Russia’s Matryoshka Propaganda Machine Picks New Target, Pushing 39 False Claims Against Moldova Over Past Three Months
www.newsguardtech.com

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Russian propagandists are flooding the internet with fake claims targeting the Eastern European country of Moldova, which has a population of 2.5 million, in a concerted effort to discredit its pro-European Union government ahead of upcoming parliamentary elections.

Promoting claims including that Moldovan President Maia Sandu embezzled $24 million and that she is addicted to “psychotropic drugs,” one Russian campaign alone targeted Moldova with 39 fabricated stories in just three months, compared to zero in the entire previous year, NewsGuard found.

The 39 false claims were spread by a Russian influence operation known as Matryoshka, named after the Russian nesting dolls, which has previously targeted the U.S. 2024 presidential election, the February 2025 German elections, and Ukraine. The false Moldova narratives identified by NewsGuard from mid-April to mid-July 2025 took the form of fabricated video news reports and articles that mimicked 23 legitimate media outlets, including the BBC, The Economist, Fox News, Euronews, and Vogue. Collectively, they gained nearly 2 million views on Telegram.

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The false narratives are spread in Romanian, which is the majority language in Moldova, in Russian, which is regularly spoken by about 20 percent of the population, and in English.

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In a related finding about Matryoshka taking aim at Sandu, Finnish software company CheckFirst and international non-profit Reset Tech said in a June 2025 report that during May, the Moldovan president was targeted far more than Russia’s arch enemy, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and French President Emmanuel Macron, Ukraine’s most ardent advocate in Europe. CheckFirst’s analysis found that the emails they received from Matryoshka in May mentioned Sandu 75 times, compared to 28 mentions of Macron and 22 mentions of Zelensky.

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Among the false narratives aimed at Sandu’s government, one of the most viral attacked her legitimacy as president, claiming she won the presidential election by rigging absentee votes. The claim followed a well–trodden Matryoshka path. It first appeared in late May 2025 on a pro-Kremlin Telegram channel that shared a video falsely bearing the BBC logo to claim that 42 percent of absentee ballots in Moldova’s November 2024 presidential election were cast fraudulently using the identities of dead people.

The video attributed the claim to Bellingcat and quoted Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins as stating, “This information will be very revealing for citizens of Moldova, who should take note of it and take action.” The video was entirely fabricated, Higgins told NewsGuard, and the claim is baseless.

The fabricated video was then amplified in late May 2025 across social media, including Instagram, Telegram, Facebook and X. By early June, the false claim was picked up by the Pravda network, which published four articles repeating the claim in English and Romanian.

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[Edit typo.]

  • randomname@scribe.disroot.orgOPEnglish
    6·
    8 days ago

    Russian bots pose as [exiled Russian independent media outlet] ‘The Insider’ to spread disinfo about Moldova’s President Maia Sandu, alleging she uses orphans to win votes

    The Kremlin-linked Matryoshka bot network, named after the famous Russian nesting doll, is spreading disinformation on Twitter and Bluesky while posing as The Insider. The false narratives in the network’s latest campaign target Moldovan President Maia Sandu and her ruling Action and Solidarity Party (PAS), as revealed by the bot-monitoring project Bot Blocker (@antibot4navalny).

    Specifically, the bot network is circulating four identical fake videos alleging that:

    • “Relatives of Moldovan prisoners are being induced to vote for the PAS in exchange for a reduced sentence.”
    • Orphans are supposedly being “emancipated” en masse to make them legally eligible to vote for PAS. The text in the video reads: “Sandu and the PAS use teenagers in children’s homes to influence the election.” A full video can be viewed below.
    • Prison inmates are reportedly being pressured with threats of worsening conditions if they do not support the ruling party.
    • Thousands of dead children will allegedly be used to cast votes, as they are not listed in adult death registries. The exact wording of the post reads: “Sandu is ready to use dead children as voters. Thousands of dead minors could become voters, as they cannot be found among the lists of deceased adults.”

    [Screenshots of several of the posts are depicted in the linked article.]