Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova in her weekly briefing yesterday, addressed highly suspicious events around the Oct. 20 referendum in Moldova on whether to move forward with the country’s joining the EU. Moldova, a country of 2.4 million citizens, is the western neighbor of Ukraine, and when it became an independent country in 1991, fighting broke out, leaving a narrow eastern strip called Transnistria—the industrial and energy eastern section of former Moldova. For months, the West has attempted to shut down any discussions that questioned the wisdom of joining the European Union—that is, in a “yes”/”no” on a future with the EU, it was only allowed to discuss the merits of joining.
Zakharova stated: “However, despite all this, the outcome of the election demonstrated that the Moldovan leadership failed in its efforts. The nation firmly spoke out against EU integration, even if the authorities, including Maia Sandu, went to great lengths to sweep these results under the carpet.” While she repeated [points made earlier by the Kremlin](Moldova’s Election: Democracy Saved by a Deluge of Improbable Votes)—that the vote count “cannot be reasonably explained,” that there was a massive turnaround in the vote, in which the “no” vote’s large lead disappeared, saying: “Preliminary voting results as published by the media showed that the number of votes against EU integration exceed the number of ‘yes’ votes by around 10% throughout the day. However, by the end of the vote, this gap started to shrink rapidly as if by magic.” She also addressed two phony explanations promulgated by Moldovan authorities.
First, the Western narrative offered for the miraculous last-minute turnaround in the vote is that the ballots from overseas Moldovans were counted last, and those votes were heavily pro-EU. However, Zakharova explained that there are almost 500,000 Moldovans living in Russia and, while “in the United States and Western Europe, there were about 200” polling stations provided by the Moldovan authorities, in Russia Chisinau provided only two, and each of them limited to only 5,000 ballots.
