$500 and a trip abroad: How recruits end up in Russian sabotage training camps

When Anatoli Prizenco met Maxim Roșca outside a grocery store in downtown Chișinău, he pitched an easy escape from Roșca’s job at a local auto shop: a paid, two-week trip involving travel and outdoor activities.

According to Roșca’s testimony to a Moldovan court, Prizenco offered few details, only that Roșca would earn between $300 and $500 — and that further instructions would come from a contact in Moscow.

Within weeks, Roșca found himself in training camps in Bosnia and Serbia. There, participants learned how to fly drones, handle incendiary devices and evade law enforcement during protests — part of what Moldovan investigators say was a coordinated Russia-backed effort to recruit operatives for destabilization operations as far away as France and Germany.

Moldova’s investigations into Russian-linked recruitment efforts come as European countries warn that Moscow is waging a campaign of hybrid warfare aimed at destabilizing their internal politics. 

French authorities, already on alert ahead of next year’s presidential election, documented low-level disinformation campaigns by Russian networks during this month’s local elections. In Germany, the government summoned the Russian ambassador in December, alleging that Moscow had orchestrated cyberattacks and interfered in a general election last year.

Having faced some of the Kremlin’s most aggressive campaigns in 2024 and 2025, officials in Moldova say their country is well-positioned to help their European neighbors fend off Russian attacks. 

The Kremlin ramped up its use of proxies after many European capitals expelled dozens of Russian diplomats — some of them suspected intelligence agents — following Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Moldovan prosecutors allege Prizenco acted as a recruiter in a wider, foreign-based network they have now dismantled, one that trained dozens of people as proxies for Russian-linked influence and disruption campaigns. He is scheduled to appear in court on Thursday in Chișinău.

French authorities are also investigating Prizenco as the prime suspect in the hiring of a group of Moldovan citizens who drew Stars of David on Paris walls in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks in Israel — an apparent attempt to stoke political tensions.

Moldovan prosecutors are investigating more than 80 people over suspicions they fomented mass disorder. Twenty have been formally indicted. At least two other people linked to the camps are suspected of involvement in other destabilization operations in France and Germany. 

“These young people, Russian speakers, were recruited, transported to specially organized camps and trained in [tactics including] how to break law enforcement cordons,” Moldova’s Minister of Internal Affairs Daniella Misail-Nichitin told POLITICO.

“Some were taught how to use unmanned devices. And it even went as far as training on providing medical aid in the event of violence.”

Boot camp 

Roșca came to the attention of the Moldovan authorities on Oct. 11, 2024 when he was stopped while crossing into the country from Romania aboard 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 recovered six black objects described in court proceedings as single-use devices for dropping grenades from the air.

The three passengers of the bus were sentenced last month to four- to five-year prison sentences on charges of fomenting mass disorder. Roșca — who says he was beaten after he refused to take part in the training — testified as a witness in the case.

In court, Roșca said he first traveled to Republika Srpska, a region of Bosnia with an ethnic-Serb majority, where he was taken into the dense forests surrounding the city of Banja Luka.

There, he and other participants were told they would be trained to take part in protests, operate drones and prepare smoke grenades.

The training took place just ahead of the 2024 fall presidential election, in which Moldova’s pro-European President Maia Sandu would be reelected 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 camp of four tents set up along a river, where recruits were taught to pilot drones using goggles and joysticks. The instructors were part of an international network with ties to Russia’s Wagner mercenary group, according to Moldovan intelligence services. 

After that, participants were sent to Banja Luka for a practical exercise: recording the locations of administrative and government buildings and scouting potential launch sites for drones.

According to that same witness, they were transported into the city by a man named “Mircho,” who also appears in Roșca’s testimony.

Though the man’s last name isn’t mentioned in court records, Moldovan intelligence services said upon the arrests that Mircho Angelov had been among the 11 “foreign nationals who provided assistance to the training camps in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia, acting as instructors.”

Angelov was tasked with bringing the participants food, among other logistical duties, Roșca told the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network and Moldovan investigative outlet CU SENS.

A Bulgarian national, Angelov 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, an act French judges described as a foreign-coordinated destabilization operation. 

Angelov is also accused by Moldova of acts of vandalism in Chișinău.

Another man, Danil Dilan, a 22-year-old native of Moldova’s breakaway pro-Russian Transnistria separatist region, was sentenced to three years in prison in November.

As part of a plea deal, Dilan admitted in court to traveling to Düsseldorf in 2024 for a high-profile UEFA European Championship football game between Slovakia and Ukraine, where he was asked to wave a Ukrainian flag, according to court transcripts seen by POLITICO. 

Dilan said he had refused to do so, but a Ukrainian flag with the inscription “Give us elections back” was unfurled during the game. The Kremlin was quick to cite the flag as a reason Ukraine should hold an election to replace President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with a Foreign Ministry spokesperson expressing her “shock” over the incident.

Dilan also said he had received an offer from one of the camp instructors to travel to Paris during the 2024 Summer Olympics to carry out destabilizing operations, but didn’t. 

