Georgia and Moldova Weigh Western Future Despite Russian Influence

Happy Wednesday! The Federal Aviation Administration on Tuesday eliminated a rule requiring the “No Smoking” signs on airplanes to have an “off” switch—only 24 years after smoking became illegal on airplanes. 

The jokes about government efficiency write themselves. 

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced on Monday that Ukraine expects to receive $1.6 billion in aid from the United States for the domestic manufacturing of long-range weapons. Zelensky claimed that the first $800 million package—to be paid out to a Ukrainian weapons manufacturer—would arrive soon, followed by another of roughly the same size at a later date. A U.S. Defense Department official confirmed to the New York Times on Tuesday that the first payment was imminent. The funding comes amid repeated Ukrainian requests to use Western-made long-range weapons to strike deep inside Russia, as its ability to do so with its own drones is limited. 
• Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani announced Tuesday that the Islamic State’s commander for Iraq and eight other top leaders of the terrorist group had been killed in an overnight raid on Monday. The Iraqi national security services and the international coalition force apparently acted jointly to eliminate the terrorist leader, Jassim al-Mazroui Abu Abdul Qader, in an operation that injured two U.S. service members. Defense Department spokesman Gen. Pat Ryder said Tuesday both troops were in stable condition and being treated for their injuries. 
• The Lebanese Health Ministry said Tuesday that at least 18 people were killed, including four children, and 60 people were wounded Monday by an Israeli airstrike near Rafik Hariri University Hospital, just south of Beirut. The Israel Defense Forces claimed that the strike was against a Hezbollah target near the hospital and did not damage the facility. 
• Israeli security services on Tuesday arrested seven residents of Jerusalem on suspicion of plotting to assassinate Israeli officials—including a nuclear scientist and the mayor of an Israeli city—on behalf of Iranian intelligence agencies. The arrests marked the fifth such case in the past five months and came the day after Israeli intelligence busted another spy ring.  
• The Justice Department on Tuesday indicted Brig. Gen. Ruhollah Bazghandi, a senior official in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and three other men for their alleged involvement in a plot to kill Iranian-American author Masih Alinejad. Federal prosecutors had previously charged several other men—associated with an Eastern European crime group—related to efforts to assassinate Alinejad, a critic of the Iranian regime who’s lived in exile in the U.S. since 2009. The four men charged on Tuesday are in Iran and remain at large.
• U.S. intelligence officials on Tuesday released a report warning of intensified attempts by foreign intelligence services—particularly from Russia, Iran, and China—to interfere in the U.S. election during the coming weeks. The report said Russian actors fabricated and amplified a viral claim about Democratic vice presidential nominee Gov. Tim Walz and will likely continue to boost false claims—some artificial intelligence-generated or “-enhanced”—though the report suggests “the IC has no information that any foreign actor intends to compromise the integrity of the election administration process.” The report also warned Iran may try to incite violence around the election, including against election officials. 
• The parent company of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post on Monday sued the artificial intelligence startup Perplexity for copyright infringement. In its filing, News Corp accused Perplexity of copying on “a massive scale” articles from the news outlets to train its model. Perplexity—created as an alternative to a traditional search engine—generates summaries based on user queries, which it advertises as being so thorough that users can “skip the links”—thereby, the suit alleges, depriving the news outlets of “critical revenue sources” generated when consumers visit their sites.
• Peggy Judd—a county supervisor in Cochise County, Arizona, who delayed certification of the 2022 midterm election results in her county over unfounded concerns about fraud in Maricopa County—pleaded guilty on Monday to misdemeanor charges of failing to perform her duties as an election official. Judd’s plea was part of a deal with Arizona state prosecutors to reduce the original charges—brought last year—of felony conspiracy and interference with an election officer.
• A Washington Free Beacon investigation published Tuesday claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris, when she was the San Francisco district attorney, plagiarized a 2007 testimony to the House Judiciary Committee from a Republican district attorney in Illinois. However, Paul Logli, the GOP district attorney in question, attributed their nearly identical testimonies to the fact that they were drafted by the National District Attorney’s Association. But the Beacon also claims that Harris presented a fictional story from an advocacy group as an actual case of sex trafficking in a report created when she was California’s attorney general, along with some statements in other contexts that appear to be lifted from Wikipedia and other sources.
• A federal judge on Tuesday ordered former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani to turn over almost $150 million worth of property to two Georgia election workers who won a defamation suit against him after he falsely contended they committed election fraud in the 2020 elections. The list of property includes an Upper East Side apartment, a Mercedes Benz, over two dozen watches, and a claim for $2 million worth of unpaid legal fees for services rendered to the Trump campaign in 2020. The two workers—a mother and daughter pair, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss—were able to pursue Giuliani’s assets after a judge dismissed his bankruptcy claim. 
• Researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey and the Arkansas state government announced on Monday that they believe they’ve found a trove of lithium, potentially as large as 5 million to 19 million tons, in an underground brine reservoir in southwestern Arkansas. Energy companies, including ExxonMobil, are currently investigating whether the lithium-rich water can be accessed in a cost-effective way, but the deposit is potentially more than sufficient to meet the world’s demand for the metal.

