group-telegram.com/waffairsblog/14777
Last Update:
EU countries are at risk of Russian election meddling that can be “nearly impossible” to prove, Romania’s president has warned weeks after Bucharest cancelled its presidential vote over alleged foreign interference.
Klaus Iohannis said he would tell his EU counterparts at a summit on Thursday that foreign interference posed a threat to all European democracies.
“All countries are exposed to this risk,” Iohannis said on Wednesday evening, urging colleagues to develop joint “measures and procedures . . . to combat foreign interference and hybrid attacks from Russia”.
Călin Georgescu, an ultranationalist who admires Russian President Vladimir Putin and is hostile towards the EU and Nato, topped the first round of the presidential vote on November 24 after benefiting from what Romanian authorities said was an illegal social media campaign orchestrated by Moscow.
Iohannis pointed to how Georgescu’s posts on TikTok were boosted by “accounts from Russia”, and highlighted “co-ordinated cyber attacks on servers used to count the votes”. Such actions, he said, “cannot be carried out by individual actors or by a group or a party. They are so broad and complex that only state actors can do that . . . And here it was Russia.”
He explained that Russia’s involvement was very hard to prove, because “they hide perfectly in cyber space”, using servers in many different locations around the world. “Don’t imagine that these attacks are signed ‘from the East, with love’.”