Participants in the camps were paid in crypto via popular platforms such as Trust Wallet, several witnesses said in court. 

Anatomy of a proxy 

Before falling afoul of the law, Prizenco, the recruiter, ran a retail business, marketing and selling cosmetics from the Swedish brand Oriflame to Moldovan clients.

In 2019 his wife Olga Prizenco told the Moldovan lifestyle magazine RED how her husband had gone from selling apples in Moscow to building a business in Moldova alongside her and their four children. 

In the early 2010s, Prizenco was briefly detained in relation to a Ponzi scheme involving a Russian bank for which he was listed as a local representative, according to Moldovan investigative outlet Ziarul de Gardă. 

Shortly afterward he dipped a toe into politics. In 2014 he campaigned for a newly created party, the People’s Movement for the Customs Union, which advocated closer economic integration with Russia and Belarus.

In his recruitment efforts, prosecutors suspect, he did not act alone. He is alleged to have worked with a man “in a higher position” named Vladimir Firsov, who is believed to be in Russia, according to Vitalie Chișca, the lead prosecutor on Prizenco’s case. 

“We suspect and intuit that these operations are not actually led by [Prizenco], but that there is someone behind them, some services,” Chișca told POLITICO. 

Prizenco has admitted to organizing five other Moldovans to spray-paint dozens of Stars of David on buildings in Paris, telling the French newspaper Libération that he was acting in support of European Jews.  

The French government described Prizenco’s operation as part of “an opportunistic and irresponsible strategy aimed at exploiting international crises to sow confusion and create tension in the public debate in France and Europe.”

Viginum, France’s national agency monitoring online disinformation, has accused a network of Russian bots of amplifying the dissemination of photos of the Stars of David on social media.

Vaeceslav Valico, another participant in the Stars of David operation, estimated the stunt cost less than the value of his wristwatch and smartphone: some €2,000.

“I’m first and foremost an entrepreneur, a businessman, and secondly, I’m a person active in civic movements,” the 49-year-old businessman told POLITICO in an interview in downtown Chișinău. “This action was in no way planned as an antisemitic one … it was a gesture toward the State of Israel.” 

“When I agreed to this action, I saw nothing negative in it,” he added. 

While Prizenco coordinated from abroad, Valico photographed the stars and uploaded them. Two other people, a man and a woman, who did the painting, were arrested on location. 

According to French police documents seen by POLITICO, the two people both pointed to Prizenco as the man who had hired them for the operation. After being released by the police, the two suspects fled France. 

Valico said Prizenco was first contacted via Telegram by someone named “David,” and that he sent the pictures to the same person, also via Telegram.  

“I have known Anatoli Prizenco for over 10 years … He invited me to participate because he knows I’m an educated person and I know my way around abroad,” Valico said. “My job was to organize the logistics, to make sure people did everything correctly, that they weren’t harmed, and to help them return home.”

Valico said he stopped communicating with Prizenco after the fallout from the Paris operation. “I can assume today that Anatoli knew or guessed more information than he told me,” he said.

Prizenco declined POLITICO’s requests for an interview. In a court hearing in a separate case, he denied acting as a recruiter for destabilization operations, insisting he was only helping people enroll in leisure camps. His lawyer, Barba Daria, said he denies the charges against him.

Beyond borders 

Sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine, Moldova lies on the periphery of the European Union and yet well within what Moscow has traditionally regarded as its sphere of interest. Transnistria, a strip of its territory bordering 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 front in Russia’s hybrid war on Europe. Sandu’s government has accused Moscow of interfering in a 2024 referendum on whether the country should join the EU, as well as in a parliamentary election in which she was standing for reelection the following year. Moscow has denied interfering in the election.

In a document seen by POLITICO and circulated by Moldova to EU officials shortly after the parliamentary election, the government documented how Orthodox priests in the country had received “instructions to spread disinformation seven days a week instead of only on Sundays.” Moscow 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, staged protests, cyberattacks, troll farms and AI-generated deepfakes — with Russian proxies paid, sometimes in cryptocurrency, according to a performance-based system of financial bonuses.

Moldova said it has been dismantling networks of foreign-trained operatives sponsored by Moscow since 2024. “We are talking here about trainings organized in Serbia, in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in the Russian Federation,” said Misail-Nichitin, the interior minister.

Misail-Nichitin said that cases like the one against Prizenco show how the networks that targeted Moldova have stretched their operations beyond the country’s borders. As a recent example she pointed to an alleged plot to assassinate several public figures in Ukraine.

“We are talking about more than 90 targets, spanning high-profile journalists, defense officials, high-level executives linked to Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, who were going to be assassinated on command,” she said.

Recruiters in that operation, she said, targeted “vulnerable young men” with no criminal records and with EU passports, if possible, some of them as young as 14 or 15 years of age.

The operations that took place in France, such as the painting of the Stars of David or red handprints, involved citizens of Eastern European countries including Moldova, Bulgaria and Serbia. 

“Moldova’s case is a unique one,” read the document seen by POLITICO. But, it added, “neither the EU member states nor its neighbours are safe from hybrid threats.”

Irina Codrean contributed reporting from Chișinău.