US efforts to protect democracy in Europe could fade under Trump

The Oct. 20 election in Moldova went off successfully—despite record Russian attempts to disrupt it—because of U.S. efforts to help, U.S. and Moldovan officials said this week. Such efforts could be imperiled should Donald Trump return to office.

Last Sunday, more than one and a half million Moldovans took to the polls and narrowly passed a referendum to join the European Union, an outcome Russian President Vladimir Putin worked hard to prevent.

“Every single tool from the Soviet hybrid-war toolbox was used” to undermine the outcome Viorel Ursu, Moldova’s ambassador to the United States, said this week during a CSIS event. “There are armies of online trolls and call centers that were established to spread deepfake videos and false information about the EU, about selling land to Europeans or hosting immigrants from Europe.”

Russia also “created an elaborate Ponzi scheme” to buy votes, a scam that poor Moldovans were particularly vulnerable to, Ursu said.

He said other Russian efforts included “training of young adults on conducting cyber actions and provoking violence during protests…engaging criminal groups, including foreigners, to disrupt the work of public offices in order to provoke a sense of fear and mistrust, constant bomb alerts that took resources from investigating the deeds of these criminal groups, paying religious community leaders to engage in political campaigning."

Such efforts laid bare Russia’s determination to “undermine its democracy in a truly unprecedented fashion,” said Christopher Smith, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for Eastern Europe and policy and regional affairs.

So why did the effort not succeed? One huge factor, said Ursu, was U.S. help—millions of dollars in aid, cybersecurity training, and more—all to build up the country’s resilience to attacks.

“The European Union and the U.S. partners here, the State Department, and particularly USAID, have been on on our side, on reinforcing that infrastructure…of the electoral process,” he said.

The scale of the Kremlin’s effort was unprecedented: 6.5 million attacks between December and May alone, a top USAID official said. All aimed to disrupt the electoral process directly or indirectly, targeting government actors, journalists, and elements of infrastructure, said Mark Simakovsky, deputy assistant administrator of USAID’s Bureau for Europe and Eurasia.

“It continues to grow, and it grew as we approached the election and even on election day,” Simakovsky said. “Moldova's digital infrastructure, including the site of the presidency, came under attack.” 

To counter those attacks, he said, USAID worked for months to “really ramp up our assistance” in various ways, such as sharing intelligence about Russian cyber actors, training a cyber workforce, and providing cybersecurity tools.

Smith said the United States also helps protect Moldovan elections by sanctioning pro-Russian operators such as the fugitive oligarch Ilan Shor,

“All of these cyber attacks, all of these trolls, all of these bots require money. Russia can field these instruments because they use Ilan Shor's network of influence in order to support these campaigns. And throughout this year, we have leveled sanctions against multiple elements of Ilan Shor's  network,” he said.

Moldova is hardly the only Russian neighbor under stress. In Georgia, which will hold parliamentary elections on Saturday, the rise of the pro-Kremlin Georgia Dream party Is beginning to bend the country to Putin’s will. Western observers say a “foreign agent” law passed in May is modeled closely after a Russian law used to crush dissent. The law, which targets aid and non-governmental organizations that receive more than 20 percent of their funding from foreign sources, is used to target pro-Western dissident groups and complicate Georgia's ascension into the European Union more difficult, they said.

What does that have to do with Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate? As president, he repeatedly pushed to slash foreign aid, particularly through agencies like USAID. To the extent that the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 accurately reflects his agenda, foreign aid would face sweeping changes and a change in focus away from Europe toward the Pacific.

Perhaps most importantly, Trump has both denied and welcomed Russian interference in U.S. elections and even briefly proposed to establish a joint Russian-U.S. cybersecurity project. And given Trump’s vocal support for pro-Kremlin strongmen in Europe such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, it’s unlikely he would find much urgency to help fledgling democracies protect themselves from Russian meddling.