Very briefly—because I was coming to the end of my time—I mentioned Moldova and Romania as the two most recent examples of Russian election interference, but it's also combined with information operations—propaganda, disinformation.

In Moldova, the Russians tried indirectly, through a Moldovan oligarch who's resident in Russia, to buy 300,000 votes against Maia Sandu's candidacy for president and against the referendum on EU accession or integration. In a country like Moldova, 300,000 votes is enough to swing an election, and they came very close. They were able to buy over 100,000 before the Moldovan security services understood what was happening and were able to shut this effort down. However, that's one example.

Another example, in Romania, is Georgescu, this candidate who won the first round of the presidential election and literally came from nowhere. He was in eighth or ninth place among the candidates a month prior to the election. He had no organization. He had no funding. He had a TikTok presence that, according to the Romanian special services, the intelligence services, was created and amplified by the Russians out of the Russian Federation. What's interesting is that it appears that TikTok was initially unaware and then tried to take measures to prevent this but was unable to.

Of course, in the Romanian case, the question becomes whether this was some sort of combined Chinese-Russian effort using TikTok to promote the candidacy of an anti-Europe, anti-NATO, pro-Russian candidate for the Romanian presidency. It doesn't appear that it was. It does definitely appear that there were Russian fingerprints all over this, but it does not appear that even TikTok, much less the Chinese government, was a part of this effort. The Constitutional Court of Romania has now annulled the first round of the election; it will be rerun.

Again, these are two cases in which Russia came very close to swinging the outcome of a democratic election using misinformation and interference.

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