The government of Moldova wants to subjugate the country to the West, Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolay Patrushev warned on Wednesday. This policy is the opposite of what its people want, he claimed.
“The leadership of Moldova under Western pressure and in defiance of the opinion of its people has taken the course to joining the EU, Romanianization, rejection of sovereignty and national identity,” the senior official said at an intragovernmental meeting in Moscow.
“In essence, Moldova risks becoming a new victim of the Western colonialist policy,” he told his counterparts from the Commonwealth of Independents States (CIS), a regional organization that includes former parts of the USSR.
Moldova is a CIS member, but has been distancing itself from the group under the leadership of President Maia Sandu. The politician, who has dual Moldovan-Romanian citizenship, is a critic of Russia and an avowed supporter of joining the EU.
Sandu’s Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS) suffered a major blow at the ballot box last Sunday, when its candidates for mayors and county administrators were overwhelmingly rejected by voters. In more than 600 elections, opposition parties won in the first round, according to the authorities. Some 265 communities will pick their leaders in the second round on November 19.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called the outcome an “unflattering judgment on the dead-end course pursued by the ruling party.”
She noted that the defeat had come despite an “unprecedented campaign of repression of the opposition and independent media, direct blackmail of voters, discrimination against candidates based on their spoken language, and even a direct ban of the competition.”
During the meeting of security chiefs, Patrushev said this was a “period when the process of the destruction of the West-centered world order becomes inevitable.” An increasing number of countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America are becoming more assertive in defending national interests, he stated.
Simultaneously, the US and its allies “seek to dictate their interests to economically and politically dependent nations more aggressively,” according to Patrushev. The West openly applies double standards to justify its hegemonic policies, he said.
“While it encourages crimes committed by the Kiev regime and turns a blind eye on the violations of law and human rights in Moldova, they condemn Russia and Belarus, demand investigations in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and arbitrarily impose unilateral restrictions,” he added.