Russia Tries to Reel Moldova and Georgia Back In 

In 2014, the European Union signed economic and political association agreements—early steps toward membership in the bloc—with three former Soviet Republics: Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova.

A decade later, the trio is still trying to integrate with Europe and the West while under assault from Russia and pro-Russian factions. Ukrainians are fighting tooth-and-nail on the battlefield against Kremlin forces trying to wipe their country off the map as pro-EU voices in Moldova and Georgia strive to overcome Russian and Russia-aligned efforts to subvert their democracies and bring the two countries back into its sphere of influence.  

Moldova narrowly affirmed its goal of securing membership in the EU despite Russian influence in the elections last weekend, but Georgia faces its own geopolitical test on Saturday as voters go to the polls to elect a new parliament that will determine whether the Caucasus nation pursues European integration and renewed ties with the United States or continues in its drift toward Moscow’s orbit. 

Moldovans on Sunday just barely approved a constitutional amendment—in the mold of Georgia and Ukraine—that enshrines in law a commitment to join the EU. The bloc opened accession talks for Moldova last December, and negotiations began over the summer. The results represented a slim mandate for Moldovan President Maia Sandu, who won the first round of voting in the presidential election, which was also held on Sunday. Sandu is favored to win the runoff that will be held in November. The ruling Party of Action and Solidarity initiated the referendum at Sandu’s urging, and she spent much of the year campaigning for the measure. 

But the vote was hardly a resounding triumph, passing on a razor-thin margin: 50.38 percent to 49.62. Just more than 11,000 votes out of the nearly 1.5 million cast made the difference in the outcome, with the large Moldovan diaspora proving instrumental in clinching the pro-EU win. 

The slim margin surprised observers as polls showed more popular support—63 percent according to a September survey—for EU integration. Sandu and international election monitors pointed to a likely culprit for the close results: an unprecedented Russian influence and interference campaign. “Moldova has faced an unprecedented assault on our country’s freedom and democracy, both today and in recent months,” Sandu said on Sunday night as the results were coming in. 

Moldovan, EU, and American officials had been tracking substantial Russian influence operations for months leading up to the elections. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said last week that Moscow had spent millions backing pro-Russian parties and spreading disinformation. An ex-Moldovan oligarch, Ilan Shor—who lives in Russia after being convicted of stealing $1 billion from Moldovan banks—personally spent tens of millions to try to swing the vote Russia’s way via propaganda in print and online media. In the most brazen example of election interference, Shor’s network allegedly transferred a total of about $15 million to the accounts of more than 130,000 Moldovan citizens in exchange for a vote against the EU accession measure, according to Moldovan authorities.  

BBC reporters at one polling station came across a woman who voted in the referendum asking where she would get paid and then complaining that an unidentified man had told her she would be paid to vote but hadn’t shown up with the money. 

Russia has hardly been coy about their aims in Moldova. “Their project of integrating the country in the European Union failed to win decisive support,” Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for Russia’s foreign ministry, said Monday. She claimed the election was unfair based on the rise in ‘yes’ votes for the referendum overnight Sunday as the results were tabulated. (Where have we heard that one before?) International election observers from the National Democratic Institute (NDI) said in their initial assessment the election was administered impartially and that the “greatest threat to the integrity of these elections has been a campaign of malign foreign influence from Russia.” 

“[The referendum] is a narrow victory that is reflective of a rather divided country that has strong influence coming from Russia,” David Kramer—the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs in the George W. Bush administration who worked on Russia and Moldova policy—told TMD. He argued that the EU needs to make the benefits of the accession process and the country’s candidate status more clear to the Moldovan people. The bloc announced earlier this month a nearly $2 billion support package for Moldova as it pursues membership. 

Observers and analysts worry that the narrow results of the referendum will encourage Russia to double down on its influence operations during the runoff and the parliamentary elections in 2025. “We fought fairly in an unfair fight—and we won,” Sandu noted Monday. “But the fight isn’t over.” Moldova’s police chief Viorel Cernauteanu put it more bluntly to the Wall Street Journal: “The real threat will come next year.”  

