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EU countries are at risk of Russian election meddling that can be ānearly impossibleā to prove, Romaniaās 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.
āAll countries are exposed to this risk,ā Iohannis said on Wednesday evening, urging colleagues to develop joint āmeasures and procedures . . . to combat foreign interference and hybrid attacks from Russiaā.
CÄlin 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 Georgescuās posts on TikTok were boosted by āaccounts from Russiaā, and highlighted āco-ordinated cyber attacks on servers used to count the votesā. Such actions, he said, ācannot 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.ā
He explained that Russiaās involvement was very hard to prove, because āthey hide perfectly in cyber spaceā, using servers in many different locations around the world. āDonāt imagine that these attacks are signed āfrom the East, with loveā.ā