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Moldova’s national intelligence agency warned Tuesday against "unprecedented" Russian interference as the country gears up for a referendum on joining the European Union and a presidential election. The Intelligence and Security Services, or SIS, released a report saying it has gathered data indicating Russia plans to launch vast hybrid attacks against Moldova through 2024-2025 to try to bring the former Soviet republic back under Moscow's influence. Head of the SIS, Alexandru Musteata, said in a press conference that Russia sought to undermine the democratic polling this year in the eastern European country. "There is information about an attempt to compromise...

Officials in Moldova’s Russia-backed breakaway region of Transnistria appealed to Moscow for protection Wednesday, as tensions escalate with the pro-Western government. ... On Wednesday, members of the Transnistrian congress used a rare meeting in the regional capital, Tiraspol, to ask the Russian Duma to “implement measures for defending Transnistria amid increasing pressure from Moldova, given the fact that more than 220,000 Russian citizens reside in Transnistria." A short war in the early 1990s led pro-Russian forces in Transnistria to declare a breakaway state. To this day, Russia stations about 1,500 troops in the region as so-called peacekeepers, who guard huge...

Farmers in Romania and Bulgaria staged protests Friday to express their anger over the European Union’s response to a glut of agricultural products from Ukraine that they say are flooding local markets and undercutting prices. Last year, the EU waived customs duties and import quotas on Ukrainian agricultural products as a way of facilitating transport to third-country markets. However, farmers in Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, and other EU countries have been disproportionately hard-hit by an influx of cheap Ukrainian produce — namely grain — which stays on local markets and undercuts prices. Polish farmers have also held protests in recent weeks....

U.S. intelligence officials have determined that people with ties to Russian intelligence are planning to stage protests in hopes of toppling the Moldovan government, according to the White House. White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said the intelligence shows that actors, some connected with Russian intelligence, are seeking to stage and use protests in Moldova as a basis to foment an insurrection against Moldova’s new pro-Western government. Kirby said the intelligence shows that another set of Russian actors would provide training and help manufacture demonstrations in Moldova, which was granted European Union candidate status in June, on the...

Moldova’s president outlined Monday what she described as a plot by Moscow to overthrow her country’s government using external saboteurs, put the nation “at the disposal of Russia” and derail its aspirations to one day join the European Union. President Maia Sandu’s briefing comes a week after neighboring Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his country had intercepted plans by Russian secret services to destroy Moldova, claims that were later confirmed by Moldovan intelligence officials. “The plan for the next period involves actions with the involvement of diversionists with military training, camouflaged in civilian clothes, who will undertake violent actions, attack...