Why this minority group in Moldova is so resistant to the country’s shift toward the EU

In a cafe not far away from the Lenin statue in Comrat, the capital of Moldova’s autonomous region of Gagauzia, political organizer Andrey Shevel reads a book by George Orwell written in the Cyrillic alphabet.

During his work promoting President Maia Sandu’s campaign and the concurrent EU referendum in Gagauzia this past fall, Shevel said he received hate mail and death threats from other Gagauzians who considered him a traitor for promoting her and her pro-European party and direction.

But he didn’t stop his work. Shevel said his “traditional Gagauz” upbringing involved a steady diet of propaganda from Russian news channels, and that he once thought Russian President Vladimir Putin was the best world leader.

That changed as Putin cracked down on dissidents in Russia, and as Andrey started to travel more. But for a while, he still thought Moldova could be “friends with everyone,” including Russia. That, too, changed after Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Moldova’s eastern neighbor.

While Sandu ended up winning the presidential election overall — mostly thanks to diaspora votes at embassies across Europe — she lost overwhelmingly in Moldova’s Gagauzia region, where only 3% of voters chose her in the second round. The other 97% of Gagauzians voted, instead, for the socialist candidate, who also happens to be Gagauz, Alexandr Stoianoglo. Now, some Gagauzians like Shevel are trying to get Moldovan officials to engage directly with his community, to draw them away from Russian influence.

In the heat of the election, Moldovan authorities accused the Israeli-born Moldovan pro-Russian fugitive oligarch Ilan Shor of an illegal vote-buying scheme to sway people against Sandu and the EU toward more Euroskeptical leadership, like Stoianoglo.   

Months later, on March 25, Gagauzia’s leader, or bashkan, Eugenia Gutul, is now in pretrial detention after she was nabbed at Moldova’s international airport, allegedly fleeing a corruption trial. She, too, was backed by Shor to become the region’s leader in 2023, and is now accused of helping Shor funnel money back into Moldova to illegally finance his political bloc. She said that the charges against her are politically motivated.

Gutul has written open letters to Putin and US President Donald Trump in recent weeks, asking for support. Only a few days after she told Trump that American development money has been financing propaganda and “deliberately fomenting instability in Gagauzia”, Trump cited a “left-wing propaganda operation in Moldova,” when he drastically cut USAID.

Gutul is the third pro-Russian politician in Moldova to attempt to leave the country in recent weeks. (Her lawyers say she intended to return for the trial.) And her campaign from behind bars shows why Western officials are worried about attempts to hijack Moldova’s parliamentary election this summer. 

But alleged election interference is only one part of the story in Gagauzia and Moldova as a whole. 

While the parliamentary election could complicate the country’s European ambitions, local frustrations in Gagauzia could offer some clues as to why. The pro-European party that Gutul opposes — beset with high inflation and accusations of not moving quickly enough to deal with corruption — is becoming less popular. It’s a sentiment that’s beginning to peak as the country deals with high-energy prices after Russia shut off its gas supply, forcing Moldova to move to European suppliers.

The financial pressures are hitting people in mostly rural regions like Gagauzia particularly hard.

Many in Gagauzia are not blaming Russia for turning off the taps, but rather, criticizing the Moldovan government for playing political games.

“Pensioners are more tense,” independent journalist Elena Tchilak said. “Negative feelings have only intensified.”

Gagauzia also has unique factors that foster the region’s close ties to Russia. The first is the legacy of the Soviet Union. Gagauzians are a small Turkic-speaking minority in a country mostly comprised of ethnic Romanians, and this land has gone back and forth throughout history between Romanian and Russian power.

When people talk about historic ties, they often go back to the 19th century, when the Russian czar gave the Gagauz people that land after the Russo-Turkish war. Many Gagauzians are also nostalgic for the Soviet Union as a time of stability and prosperity. The former Soviet Union was their protector in World War II from Romanian fascism. This history still forms a fault line in terms of how people in Moldova remember the past.

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory in World War II against the Nazis, and on Jan. 22, Gutul announced the year would be earmarked for celebration. That pronouncement came a month after Moldova’s national parliament adopted a draft decision to declare 2025 the “Year of Mihai Eminescu,” for the poet who is a hero of ethnic Romanian nationalism — a vision of the world propped up by his xenophobia and antisemitic views.

Gagauz people are still afraid of ethnic discrimination, and local political elites don’t shy away from leveraging those anxieties today. Early last year, Gutul traveled to Moscow to ask for Putin’s “support” in fighting what she called “destabilization by the Moldovan authorities,” a move that was amplified by Kremlin media. Gutul and five others in leadership positions in Gagauzia have been sanctioned by the European Union for promoting separatism.  Gutul has also been sanctioned by the United States for alleged complicity in pro-Russian oligarch Ilan Shor’s efforts to influence Moldovan elections from Moscow.

Today, while Gagauzia’s Turkic language and cultural ties have resulted in more economic support from Turkey, Russian is still the language of education, commerce and politics in Gagauzia, and many people have families who go to school or work in Moscow.

But Shevel is not the only person for whom the Russian sheen has worn off. He started a chat group with other pro-European youth in the region and he said it’s growing. The next question will be whether Sandu’s government can get enough buy-in from this region to avoid more division.

“As soon as she won the first elections in 2020, she should have actually created a team here in Gagauzia to connect with people, but she didn’t do that,” he said.

Shevel’s goal now is to push Europeanists like Sandu to prioritize Gagauzia, because it’s uniquely vulnerable to Russian influence.

A few weeks ago, Moldovan leaders met with members of Gagauzian civil society, effectively an admission that there hasn’t been enough contact in recent years.

Journalist Tchilak was invited as a representative of independent media, and she and others advised the government to visit Gagauzia more and to speak with people directly.

It’s the first time the government decided to talk to representatives of different professional and civic communities, and not just city mayors as they did in the past. Tchilak said that there has been openness that wasn’t there before — something that gives young organizers like Shevel some optimism.

The upcoming months will show if the central authorities have what it takes to integrate the country and build a dialogue with Gagauzians communicating respect for minority rights.