week are being closely watched in the West.
In Georgia, the possibility of future free and fair elections could be on the ballot.
That’s if the country’s ruling party, Georgian Dream, wins a parliamentary election on Saturday or refuses to step down if it doesn’t. Opposition parties and analysts told NBC News that the party’s fear-mongering and attempts to undermine the vote are benefiting Russia, as are the alleged plots hatched in the run-up to Moldova’s election this week if they had won the day.
“This is probably the most defining moment in the modern history of Georgia,” Salome Samadashvili, a liberal opposition member and former head of the country’s mission to the European Union, told News in an interview. “Since we regained independence in the 1990s, we have not had a government that questioned its future in Europe.”
Georgian Dream did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Speaking on behalf of Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told News on Friday that “we do not try and have little chance to influence the situation and the electoral process in these countries.”
‘Hybrid warfare’
Moldova voted by a landslide majority on Sunday to continue with its accession to the EU, despite allegations by Moldovan authorities that pro-Russian agents engaged in vote-buying as a tactic to undermine the vote.
The country will hold a second round of parliamentary elections early next month, after a surprisingly strong performance by the pro-Moscow candidate in the first round.
The elephant in the voting booth in both countries is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.
“Russia has built up a huge arsenal of electoral and political interference mechanisms, which it has recently deployed very heavily in both Moldova and Georgia,” said Heather Grabbe, a senior fellow at the Brussels-based think tank Bruegel.
“This is clearly something that is going to be an ongoing part of the hybrid warfare strategy, where it is fighting militarily to take over Ukraine and then not militarily in Georgia,” she said in a telephone interview.
Moldova shares its largest land border with Ukraine, while Georgia lies just across the Black Sea from the major Ukrainian port of Odessa.
All three countries are former Soviet states and countries with deep Russian roots: a quarter of Moldova’s population is ethnically Russian, and a separatist government in the Transnistria region, which is internationally recognized as part of its borders, is backed by the Kremlin.
Meanwhile, Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 and still controls the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and has since attempted to “borderize” parts of the country—slowly and piecemeal shifting the borders between countries.
Yet efforts to admit the three countries to the European Union had stalled in the years leading up to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The start of that war “really created a sense of urgency and really led to the EU expanding its membership perspective to these three new countries to the east: Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova,” said Marta Mucznik, a senior EU analyst at the international peace advocacy group Crisis Group.
Since then, the EU has taken steps to accelerate the membership processes of all three countries.
Ukraine began talks this summer, while Brussels granted Georgia candidate status last year, but that process froze in May after leaders in Tbilisi cracked down on protests over a bill critics saw as authoritarian and Russian-inspired. Moldova, meanwhile, narrowly voted to join the bloc on Sunday.
The pro-EU camp won 50.46% of the vote, despite police there saying that pro-Russian fugitive businessman Ilan Shor funneled $39 million to voters in September and October.
Moldovan President Maia Sandu, who won the first round of the presidential election the same day, posted on X that “without vote buying, the outcome today would have been different. We would have won a convincing victory in the presidential election and the referendum!”
The Kremlin saw things differently. “You could see with the naked eye the changes in the dynamics of the vote count during the referendum that were difficult to explain,” Peskov said. “The Moldovan leadership does not bother to explain these anomalies.”
Moldova has taken steps to ban Russian media outlets operating in the country, and the million or so citizens who work and live in the EU have also had a crucial influence, said Grabbe, of the Bruegel think tank. But fewer steps have been taken to counter more subtle Russian influence in Georgia, she added.
Reliable polls in Georgia are hard to come by, but according to figures released in December by the nonprofit National Democratic Institute and Caucasus Research Resource Center, 79 percent of Georgians backed EU membership.
Despite this, the incumbent Georgian Dream party appears to have a strong chance of winning this weekend’s election against a fragmented opposition.
Party leader Bidzina Ivanishvili, the country’s richest man, has vowed to ban all opposition parties if Georgian Dream wins, but experts say the party’s message on other issues is well supported in rural areas and cities outside the capital, Tbilisi.
Georgian Dream has used the specter of being swept up in the war in Ukraine to controversial ends in its campaign material. Recent leaflets showed an image of a bombed-out church in Ukraine with the caption “No to war” opposite one of Tbilisi’s most famous churches and the message “Vote for Georgian Dream.”
“That created quite a bit of tension among the public,” said Natia Seskuria, founder and director of the Regional Institute for Security Studies, a Tbilisi-based think tank that collaborates with the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank. “It’s an emotional issue and it was very frustrating for people to see these tasteless banners all over the city.”
The Kremlin has repeated the ruling party’s attempts to accuse the West of interference. “It’s hard to imagine how a proud nation like Georgia can tolerate such ultimatums every day,” Peskov said.
Still, analysts say it would be an oversimplification to call Ivanishvili pro-Russian.
Georgia has historically been a strategically important but ideologically ambiguous power that can court Europe, Russia, Iran and China via the Silk Road, a vast network of trade routes stretching from China to the Mediterranean. And the Georgian Dream has pursued a transactional relationship with regional powers similar to the strategy of its Caucasus neighbor, Azerbaijan, analysts say.
“The Georgian Dream is pro-self. Ivanishvili wants to stay in power,” said Tinatin Japaridze, an analyst at Eurasia Group. Ivanishvili “wants access to his wealth, much of which is of course tied to Moscow, so they have reached a kind of transactional agreement that has absolutely nothing to do with ideology.” Although the Georgian Dream has muddied the waters by using EU iconography in its campaign materials and claiming it still wants Georgia to join the bloc, the country’s opposition parties have no doubt that a victory for the party this weekend would come with risks.
“Ivanishvili thinks he has to stay in power forever and democracy won’t allow that,” said opposition lawmaker Salome Samadashvili. “That’s why he gave up on democracy.”