After sowing war in Ukraine over the last two years, the Kremlin now harvests a bonus crop in the neighborhood. In Georgia and Moldova, countries where opinion polls routinely register pro-European majorities, large numbers of voters are being frightened into voting for pro-Russian candidates. Of the 15 former republics of the Soviet Union, only the three Baltics are members of the European Union. Moscow wants to keep it that way.

On Saturday, it was Georgia, long one of the most pro-Western former Soviet republics. Confounding pre-election polls, the pro-Russian Georgian Dream party trounced a pro-Western coalition 54 percent to 38 percent. “We choose peace, not war,” Georgian Dream founder Bidzina Ivanishvili told a pre-election rally in Tbilisi. Nearby, billboards contrasted photos of peaceful Georgian cities with devastated Ukrainian ones. 

On Sunday, Moldova is up for the test. The pro-Western president, Maia Sandu, a Harvard graduate and former executive of the World Bank, faces a tough runoff race with Aleksandr Stoianoglo, an ex-prosecutor general backed by the traditionally pro-Russian Socialist Party. In advance of the October 20 first round,  Ms. Sandu charged that the Kremlin orchestrated a huge vote buying campaign, purchasing 300,000 votes. This would have been 20 percent of ballots cast.

The first round included a vote on joining the European Union. Although public opinion polls indicated that large majorities of Moldovans want to follow their Western neighbor Romania into the EU, pro-EU forces squeaked through with a slim margin of 10,564 votes, less than one percent of votes cast. Pro-EU forces carried the day on only the backs of votes cast by Moldova’s heavily pro-Western diaspora.

Yesterday President Zelensky of Ukraine bluntly assessed what Moscow is up to. “We have to recognize that in Georgia, for today, Russia won,” the Ukrainian leader said in an English language video. “If, of course, the West will not stop this dialogue (against) crossing red lines…they will lose Moldova. One-two years.”

The Kremlin, it seems, is playing chess while Washington plays checkers.

While paying lip service to one day joining the EU, the Georgian Dream rammed through Parliament in June a local copy of Russia’s “foreign agent” law. Knowing that this law was used to strangle Russian civil society, hundreds of thousands of Georgians protested. After the law was passed, the EU froze accession talks with Georgia, and Washington suspended $95 million in foreign aid.  Building on Georgia’s conservative, orthodox Christian worldview, the Georgian Dream took a second leaf out of the Kremlin’s playbook. It banned “gay propaganda.”

When election day arrived, an army of 2,000 election observers, including ones from Transparency International Georgia, reported a slew of violations — ballot box stuffing, bribery, intimidation of voters and employers confiscating voter identification. My Vote, the Georgian monitoring coalition, said it uncovered evidence of “large-scale election fraud.”

However, the opposition diluted its vote by fielding 17 parties. Exit polls indicated that the ruling party received between 41 percent and 42 percent of the vote. The government-controlled election commission gave Georgian Dream a 16 percentage point advantage over the main opposition coalition.

Georgia’s president, Salome Zourabichvili,  an opposition leader, told a protest rally of 15,000 in Tbilisi Monday night:  “You did not lose the elections. Your vote was stolen, and they tried to steal your future as well. But no one has the right to do that.”

In the official count, the opposition won only Tbilisi and Georgia’s fourth largest city, Rustavi. The ruling party swept rural areas, sometimes winning up to 90 percent of the vote. Surveys indicate that the ruling party did well among older voters, those whose memories are sharp of Georgia’s disastrous 2008 war with Russia. Evidently, they responded to the Georgian Dream slogan: “Only with peace, dignity, and prosperity to Europe.”

While President  Zourabichvili denounced the opposition loss as a “Russian special operation,” the Kremlin proclaimed victory. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov hailed the election result as “the choice of the Georgian people.”  Senator Aleksey Pushkov said: “The Western plan — to change the regime with the support of the opposition in Georgia — has, to put it simply, collapsed…The West’s plan was to turn Georgia into its semi-colony and promised to join the multi-gender family of European nations. However, for some reason, this did not attract the majority of Georgian voters.”

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary, the only pro-Putin head of government in the EU, congratulated the Georgian Dream, before the results were in. Then, he hurriedly flew to Tbilisi with three ministers.

“When liberals win, Brussels calls it democracy. When conservatives win, they say it’s not democracy,” Mr. Orbán said Tuesday at a press conference  alongside Georgia’s prime minister, Irakli Kobakhidze. “Don’t take it too seriously — it’s business as usual.” 

Although Hungary holds the rotating presidency of the EU Council, 13 EU countries, led by Germany, France, and Poland, knocked Mr. Orbán’s visit as “premature” and stressed he does not speak on the bloc’s behalf. 

Yesterday was the turn of another Central European leader, Robert Fico, the Slovak prime minister, to break EU ranks and to sidle up to Russia. In an interview with state-run Rossiya-1 television, he said further military aid to Ukraine is a waste of money and that he would like to visit Moscow for next year’s World War II Victory Day anniversary. It reportedly was the first interview to Russian state television given by an EU leader since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

While Georgian Dream pays lip service to one day joining the EU, the government increasingly professes neutrality, and the country drifts back into Moscow’s orbit. In Ukraine, President Viktor Yanukovych played that game until November 2013 when Mr. Putin persuaded him to take sides by extending a multi-billion “loan.” The announcement that Ukraine would join Moscow’s Eurasian Economic Union sparked the street revolt that led to his downfall in February 2014.

Washington and Brussels are reacting mildly to elections that may allow two once staunchly Western countries drift back into Moscow’s orbit. 

“Statements so far, especially from the EU, have been worryingly mealy-mouthed,” the Financial Times editorialized after Georgia’s election. The newspaper accused the Kremlin of  “taking advantage of distractions provided by the US presidential election and the war in the Middle East to step up efforts to bring ex-Soviet neighbors back into its sphere.” 

Many Western analysts are not impressed by Secretary of State Blinken’s statement Sunday calling “for a full investigation of all reports of election-related violations.” From London, the analyst of the former Soviet Union, Timothy Ash, wrote this week:  “Another foreign policy failure looming for Biden after Afghanistan, Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon now Georgia.” Mr. Ash added that “Georgia ends as the loser — and all this is a gift to Putin.”