Since returning to the White House in January, President Trump has dismantled the American government’s efforts to combat foreign disinformation. The problem is that Russia has not stopped spreading it.
How much that matters can now be seen in Moldova, a small but strategic European nation that has since the end of the Cold War looked to Europe and the United States to extract itself from Moscow’s shadow.
The Trump administration has slashed diplomatic and financial support for the country’s fight against Russian influence, even as the Kremlin has conducted what researchers and European officials described as an intense campaign to sway that country’s parliamentary elections, scheduled for Sept. 28.
The Russians have flooded social media with fake posts, videos and entire websites that are created and spread on TikTok, Telegram, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube using increasingly effective artificial intelligence tools.
One post impersonated OK!, the celebrity magazine based in New York, in an attempt to smear Moldova’s president, Maia Sandu, with a preposterous accusation involving celebrity sperm donors.
A year ago, when the country last held elections, Biden administration officials pushed back against such campaigns, urging platforms like Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, to do more to identify trolls or inauthentic accounts. No more.
“The Russians now are able to basically control the information environment in Moldova in a way that they could only have dreamed a year ago,” said Thomas O. Melia, a former official at the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The outcome in Moldova will be an early measure of the Trump administration’s push to dismantle American efforts to promote democracy since the end of the Cold War. In addition to cutting foreign assistance, the administration has decimated other instruments of American influence, like Radio Free Europe and Voice of America, that were central to the geopolitical struggle with the Soviet Union.
“This kind of reckless, wanton destruction of all elements of America’s soft power,” Mr. Melia said, “is clearly leaving the field vacant for others to rush in unopposed.”
The State Department, when asked, declined to discuss Russia’s influence operations in Moldova. The White House did not comment.
Although Mr. Trump has repeatedly dismissed Russian election interference as a hoax, the Kremlin’s covert influence operations have been well documented — including in last year’s American presidential election and in votes this year in Germany, Poland and Romania.
The Russian efforts have also been honed with experience and aided by rapidly evolving technologies that have made Moldova a showcase of the ways the Kremlin seeks to exert its influence in other countries.
The Stimson Center, a research organization in Washington, called Moldova, which borders Ukraine, “a testing ground for hybrid warfare operations” that “are likely to shape similar efforts” across Europe.
Russia’s goal is to keep the country, a former republic of the Soviet Union, within the Kremlin’s orbit.
According to reports in Russian media, the task was assigned to one of President Vladimir V. Putin’s most trusted lieutenants, Sergei V. Kiriyenko. The efforts intensified even as the Trump administration signaled that it was no longer committed to fighting them, according to researchers who track malign influence campaigns online.
WatchDog, a consortium of researchers in Moldova, said in a report last month that it had found more than 900 accounts linked to Russia working in concert on the most popular apps in the country, including TikTok and Facebook, as well as Telegram, YouTube and Instagram. Some included videos that its researchers and others said A.I. had created.
In July, the National Police singled out a campaign on TikTok. “Every day, officers detect hundreds of new accounts created to misinform and manipulate society,” the agency warned.
TikTok, in responses to questions, said it was working with the authorities in Moldova to install “additional safety and security measures” ahead of the election. In June, it shut down a network of 314 accounts with more than 100,000 followers that targeted Moldovan audiences, using tools to disguise their origin in Russia.
Much of this year’s campaign has been conducted by Russian operatives who have become familiar to researchers.
NewsGuard, a company in New York that tracks misinformation online, documented 39 fabricated narratives targeting Moldova in a three-month period by a covert group known as Matryoshka, after the Russian nesting dolls.
Matryoshka, first identified in 2024, bombards journalists and fact-checkers with emails alerting them to fake content spreading on social media.
Its focus shifted noticeably to Moldova this spring, according to a report by Check First, a digital research company in Finland, and Reset Tech, an international nonprofit that tracks threats online. At times, the campaign featured Ms. Sandu even more than Russia’s usual favorite target, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
Ms. Sandu, a former World Bank adviser who in 2020 became the first woman elected as the country’s president, warned this summer that Russia was overtly and covertly supporting sympathetic parliamentary parties to stoke political and social divisions.
After a recent meeting with the country’s security council, Ms. Sandu detailed numerous ways the Kremlin sought to exert its influence. She accused Ilan Shor, a fugitive Moldovan businessman now sheltering in Moscow, of being a conduit of the Russian efforts.
The effort, she said, “poses a direct threat to our national security, sovereignty and our country’s European future.”
Kristina Wilfore, a researcher at Reset Tech, said the narratives often had a misogynistic tone, a recurring theme in Russian information operations toward women holding elected office.
The misogyny often blurs with homophobic themes, in keeping with Mr. Putin’s efforts to portray Russia as a defender of traditional cultural values of family, church and state. It is a narrative embraced by the American right, including Mr. Trump.
“The Kremlin’s war on women is a war on democracy,” Ms. Wilfore said, noting examples of other officials targeted by the Russians, including Annalena Baerbock, the German foreign minister, and Jacinda Ardern, the former prime minister of New Zealand.
At home, Ms. Sandu’s vision for Moldova remains contentious. While she was re-elected last year, a proposal to pursue membership in the European Union barely passed in a referendum, despite polls showing broader support. Researchers there said the close result might have been a result of Russian influence. With the country so divided, swaying only a small percentage of voters can be decisive.
When the Trump administration slashed American foreign aid this year, the impact fell particularly hard on Moldova, a poor country with a population of 2.4 million.
Among the cuts was $22 million meant to strengthen Moldova’s “inclusive and participatory political process.” Another slashed $32 million from what Mr. Trump, in a speech to Congress, called “a left-wing propaganda operation,” which included support for independent media in the country.
Mr. Trump and his aides derided such programs as wasteful, saying the cuts saved American taxpayer dollars while protecting the right to free speech. The administration has since pushed its campaign overseas, admonishing the European Union for requirements it has imposed on the major social media platforms — most of them American — to rein in malign content online.
Last month, Mr. Trump took to his own platform, Truth Social, to threaten tariffs on countries that penalize the tech giants. Secretary of State Marco Rubio ordered diplomats to lobby to weaken or reverse the laws, including the Digital Services Act, which has investigated, among others, Elon Musk’s platform, X.
The Trump administration’s vilification of American support played into the Russians’ hands, fueling propaganda that the assistance had, in fact, been its own kind of interference.
“It’s one thing when Russian propagandists and Russian politicians are attacking the legitimacy of the action of civil society organizations of human rights organizations,” said Valeriu Pasa, the chairman of WatchDog. “It is absolutely different if the same narratives are being echoed by U.S. leadership.”
Steven Lee Myers covers misinformation and disinformation from San Francisco. Since joining The Times in 1989, he has reported from around the world, including Moscow, Baghdad, Beijing and Seoul.
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