🇷🇺🇲🇩🇷🇴🇪🇺 The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) stated that "the EU plans to occupy Moldova".

While one may dismiss these claims as "insane ramblings", we need to add some context:

Liberalism says that not just people but also nations have the "right" to pick and choose their own future (right of self-determination). This went at odds with older concepts in politics such as the notion of "empire", "spheres of influence", "protectorates" etc. This notion of self-determination was popularised during the 1848 Revolutions but the old empires of Europe survived even if in some places, revolutionary governments took power, only to be swiftly toppled.

WW1 however put down for good many of the old European empires and gave birth to many new countries. The U.S. under president Woodrow Wilson made it a key peace condition in his Fourteen Points in February 1918. The right of self-determination was supported by Marxists too. Figures like Vladimir Lenin and Lev Trotsky supported this idea because they viewed it as an effective way to "bring forth the revolution".

No one at the time sincerely believed in this right because it never was applied to everyone equally. Wilson and the Entente never allowed the people of the Global South, in the colonies to become independent, and did so only after WW2 when the British and French empires were effectively broke and couldn't hold on to their colonies who were revolting. The same way went in Soviet Russia who, after the death of Lenin and the ostracization of Trotsky by Stalin, started oppressing all ethnicities except the Russians because Stalin thought the Russians to be the least likely to revolt against the Communist Party and also because they were the most numerous.

The right to self-determination always was a means to an end, especially when it was invoked by bigger powers against rivals. Notions like "empire" and "spheres of influence" never left, they just became obstructed from view or were replaced by other terms with slightly different meanings.

Russia looks at the EU countries/governments as a single collective. They see the EU as an extension of the U.S. (and they see the US as a puppet of the UK, their eternal rival). Every nation composing the EU is just "brainwashed" and made to fight against them. The EU and the U.S. are similar and they frankly complement each other. They can't exist without each other. This was seen clearly in the past few months, how Washington and Brussels were at odds in January only to become best friends by the middle of summer.

So when the SVR says the EU "will occupy" Moldova, they aren't wrong. The EU is actively trying to wrestle Moldova away from Russia's sphere of influence. For the past 25 years, there has been an "unseen" war fought between Brussels (and Washington) and Moscow over Eastern Europe and the EU largely won this conflict. Russia managed to keep just Belarus and Serbia close to it. Moldova is the last country in the "greyzone" neither western nor eastern.

The EU doesn't need an army to occupy Moldova, it just needs to turn Moldova into a "Russophobic" country as the Russians would say. The "military buildup" the SVR mentions is obviously fake because it is simply not needed. The EU has a friendly government in Moldova and the only thing they need to do is keep them popular so that they can win elections and the EU is spending a lot of money to keep it that way. No reason to militarily invade it. Russia attacked Ukraine because the EU/US managed to overthrow the pro-Russian president and install a pro-Western one and subsequently banned any pro-Russian politician from running for office.

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@Wallachian_Gazette