Bosnia and Herzegovina as one of the key points on the Russian map of destabilization of Europe

"Neither EU member states nor its neighbors are safe from hybrid threats"

When Anatoli Prizenco met Maxim Rosca outside a grocery store in downtown Chisinau, he offered him an easy way out of Rosca’s job at a local auto repair shop—a paid two-week trip that included travel and outdoor activities.
According to Rosca’s testimony before a Moldovan court, Prizenco gave few details, only that Rosca would earn between $300 and $500 and would receive further instructions from a contact in Moscow.
Within weeks, Rosca found himself in training camps in Bosnia and Serbia. There, trainees learned to fly drones, handle incendiary devices, and evade law enforcement during protests—part of what Moldovan investigators say was a coordinated, Russian-backed effort to recruit operatives for destabilization operations as far away as France and Germany.
Moldova’s investigations into Russia-linked recruitment come as European countries warn that Moscow is waging a hybrid warfare campaign aimed at destabilizing their domestic politics.
French authorities, already on alert ahead of next year’s presidential election, have documented low-level disinformation campaigns carried out by Russian networks during local elections this month. In Germany, the government summoned the Russian ambassador in December, alleging that Moscow orchestrated cyberattacks and interfered in last year’s general election.
Facing some of Moscow's most aggressive campaigns in 2024 and 2025, officials in Moldova say their country is well-positioned to help its European neighbors defend against Russian attacks.
The Kremlin has stepped up its use of intermediaries after dozens of Russian diplomats – some of them suspected intelligence agents – were expelled by many European capitals following Moscow’s all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Moldovan prosecutors allege that Prizenco acted as a recruiter in a wider foreign-based network they have now dismantled that trained dozens of people as intermediaries for Russian influence and disruption campaigns. He is due to appear in court in Chisinau on Thursday.

French authorities are also investigating Prizenco as the main suspect in recruiting a group of Moldovan citizens who painted Stars of David on Paris walls after the Hamas attack in Israel on October 7, 2023 – an apparent attempt to incite political tensions.
Moldovan prosecutors are investigating more than 80 people on suspicion of inciting mass unrest. Twenty have been formally charged. At least two other people linked to the camps are suspected of participating in other destabilization operations in France and Germany.
-These young people, speakers of the Russian language, were recruited, transported to specially organized camps and trained to break through police cordons. Some were learning how to use drones. It even went so far as to provide training on providing medical aid in the event of violence - Moldovan Interior Minister Daniella Misail-Nichitin told POLITICO.
Training camp
Rosca came to the attention of Moldovan authorities on October 11, 2024, when he was stopped entering the country from Romania in a Mercedes-Benz minibus.
Inside the vehicle, officers found Serbian and Bosnian currency, flashlights, SIM cards and USB drives, along with drone components, virtual reality goggles and radio control units. They also found six black objects described in court proceedings as disposable aerial grenade launchers.
Three bus passengers were sentenced last month to prison terms of four to five years for inciting mass riots. Rosca, who says he was beaten after refusing to participate in training, testified in the case.
In court, Rosca said that he first traveled to Republika Srpska, a region of Bosnia with a majority ethnic Serb population, where he was taken to the dense forests surrounding the city of Banja Luka.
There, he and other participants were told that they would be trained to participate in protests, operate drones and prepare smoke bombs.
The training took place just before the fall 2024 presidential election, in which pro-European Moldovan President Maia Sandu is set to be re-elected in a campaign marred by Russian interference.
According to court transcripts, participants said they were told that if Sandu won the election, “there would be war in the country, just like in Ukraine.”
One witness described several days of training in a four-tent camp set up by a river, where recruits learned to fly drones using goggles and joysticks. The instructors were part of an international network linked to the Russian mercenary group Wagner, according to Moldovan intelligence.
After that, the participants were sent to Banja Luka for a practical exercise – photographing the locations of administrative and government buildings and scouting potential drone launch sites. According to the same witness, they were driven to the city by a man named Mircho, who also appears in Rosca’s testimony.
Although the man’s last name is not mentioned in the court documents, Moldovan intelligence services said after his arrest that Mircho Angelov was among 11 “foreign nationals who provided assistance to training camps in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia, acting as instructors.”
Angelov was in charge of bringing food to the participants, among other logistical tasks, Rosca told the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network and the Moldovan investigative portal CU SENS.
Angelov, a Bulgarian national, was sentenced to three years in prison by a Paris court last fall for conspiring to paint red handprints on a wall outside the Paris Holocaust Museum, in what French judges described as a destabilization operation coordinated from abroad.
Moldova also accuses Angelov of vandalism in Chisinau.
Another man, Danil Dilan, a 22-year-old from Moldova’s separatist pro-Russian region of Transnistria, was sentenced in November to three years in prison.
As part of a plea bargain, Dilan admitted in court that he traveled to Dusseldorf in 2024 for a European Championship soccer match between Slovakia and Ukraine, where he was asked to wave a Ukrainian flag, according to court transcripts seen by POLITICO.
Dylan said he refused to do so, but a Ukrainian flag with the words “Give us back our elections” was revealed during the game. The Kremlin quickly cited the flag as a reason why Ukraine should hold elections to replace President Volodymyr Zelensky, and a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman expressed “shock” at the incident.

