KEY TAKEAWAYS
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Russia’s escalating campaign to block Moldova from joining the European Union reflects a weakening in Eastern Europe of a longstanding Russian lever of regional influence: its Orthodox church. A number of Moldovan Orthodox priests and parishes are campaigning to withdraw their nation’s churches from two centuries of formal subordination to Russia’s church, and Moldova’s senior prelate has bluntly condemned his superior, the Russian Orthodox Church patriarch, for supporting Moscow’s war on Ukraine. As conflict escalates this year over Moldova’s future, advocates of European democracy and stability might strengthen both by supporting dialogue to reduce conflict between Moldova’s historically Russia-linked church and its smaller rival, subordinate to the Orthodox hierarchy in neighboring Romania.
President Vladimir Putin targets Moldova as part of his effort, centered on Ukraine, to secure his authoritarian rule and bolster Russia’s influence over nations it once ruled under czars or the Soviet Union. The government in Moldova, a land that Russia ruled for some 190 years, now seeks full independence from Moscow, notably by “locking in” its decision to join the European Union (EU). Over the next 14 months, President Maia Sandu will seek voters’ confirmation of Moldova’s EU candidacy through an October referendum on that question (simultaneous with her bid for a second term in office), and through parliamentary elections in July 2025.
This period will trigger new risks of conflict as Russia escalates its campaign of opposition — including disinformation, cyberattacks, corruption and influence by its church. In Putin’s long, “gray zone” campaign to sustain dominance over Moldova, Russia has used these and other tactics to foment conflict among Moldovans — and opposition to Europe, democracy and Sandu’s government. Over centuries, Romania has contested Russian rule of Moldova. While about 80 percent of Moldova’s 3.6 million people speak Romanian as their first language, Russian language, media and cultural ties remain strong, notably for ethnic Russians, Gagauz and other minorities.
In 2024, the United States and supporters of peace and security in Europe can help Moldovans bolster stability and democratization by quickly boosting support for Moldovan election integrity and defenses against disinformation, which is delivered notably via Facebook, analysts say. As Russia aims to fuel conflicts among Moldovans over their future alignment, democratic allies should support Moldovan peacebuilding dialogues that can model compromise and strengthen a stabilizing political center.
As Russia aims to fuel conflicts among Moldovans over their future alignment, democratic allies should support Moldovan peacebuilding dialogues that can model compromise and strengthen a stabilizing political center.
The risks of heightened conflict in Moldova, including violence, “provide a justification for some form of intervention now — efforts to help Moldovans address internal disputes, whether by supporting dialogues or humanitarian aid” across domestic lines of conflict, said Catherine Wanner, a historian, anthropologist and religion specialist at Penn State University. Any dialogues or other peacebuilding efforts would face resistance or interference from Russia, she and other analysts noted.
One potential arena for dialogue is the conflict between Moldova’s main churches — the Moldovan Orthodox Church, historically aligned with Russia, and the much smaller Bessarabian Orthodox Church, subordinate to the Orthodox hierarchy in Romania.
In the Orthodox Christian world, Russia’s church for centuries has wielded canonical authority over most of what was the Russian empire and the Soviet Union — including Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states. The church’s senior prelate, Patriarch Kirill, has voiced increasingly strident support for Putin’s all-out invasion of Ukraine — and for Putin’s ideology of Russia’s natural right to dominate neighboring states. In March, Kirill’s office published an edict by a church-linked council he heads, calling Putin’s invasion a “holy war” against threats to Russia and Christianity from the “the West, immersed in Satanism.” Kirill’s “active support and propaganda have dealt a greater blow” to the Russian Orthodox Church’s influence abroad, and within Russia, than even the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, according to Nikolai Mitrokhin, a Russian sociologist and researcher on the former Soviet Union and its Orthodox churches.
Kirill’s support for Putin’s war has led to the Orthodox hierarchies in Ukraine and Latvia formally declaring an end to their historical subordination to Russia’s church, “and has clearly outlined the prospects for the withdrawal” of Moldova’s church as well, Mitrokhin wrote in January. In Moldova, 90 percent of people identify themselves as Orthodox, and 90 percent of those say they belong to the Moldovan Orthodox Church (MOC). But amid the war, opinion polls show the MOC steadily losing public support — and Moldovan news reports count more than 60 priests who have quit its ranks to join the smaller, Bessarabian church tied to Romania.
The MOC’s head, Metropolitan Vladimir, wrote a stiff protest letter to Moscow’s Patriarch Kirill in September over Kirill’s support of the war. Vladimir complained that the Moscow church treats Moldovans disrespectfully as “a peripheral and spineless people” and is seeking to “fold Moldova into the Russian World to which it is alien.” Soon after that letter became public, dissident priests under Vladimir petitioned him to withdraw the entire Moldovan church from its Russian parent and associate it instead with the Romanian Orthodox hierarchy. Vladimir summoned a conference of senior priests, after which a spokesman said the Moldovan church will maintain its status and its transfer to the Romanian church “will not be discussed.”
But the leader of the dissident faction — a priest in Chisinau, Moldova’s capital, named Pavel Borsevschi, said the meeting had left open the question of a transfer and that the dissident campaign would continue. “People can no longer tolerate the Russian church,” Borsevschi said, yet he declined to join other priests in switching to Moldova’s Romania-aligned church because “we must remain united regardless of everything.”
Borsevschi’s measured dissent, and Vladimir’s response so far, appear to reflect that, as Wanner noted, Moldova’s church battle is less extreme than the better-known conflict between the historically Russian-governed and independent (or “autocephalous”) Orthodox churches in Ukraine. Moderation in Moldova’s national conflict will become only rarer during this 14-month elections season. Russia is able to heighten divisions through aggressive disinformation campaigns, notably via Russian-language media and through proxy political figures such as the billionaire Ilan Shor, a fugitive in Israel from his Moldovan conviction in a massive bank fraud. In April, Russia hosted the formation of an opposition political bloc around Shor and sent a flood of illegal cash into Moldova to buy votes. Visiting Moldova May 29, Secretary of State Antony Blinken offered U.S. funding to help defend against disinformation.
Moldova’s church conflict appears most likely to fester in the foreseeable future. One reason is that the two possible institutional changes — canonical independence (or autocephaly) for the Moldovan church or a more pronounced involvement in Moldova of the Romanian church — imply heavy political and administrative consequences. “Significant institutional reconfigurations in Orthodoxy are hard to realize, although since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine they are far easier to envision,” Wanner said in an interview. That is partly because of the intrinsic conservatism and adherence to tradition of Orthodox churches, she said, and partly because the spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, has opposed reflexively using ethnic or national identities to create or delimit institutional churches.
All this suggests continued, grassroots turmoil in Moldova’s churches, writes Moldova-based analyst David Smith, with “increased divisions and realignments as clergy bypass the leadership and make their own choices.”
For Moldova generally, a practice of moderation and dialogue within and among Moldova’s Orthodox churches could be helpful in what will remain a difficult process of democratization for at least a generation to come. Wanner pointed out a core of that challenge: “While many Moldovans express pro-Europe sentiments in a political sense, aspiring to the economic prosperity and democratic freedoms of Europe, opinion research shows us clearly that their cultural and personal values resonate to the conservative ideas represented by Orthodox tradition — especially on any issues of connected to sex or gender,” such as abortion or LGBTQ rights, she said.
Thus, Moldova’s churches will remain important arenas for Moldovans’ critical task of managing political and social dialogues that can help build a political culture of moderation and compromise that Russia’s divisive manipulations in Moldova seek to destroy.