"A two-week paid trip involving travel and outdoor activities, worth between $300 and $500, with further instructions to follow from a contact in Moscow" - that was the proposition Anatoli Prizenco made to Maxim Roșca outside a grocery store in downtown Chișinău, according to Roșca's testimony to a Moldovan court, as reported by POLITICO.
Within weeks, Roșca was in training camps in Bosnia and Serbia, learning to pilot drones, handle devices, and evade police cordons during protests — part of what Moldovan investigators describe as a coordinated, Russian-backed infrastructure for recruiting and deploying operatives across Europe.
Boot camps in the Balkans
Roșca came to the attention of Moldovan authorities on 11 October 2024, when he was stopped crossing from Romania into Moldova in a Mercedes-Benz minibus. Officers found Serbian and Bosnian currency, SIM cards, USB drives, flashlights, drone components, virtual reality goggles, radio control units, and six black objects described in court proceedings as single-use devices for dropping grenades from the air. The three other passengers received four- to five-year prison sentences for fomenting mass disorder. Roșca, who testified as a witness after stating he was beaten when he refused to participate in training, described the camps in detail.
In Republika Srpska, Bosnia, recruits were brought into forests near Banja Luka and told they would be trained to operate in protests, fly drones, and prepare smoke grenades, according to court transcripts seen by POLITICO. The training preceded Moldova's 2024 presidential election, and participants were told, according to those transcripts, that if pro-European incumbent Maia Sandu won, "there would be war in the country, just like in Ukraine."
Instructors at the camps were described by Moldovan intelligence services as part of a network with ties to Russia's Wagner mercenary group. One Bulgarian national, Mircho Angelov, served as a logistical coordinator — transporting participants and arranging food — and was subsequently sentenced to three years in prison by a Paris court for conspiring to paint red handprints on a wall outside the Paris Holocaust Museum, which French judges characterized as a foreign-coordinated destabilization operation. Angelov also faces vandalism charges in Chișinău.
Recruits were paid in cryptocurrency through platforms including Trust Wallet, multiple court witnesses said.
From Moldova to Paris, Düsseldorf, and beyond
Prizenco, the recruiter, admitted to POLITICO — through a statement to the French newspaper Libération — to organizing five Moldovan nationals to spray-paint Stars of David on buildings in Paris in the aftermath of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks, claiming he was "acting in support of European Jews." French authorities investigated the incident as a Russian-linked destabilization operation. Viginum, France's national online disinformation monitoring agency, documented a network of Russian bots amplifying photographs of the graffiti on social media.
One of the participants in the Paris operation, Veaceslav Valico, described the logistics to POLITICO in an interview in Chișinău. "I'm first and foremost an entrepreneur, a businessman, and secondly, I'm a person active in civic movements," the 49-year-old said. "This action was in no way planned as an antisemitic one … it was a gesture toward the State of Israel."
Valico said Prizenco had been first contacted via Telegram by someone named "David" and that photographs of the painted stars were sent back through the same channel. "I can assume today that Anatoli knew or guessed more information than he told me," Valico said. He estimated the operation cost less than the combined value of his wristwatch and smartphone — approximately €2,000.
A separate case involved Danil Dilan, a 22-year-old from Moldova's breakaway pro-Russian Transnistria region, who was sentenced to three years in November. As part of a plea deal, Dilan admitted to traveling to Düsseldorf in 2024 for the UEFA European Championship match between Slovakia and Ukraine, where he was instructed to wave a Ukrainian flag. Dilan said he refused, but a Ukrainian flag bearing the inscription "Give us elections back" was nonetheless unfurled during the game. The Kremlin's Foreign Ministry subsequently cited the flag as grounds for arguing Ukraine should hold elections to replace President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Dilan also said he had received an offer to travel to Paris during the 2024 Summer Olympics for unspecified destabilizing operations, which he declined.
The network's structure
Moldovan prosecutors are investigating more than 80 people on suspicion of fomenting mass disorder; 20 have been formally indicted. At least two others linked to the camps are suspected of involvement in destabilization operations in France and Germany.
Moldova's Interior Minister Daniella Misail-Nichitin described the scope of the training to POLITICO: "These young people, Russian speakers, were recruited, transported to specially organized camps and trained in [tactics including] how to break law enforcement cordons. Some were taught how to use unmanned devices. And it even went as far as training on providing medical aid in the event of violence."
Vitalie Chișca, the lead prosecutor in the Prizenco case, told POLITICO the network extended well above the accused recruiter. "We suspect and intuit that these operations are not actually led by [Prizenco], but that there is someone behind them, some services," Chișca said, naming a man identified as Vladimir Firsov — believed to be in Russia — as a figure of higher authority within the network.
Prizenco denied the charges in court, insisting he had only been helping people enroll in leisure camps. His lawyer, Barba Daria, confirmed he rejects all allegations.
Before his arrest, Prizenco had run a cosmetics distribution business selling the Swedish brand Oriflame in Moldova. He was briefly detained in the early 2010s in connection with a Ponzi scheme involving a Russian bank, and in 2014 campaigned for the People's Movement for the Customs Union, a party advocating closer economic integration with Russia and Belarus.
Misail-Nichitin also described a separate alleged plot, attributed to the same network architecture, targeting more than 90 individuals in Ukraine for assassination: "We are talking about more than 90 targets, spanning high-profile journalists, defense officials, high-level executives linked to Ukraine's critical infrastructure, who were going to be assassinated on command." Recruiters in that operation, she said, sought "vulnerable young men" with no criminal records and EU passports, some as young as 14 or 15.
In a document circulated to EU officials after Moldova's parliamentary election and seen by POLITICO, the Moldovan government documented Russian interference methods including instructions to Orthodox priests to "spread disinformation seven days a week instead of only on Sundays," guidance for setting up Telegram channels, staged protests, cyberattacks, troll farms, AI-generated deepfakes, and performance-based cryptocurrency bonus systems for proxies.
"Moldova's case is a unique one," the document stated. "But neither the EU member states nor its neighbours are safe from hybrid threats."