Dylan also said he received an offer from one of the camp’s instructors to travel to Paris during the 2024 Summer Olympics to conduct destabilizing operations, but he did not.

Camp participants were paid in cryptocurrencies through popular platforms such as Trust Wallet, several witnesses told the court.

Anatomy of a middleman
Before his run-in with the law, Prizenco, a recruiter, ran a retail business, marketing and selling Swedish cosmetics brand Oriflame to Moldovan customers.

In 2019, his wife Olga Prizenco told the Moldovan lifestyle magazine RED how her husband went from selling apples in Moscow to building a business in Moldova together with her and their four children.
In the early 2010s, Prizenco was briefly detained in connection with a Ponzi scheme involving a Russian bank for which he was listed as a local representative, according to Moldovan investigative portal Ziarul de Garda.
Soon after, he plunged into politics. In 2014, he campaigned for a newly founded party, the People's Movement for a Customs Union, which advocated closer economic integration with Russia and Belarus.
Prosecutors suspect that he did not act alone in his recruitment efforts. He is said to have collaborated with a “senior” man named Vladimir Firsov, who is believed to be in Russia, according to Vitalie Chisca, the lead prosecutor in Prizenco’s case.
“We suspect and intuitively feel that these operations are not actually led by Prizenco, but by someone behind them, some service,” Chisca told POLITICO.
Prizenco admitted to organizing five other Moldovans to spray paint dozens of Stars of David on buildings in Paris, telling the French newspaper Liberation that he was acting in support of European Jews.
The French government has described Prizenco’s operation as part of “an opportunistic and irresponsible strategy aimed at exploiting international crises to sow confusion and create tension in public debate in France and Europe.” Viginum, France’s national agency for monitoring online disinformation, has accused a network of Russian bots of amplifying the spread of photos of Stars of David on social media.
Veaceslav Valico, another participant in Operation Star of David, estimated that the stunt cost less than the value of his watch and smartphone – around 2,000 euros.
“First of all, I am an entrepreneur, a businessman, and secondly, I am a person active in civil movements. This action was in no way planned as anti-Semitic… it was a gesture towards the State of Israel. When I agreed to this action, I did not see anything negative in it,” the 49-year-old businessman told POLITICO in an interview in downtown Chisinau.
While Prizenco coordinated from abroad, Valico took photos of the stars and posted them. Two other people, a man and a woman, who took the picture were arrested at the scene.

According to French police documents seen by POLITICO, both individuals identified Prizenco as the man who hired them for the operation. After police released them, the two suspects fled France.
Valico said Prizenco was first contacted via Telegram by someone named David, and that he sent the images to the same person, also via Telegram.
“I have known Anatoly Prizenco for over a decade… He invited me to participate because he knew I was an educated person and I was comfortable abroad. My job was to organize the logistics, make sure people did everything right, that they didn’t come to harm, and help them get home,” Valico said.
Valico said he stopped communicating with Prizenco in the aftermath of the Paris operation.
-Today I can assume that Anatolij knew or guessed more information than he told me - he said.
Prizenco declined POLITICO's requests for an interview. At a court hearing in a separate case, he denied acting as a recruiter for destabilization operations, insisting he was only helping people enroll in recreational camps. His lawyer, Barba Daria, said he denies the charges against him.
Across the Borders
Located between Romania and Ukraine, Moldova is on the periphery of the European Union, yet within what Moscow traditionally considers its sphere of interest. Transnistria, the part of its territory that borders Ukraine, has been controlled by pro-Russian politicians since it broke away in the 1990s during the collapse of the Soviet Union.
More recently, Moldova has been a major battleground in Russia’s hybrid war against Europe. Sandu’s government has accused Moscow of meddling in the 2024 referendum on whether the country should join the EU, as well as in parliamentary elections next year. Moscow has denied meddling in the elections.
In a document seen by POLITICO and distributed by Moldova to EU officials shortly after the parliamentary elections, the government documented how Orthodox priests in the country were given “instructions to spread disinformation seven days a week instead of just on Sundays.” Moscow has also offered people in the country “guidance on how to set up and manage Telegram channels,” a messaging platform popular in Russia.

The government has also highlighted the use of large-scale vote-buying networks, organized protests, cyberattacks, troll farms, and AI-generated deepfakes—with Russian intermediaries paid, sometimes in cryptocurrencies, according to a performance-based financial bonus system.
Moldova has said it will dismantle networks of foreign-trained operatives sponsored by Moscow starting in 2024.
"We are talking about training organized in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Russian Federation," said Misail-Nichitin, the interior minister.
Misail-Nichitin said cases like the one against Prizenc show how networks targeting Moldova have expanded their operations beyond the country's borders. She cited an alleged plot to assassinate several public figures in Ukraine as a recent example.
“We are talking about more than ninety targets, including prominent journalists, defense officials, senior executives connected to Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, who were to be killed on orders,” she said.
The recruits in the operation, she said, targeted “vulnerable young men” with no criminal records and EU passports, if possible, some as young as 14 or 15.
The operations that took place in France, such as painting Stars of David or red handprints, involved citizens of Eastern European countries, including Moldova, Bulgaria and Serbia.
“The case of Moldova is unique,” the document, which POLITICO has seen, says. But it adds that “neither EU member states nor their neighbors are safe from hybrid threats.”