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Demonstrators took to the streets of the Moldovan capital of Chișinău on Sunday, demanding the removal of pro-west president Maia Sandu after US and European officials raised concerns about an alleged Russian plot to topple her government. The protest was peaceful and smaller than previous demonstrations held last autumn. It came, however, amid heightened political tension in Moldova following fresh warnings of a security threat to the nation of 2.6mn people, which borders Ukraine and Romania. Transnistria, a breakaway Moldovan region, is already under Russian control. US secretary of state Antony Blinken, who met Sandu in Munich at the weekend, said Washington was alarmed by “some of the plotting that we’ve seen coming from Russia”. Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy this month claimed that Moscow was planning to remove Sandu. Last week, Sandu said that Russia planned “the use of people from outside the country for violent actions” in Moldova. Over the weekend, Zelenskyy’s adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said Russia was trying to seize power, just as it did a year ago in Ukraine. “But in Moldova, Russia wants to do things differently — not by tanks, but by bandits,” Podolyak told Moldova’s Tv8 broadcaster. Moscow has denied the existence of a plot, describing them as “fiction”. On Saturday, Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova drew parallels between Kyiv and Chișinău, saying that Moldova is being “led by its western sponsors on the same path as Ukraine and the Baltic states”.
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On Sunday, the UK shared its analysis of what provoked last week’s brief closure of Moldova’s airspace following another security warning from Ukraine. “There is a realistic possibility that this was a Russian balloon that had drifted from Ukrainian airspace,” British intelligence said on Twitter.
Ahead of Sunday’s protest, Moldovan authorities reacted by restricting access for citizens from Moscow-friendly countries, including from the Balkans.