A Moldovan court sentenced the leader of the autonomous Gagauzia region, Evghenia Guțul, to seven years in prison for funneling Russian funds to the illegal Shor party between 2019 and 2022. Guțul was convicted of regularly directing Russian financing into the pro-Russian party, Shor, while working as its secretary from 2019 until 2022, as well as coordinating party activities and paying protesters. The party was banned by the Constitutional Court in 2023 over its efforts to destabilize the country, just weeks after the EU sanctioned its leader because of his links to Moscow. The Tuesday trial ended the day after Moldovan authorities warned that Russia is ramping up efforts to influence Moldovans living across Europe, aiming to sway critical parliamentary elections next month. “Russia and its proxies are now actively focusing their efforts on the Moldovan diaspora,” National Security Adviser Stanislav Secrieru told POLITICO. “The indictment of Guțul is one of the few examples of success within a broader trend to clean up the Moldovan public space of corrupt officials,” said Oktawian Milewski, a political scientist based in Warsaw. According to him, Guțul came to power in Gagauzia after a rigged election in 2023, where politicians were giving out so-called electoral gifts containing food products and basic consumables. “The Gagauz elections of April-May 2023 served as a testing ground for what was to come in the Kremlin’s plan of a massive electoral bribing attempt in the summer–autumn of 2024 on a larger scale, that is, on the rest of the territory of Moldova,” Milewski said. “Despite no prior political experience, Guțul became one of the main voices and faces of the Kremlin’s propaganda in Gagauzia, but also for the pro-Russian opposition in Chisinau as well,” the expert added. Guțul was escorted to prison after the ruling, according to local media reports. However, her lawyer, Sergiu Moraru, plans to file an appeal. “This is not a trial, but a public execution. I can’t say that there is evidence there, there is fiction,” Moraru told local TV8.md after the court session. Guțul earlier in July denied any wrongdoing, saying she has never broken any Moldovan laws in her life. In March, Guțul wrote an appeal to Russian President Vladimir Putin — addressed as “dear Vladimir Vladimirovich” — asking him to pressure Moldovan authorities “to stop political persecution against her” and imploring him to “use the entire arsenal of diplomatic, political and legal mechanisms” to get the Moldovan authorities to release her. The European Council imposed sanctions on Guțul last year for promoting separatism in Gagauzia, thereby attempting to overthrow the constitutional order and threatening the sovereignty and independence of Moldova. Russia has previously fueled separatism and then used it as a pretext to attempt to invade and annex parts of other countries, such as Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula and Georgia’s South Ossetia region. Moldovan authorities will showcase Guțul’s sentencing as an instance of success in the fight against the oligarchic networks supported by the Kremlin in Moldova, Milewski said. “The fact that the sentence was pronounced when Moldova is already in full electoral process, also gives hopes of encouragement for the pro-European electorate,” Milewski added.

The European Court of Human Rights on Wednesday ruled Russia is responsible for downing flight MH17 in 2014 and human rights violations during its war in Ukraine. The decision marks the first time an international court has found Russia guilty of international human rights abuses since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, and ruled on Russia’s role in the MH17 disaster. The judges are set to rule on a total of four cases, brought against Russia by Ukraine and the Netherlands, including the abduction of Ukrainian children to Russia in 2014 and violations during the armed conflict in Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Donbas. “In none of the conflicts previously before [the Court had] there been such near universal condemnation of the ‘flagrant’ disregard by the respondent State for the foundations of the international legal order established after the Second World War,” said the Strasbourg-based court in its judgment. Malaysia Airlines flight 17 was traveling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on July 17, 2014, when it was hit by a surface-to-air missile over eastern Ukraine, during the conflict between pro-Russia rebels and Ukrainian forces in the region. All 298 passengers on board were killed, among them 196 Dutch citizens. In November 2022, a Dutch court found guilty of murder and sentenced (in absentia) to life imprisonment Russian nationals Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinskiy and Ukrainian national Leonid Kharchenko. Girkin, a pro-war Russian nationalist, was also sentenced by Russia to four years on charges of inciting extremism after complaining too much about President Vladimir Putin’s leadership of the war against Ukraine. The Dutch court also confirmed a previous Dutch-led joint international investigation concluded in 2018 that the airliner was downed by a surface-to-air missile launched from pro-Russian separatist-controlled territory in Eastern Ukraine. In January 2023, a Dutch court ruled that the Netherlands could bring a case before the European Court of Human Rights over the downing of the flight. It argued that Russia was responsible for the crash, due to its support for the self-proclaimed republics of Luhansk and Donetsk. Russian authorities have repeatedly denied any involvement in the attack. The United Nations Aviation Council found Russia responsible for downing the plane in May, stating that it failed to uphold its obligations under international air law, which requires that states “refrain from resorting to the use of weapons against civil aircraft in flight.” The ECHR, an international court of the Council of Europe, stated that it had jurisdiction to rule on complaints concerning events that occurred before Sept. 16, 2022, when Russia was excluded from the organization.