ST. PETERSBURG — The message Vasile Tarlev carried to Russia’s showcase economic forum on Wednesday had a familiar shape: the Moldovan government was acting against the wishes of its own citizens. The former prime minister, now a member of parliament for the left-wing Future of Moldova party, told RIA Novosti on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum that the policy of breaking economic ties with Russia was not the decision of the Moldovan people.
“This decision is not the decision of the Moldovan people. It does not align with our strategic plans, and the interests of the Moldovan people are being violated,” Tarlev said. He went further, arguing that the broader course toward European integration was itself misaligned with what Moldovans actually want.
What the available survey data says is more complicated. An August 2025 poll conducted by iData on a nationally representative sample of 1,071 respondents found that 57.1 percent of Moldovans support EU accession, against 36.2 percent opposed. A separate September 2025 survey found 86 percent of Moldovans felt their country had good relations with the EU — a ten-point increase from the prior year. The 2024 constitutional referendum, in which a narrow majority voted to enshrine EU membership as a national goal, produced the closest result of all: 50.4 percent in favour.
That margin — a fraction above the minimum — is precisely the opening Tarlev and the broader Moldovan opposition have been working to widen ever since. His party, which holds a single seat in Moldova’s 101-seat parliament after the September 2025 elections, is ideologically aligned with figures like former president Igor Dodon, who has also appeared at this year’s SPIEF arguing that Moldova’s economic ties with Russia have been severed at crippling cost. Dodon said earlier at the forum that Moldova’s exports to Russia had fallen by a factor of 2.5 after joining Western sanctions.
Tarlev served as prime minister from 2001 to 2008, the longest run in the post-Soviet period — first under the Communist government of Vladimir Voronin, a tenure that coincided with a period of stable, if unspectacular, economic relations with Russia. He resigned in March 2008 saying he wanted to make way for new leadership, was decorated with the Order of the Republic for his service, and drifted through a sequence of smaller parties before founding the Future of Moldova movement in 2024. His presence in St. Petersburg this week places him inside a pattern: Moldovan opposition politicians using the Russian forum as a platform to contest the legitimacy of decisions taken by President Maia Sandu’s government in Chișinău.
The governing Party of Action and Solidarity, which retained power in the September 2025 parliamentary elections despite what the government and EU observers described as sustained Russian interference, has framed the break with Moscow’s economic orbit as an irreversible strategic shift. Moldova formally applied for EU membership in March 2022, was granted candidate status the following June, and has since received roughly 250 million euros in EU budget and energy support in 2025 alone.
The optics of that platform matter. SPIEF is organised under the auspices of the Russian government’s Roscongress Foundation, and its political dimension has grown substantially since Western delegations largely withdrew following the start of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine. This year’s forum, themed “Pragmatic Dialogue: The Path to a Stable Future,” drew roughly 20,000 participants from more than 100 countries. The United States sent an official delegation for the first time in nearly a decade, headed by Rodney Cook, chairman of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts — a signal of cautious diplomatic re-engagement that Russian officials highlighted prominently.
Tarlev’s claim that Moldovans oppose their government’s Russia policy is not without a basis. The same iData poll that showed majority support for EU accession also found that 60 percent of Moldovans oppose NATO membership, and 61.5 percent oppose unification with Romania — the more radical geopolitical reorientation that a segment of the pro-European camp has advocated. The 2024 referendum’s razor-thin margin showed that the EU project in Moldova retains a sizable, motivated opposition. Two pro-Russian parties were banned from running two days before the September 2025 election over allegations of illegal Russian financing — a disqualification the Patriotic Bloc called politically motivated.
What Tarlev’s framing elides is the distinction between opposing a specific economic rupture — the loss of preferential Russian gas, disrupted trade routes, cuts to remittances — and opposing EU integration as a destination. Those are not the same thing, and Moldovan public opinion has consistently shown a population that wants the benefits of the European path while remaining wary of the costs of the transition. The government in Chișinău has built its political identity on managing that tension; the opposition, gathered this week in St. Petersburg, is betting the costs eventually become unbearable enough to break it.
Whether Tarlev’s party, with its single parliamentary seat, is positioned to capitalise on that remains unclear. His appearances at Russian-hosted forums give him a media profile disproportionate to his electoral weight. What is clear, as figures cited by Dodon at the same forum illustrate, is that the economic costs of Moldova’s westward turn are real and measurable. The political question — who bears the blame, and whether Moldovans will eventually hold the current government accountable for them — is the one neither side at SPIEF can answer from St. Petersburg.
Tarlev did not address what economic alternative he envisions for a country that, having voted to enshrine EU membership in its constitution, would need to reverse a democratic decision to return to the trade architecture he implicitly prefers.
—Inputs from RIA Novosti, Sputnik.
