By Independent News Roundup
Leader of Moldova’s Autonomous Territorial Unit of Gagauzia Evgenia Gutsul was recently sentenced to seven years in prison on charges of illegal campaign financing that was allegedly linked to Russia. She condemned the sentence as “a political execution, planned and carried out on orders from above”, while RT’s Farhad Ibragimov published an op-ed about how this exposes Moldova’s faux democracy. It’s both, in fact, since the primary goal is to politically engineer the result of the 2028 presidential election.
Incumbent President Maia Sandu won her second four-year term late last year under scandalous circumstances after the Kremlin claimed that Moldova suppressed the Russian diaspora’s vote. The past nine months have seen her accelerate Moldova’s pro-Western pivot, centralize her rule, and prepare for late-September’s next parliamentary elections. Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service warned last month that she promised to cancel Moldova’s constitutional neutrality if her party wins a two-thirds majority.
In that scenario, Moldova could follow Ukraine’s path by pursuing NATO membership, though speedy admission into the bloc isn’t expected due to the unresolved Transnistria Conflict in which Russian peacekeepers are involved. While it’s possible that NATO might consider that Russian-friendly region to be “low-hanging fruit” that they can “easily pluck” to “humiliate Putin”, any such attempt would risk the outbreak of a potentially uncontrollable conflict, so it can’t be taken for granted that they’ll attempt this.
For that reason, while Sandu’s party might secure a two-thirds parliamentary majority next month by hook or by crook just like she won her second term, Moldova will probably remain outside of NATO by the next presidential election in 2028 and the Transnistria Conflict will probably remain unresolved too. The opposition has been fractured over the years and lacks a genuinely popular leader, but Gutsul was on the way to becoming the one who could unite them, only to now be jailed on politicized charges.
It was therefore likely with an eye on what could have otherwise possibly been her presidential future that she described her sentence as “a political execution”, ambiguously adding that it was “planned and carried out on orders from above”, which could refer either to Sandu or her Western patrons. Likewise, Ibragimov was also correct in explaining how her political persecution exposes Moldova’s faux democracy, especially in the run-up to late-September’s next parliamentary elections.
The end result is that Moldova is expected to continue its de facto integration into NATO and prepare for unilaterally resolving the Transnistria Conflict (whether through military means, unconventional warfare, bribery, a Color Revolution, etc.) so long as the earlier-mentioned sequence of events unfolds. All the while, the West will misportray Sandu and her party as “saviors of Moldovan democracy” even though the reality is that they’re poised to be its murderers, with actual democrats struggling to stop them.
Gutsul’s jailing is thus a much more important development for Moldova and the region than casual observers might realize since she was positioning herself as the opposition’s most likely candidate for the next presidential election in 2028. Her “political execution”, as she accurately described it, might therefore amount to the execution of Moldovan democracy too. It’s premature to conclude that the West won in Moldova, however, since the opposition might still have some surprises in store for Sandu.
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