World News | Moldovan police say they foiled Russia-backed riot plot

Chisinau (Moldova), March 12 (AP) – Moldovan police said Sunday they foiled a plot by a Russian-backed group of actors specially trained to protest the country’s new pro-Western government.

Moldova’s police chief, Viorel Cernauteanu, told a news conference that an undercover agent had infiltrated some “separatist” groups of Russian citizens who had been promised $10,000 to organize “massive disturbances” over protests in the capital. In destabilizing Moldova, Chisinau. Seven people were detained, he said.

Read also | Silicon Valley Bank collapse: More than 100,000 jobs at risk, 10,000 startups face payroll failure, Y Combinator CEO tells US Treasury secretary.

Separately, police said they arrested 54 protesters on Sunday, including 21 minors, who exhibited “suspicious behavior” or were found to be carrying prohibited items, including at least one knife.

Sunday’s protest was one of several organized in recent weeks by a group calling itself the People’s Movement, which has the backing of Moldova’s Russia-friendly Shor party, which has a legislature in the country’s 101-seat legislature. There are six seats in the institution.

Read also | U.S. Capitol riots: Former Vice President Mike Pence called Donald Trump “endangering my family” on Jan. 6.

The demonstrators demanded that the government pay the winter energy bills in full and “keep the country out of war”.

They have repeatedly called for the resignation of President Maya Sandu.

Police said they received four bomb threats on Sunday, including one at the capital’s international airport, in what they said was “part of ongoing destabilizing measures” against the former Soviet republic of Moldova, home to about 2.6 million people.

Moldova’s border police also said on Sunday that 182 foreigners were denied entry to Moldova last week, including “possible representatives” of Russia’s Wagner Group, a private military company fighting in Moldova’s war-torn neighbor Ukraine.

The police announcement on Sunday came days after U.S. intelligence officials said they had identified actors with ties to Russian intelligence who were planning to exploit protests in Moldova, which has been an EU candidate since last June, as a way to as a basis for fomenting a rebellion against the government of that country.

Moldova’s national anti-corruption agency said on Saturday it had seized more than 220,000 euros ($234,000) in a search of an organized crime group suspected of illegally funding the Shor party.

During car searches of Shor’s party “couriers,” the money was found stuffed into envelopes and bags in various currencies, earmarked for “paying for transportation and paying for participation in the party,” the agency said. the remuneration of the protesters.”

The leader of Shor’s party, Ilan Shor, is a Moldovan oligarch currently in exile in Israel.

Shor is on the U.S. State Department sanctions list because of Russian interests.

Britain also placed Shor on the sanctions list in December.

Cristian Cantir, an associate professor of Moldovan international relations at the University of Auckland, said that while it was difficult to determine how the alleged plan to overthrow the Moldovan government would play out, “Russia has been trying to undermine pro-European governments.”

“I think the concerns are valid, it’s hard to say the exact nature of the threat and how dangerous some of these groups might be,” he told The Associated Press, “but it’s definitely a real concern.”

Shor’s party also organized a series of anti-government protests last fall when the Moldovan government asked the country’s Constitutional Court to declare Shor’s party illegal, a case that is still ongoing.

Around the same time, anticorruption prosecutors also claimed that the protests were partially financed with Russian money.

Last week, authorities in Moldova’s breakaway Transnistria region, which has close ties to Moscow and hosts Russian troops, said it thwarted an assassination attempt on its president allegedly organized by Ukraine’s state security service, the SBU, without providing information. evidence.

The SBU refuted the allegation, saying it “should be viewed solely as an act of provocation orchestrated by the Kremlin”. (Associated Press)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)