It’s not only in Moldova where Russia is trying to reel a former client state back in. Across the Black Sea by way of Odesa, Georgia is gearing up for parliamentary elections of its own this weekend that could be the most pivotal political moment for the country since it shook off the last vestiges of Soviet control in the 2003 Rose Revolution. 

Unlike in Moldova, support for EU integration is quite strong in Georgia, where somewhere around 80 to 90 percent of Georgians favor joining the bloc. But the ruling party, Georgian Dream (GD)—led by its founder Bidzina Ivanishvili, a billionaire who made much of his fortune from Russian investments in the 1990s—has long played footsie with Moscow and over the last year has adopted increasingly authoritarian tactics and pro-Russian posturing, as Gary Schmitt and Reuel Marc Gerecht explain on the site today.  

Though the party has nominally maintained its support for joining the EU, GD’s repressive turn toward Moscow—including adopting a Russia-style law targeting civil society and independent media—has derailed Georgia’s relationship with the bloc and the U.S. “The foreign influence in Georgia, frankly, is being carried out by Georgian Dream,” Kramer told TMD, describing the party’s targeting of government watchdogs and the promotion of Kremlin-aligned conspiracies and rhetoric as “doing the work for the Russians.” 

In July, one of your Morning Dispatchers spoke with two Georgian journalists, Eva Archemashvili and Mariam Pachkoria, who covered the massive protests against the foreign agent’s law and witnessed violent repression by police and hired thugs. They described the competing feelings of hope and fear they felt: hope in the popular opposition to the Russian-style repression, but fear that it couldn’t stop GD. 

“Right now, it feels like we’re losing the country,” Archemashvili said.   

But activists and opposition leaders looked to this month’s elections as potentially the final hinge point for Georgia’s future. GD has so far held off from a widespread crackdown on civil society using the foreign agents law, even as NGOs made plans to set up shop in other countries so they could remain operational if targeted. “They’ve slowed down with the intensity of implementation [of the law,]” Irina Arabidze, a visiting lecturer at Caucasus University in Tbilisi who will serve as an election monitor this weekend, told TMD. “It doesn’t mean that the government doesn’t have a plan to put it in action, but ahead of the elections, it’s a gathering storm, rather than the actual monsoon.” Arabidze argued that GD likely wanted to avoid agitating public attention before people headed to the polls. 

Still, Ivanishvili and GD party leaders have made clear their plans for after the election should they retain power. Ivanishvili has pledged that after GD wins the elections, he’ll target NGOs, ban the United National Movement, one of the main opposition parties, and prosecute opposition party leaders for supposed “war crimes.” 

Such threats have become a feature of GD’s campaign since April, when Ivanishvili delivered a startling speech decrying NGOs, Europe, and the West as all part of the “global party of war” responsible for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, actively attempting a coup in Georgia to remove GD from power, and seeking to open a “second front” in the Ukraine war. The anti-Western tack—one State Department official described it as “like a Reddit page came to life”—amounted to a 180-degree pivot by a longtime U.S. ally that Russia invaded in 2008. (Recent reports have suggested Ivanishvili has active financial and even governmental ties to Russia.) 

GD is looking to capitalize on renewed fears of a conflict with Russia in light of Ukraine—Russia still occupies 20 percent of Georgian territory. The party has pitched the election as a choice between war and peace, portraying GD as the only actor that can avoid a violent confrontation with Moscow. Indeed, the Russian foreign ministry seemed content to play along with the messaging, hinting last month of a possible deal with GD over the occupied territory. 

The opposition has argued GD’s agenda reflects a thinly veiled surrender to Russian influence that will prevent the country from joining the EU. “The whole history of Georgia shows that the main risk for Georgia comes from Russia,” Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili said last week. “The risk of war increases when Georgia is isolated from its partners, when it’s alone, divided and weak.” Zourbachivili was elected in 2018 to the mostly ceremonial post with GD support but has since become one of the foremost critics of the government. She joined tens of thousands of Georgians in a pro-Europe rally in Tbilisi on Saturday. 

Reliable polling on Georgian elections is historically hard to come by and recent surveys show widely diverging results. But observers agree that a coalition of the four main opposition parties will likely be needed to beat GD, though the opposition remains somewhat disjointed despite the president’s efforts to bring the parties under one pro-EU banner. “The mood that people are frustrated with Georgian Dream is very much there,” Arabidze told TMD. “The big problem that we are facing in this election is no clear-cut choice in the opposition that really attracts a large number of the electorate.” 

