frigidweirdo
Diamond Member
- Mar 7, 2014
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Moldova election: Russian cash-for-votes flows into Ukraine's neighbour as nation heads to polls
Sunday's presidential election is seen as a vote on whether the country looks east to Russia or west to the EU.
www.bbc.com
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Russian cash-for-votes flows into Moldova as nation heads to polls"
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The sniffer dogs at Chisinau Airport have been working extra hard in recent months, searching for money that might be evidence of Russian meddling in Moldovan politics.
Ami, a black retriever, gives every suitcase that rolls in on the baggage claim belts a good sniff on all sides. If she detects cash, she will freeze. Back in May she was doing that a lot.
That is when customs officers began finding large amounts of money on passengers arriving via connecting flights from Moscow. People who had never left Moldova before were returning from a few days in Russia with wads of notes.
“Almost everyone had money: 2,000, 3,000, 7,000 euros”, the head of customs at Chisinau Airport, Ruslan Alexandrov, remembers. The amounts themselves were not illegal but the patterns were suspicious."
Yeah, Russia is playing dirty, and with Putin in charge always will. Are they influencing the US election, almost certainly. Maybe they're not paying money like this... because the US elections will cost far, far more to influence, but doing it in other ways.