It’s also very possible GD could try to meddle with the election results, but analysts are hoping any interference will be identified by watchdog groups. Like with the Moldovan elections, NDI, the International Republican Institute, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe all have teams of election observers on the ground that will be monitoring the polls and election administration, along with volunteers organized by local NGOs. Though even if GD doesn’t tamper with the election infrastructure itself, the election seems ripe for voter intimidation efforts: Earlier this month, GD set up a poll monitoring force made up of police and led by a law enforcement official under U.S. sanctions for human rights abuses against protesters, journalists, and opposition lawmakers. 

GD has also been laying the groundwork to claim the elections were unfairly interfered with by Western-backed NGOs, messaging that the Russian intelligence service has amplified in recent months. “They’re very serious about maintaining power,” Eto Buziashvili, a Tbilisi-based research associate with the Atlantic Council and former adviser to the National Security Council of Georgia, told TMD. “I’m very much concerned about what might happen on the second day [after the elections.]” 

Archemashvili and Pachkoria, the Georgian journalists, told TMD on Tuesday they hope popular support will be large enough on election day to defeat GD and preempt any interference,  but they remain wary of the future. 

“We don’t know what’s going to happen and what kind of country we’re going to wake up in on the 27th,” Archemashvili said. 

Worth Your Time

• Former President Donald Trump wants to wield military power, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg reported. “I asked [former White House Chief of Staff John] Kelly about their exchange,” Goldberg wrote. “He told me that when Trump raised the subject of ‘German generals,’ Kelly responded by asking, ‘Do you mean Bismarck’s generals?’ He went on: ‘I mean, I knew he didn’t know who Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War. I said, ‘Do you mean the kaiser’s generals? Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals? And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’ I explained to him that Rommel had to commit suicide after taking part in a plot against Hitler.’ Kelly told me Trump was not acquainted with Rommel. … This wasn’t the only time Kelly felt compelled to instruct Trump on military history. In 2018, Trump asked Kelly to explain who “the good guys” were in World War I. Kelly responded by explaining a simple rule: Presidents should, as a matter of politics and policy, remember that the ‘good guys’ in any given conflict are the countries allied with the United States.” 
• In Foreign Affairs, former Assistant Secretary of Defense Mara Karlin argued that “total war” is back. “An era of limited war has ended; an age of comprehensive conflict has begun,” she wrote. “Indeed, what the world is witnessing today is akin to what theorists in the past have called ‘total war,’ in which combatants draw on vast resources, mobilize their societies, prioritize warfare over all other state activities, attack a broad variety of targets, and reshape their economies and those of other countries. But owing to new technologies and the deep links of the globalized economy, today’s wars are not merely a repeat of older conflicts.” That requires a reassessment by U.S. policymakers: “To make deterrence credible in an age of comprehensive conflict, the United States needs to show that it is prepared for a different kind of war—drawing on the lessons of today’s big wars to prevent an even bigger one tomorrow.”

Presented Without Comment

Kansas City Star: TV Reporter Struck by Bullet Fragment at [Missouri Senate Candidate] Lucas Kunce Shooting Range Campaign Event

A bullet fragment struck a TV reporter at a shooting range during a campaign event on Tuesday for U.S. Senate candidate Lucas Kunce, who provided first aid to the journalist. 

Kunce, a Democrat, was at a private residence near Holt north of Kansas City with former U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican, when a fragment appeared to have ricocheted off a target. Kunce was shooting an AR-15 at the time, and was the only person shooting when the injury occurred.

Also Presented Without Comment

Axios: Joe Rogan to Interview Trump on His Podcast 

In the Zeitgeist

During the Los Angeles Lakers’ season opener against the Minnesota Timberwolves last night, LeBron James and his son Bronny made history, becoming the first father-son pair to share the court in an NBA game. What’s Bronny yelling on the court to get his dad’s attention? “Bron,” apparently. 

Toeing the Company Line

• Can we replace the income tax with tariff revenue? Who will take control of the Senate? What comes next for Israel after Yahya Sinwar’s death? Kevin was joined by Scott, Alex Muresianu, the Dispatch Politics team, TMD’s own James, and Natalie Ecanow to discuss all that and more on last night’s Dispatch Live (🔒). Members who missed the conversation can catch a rerun—either video or audio-only—by clicking here.
• In the newsletters: The Dispatch Politics crew covered former Rep. Liz Cheney’s event with Vice President Kamala Harris in Detroit and Nick unpacked Cheney’s statements about abortion while stumping for Harris.
• On the podcasts: Seth Masket joins Jonah to discuss party realignment on The Remnant. 
• On the site: Gary Schmitt and Reuel Marc Gerecht argue the U.S. and EU are letting Russia win in Georgia, Kevin wonders whether Democrats regret picking Harris, and Jonah says both parties are acting like minority parties and we’re all the worse for it. 

Let Us Know

Should the U.S. or EU respond to Russia’s manipulations in Moldova and Georgia? If so, how?