In a high-ceilinged room, an image with the words "Hybrid Warfare" lit up the screen at Moldova's Police Academy, named after the country's hero, Ștefan cel Mare. Valeriu Harabara, the Academy's police commissioner, stepped forward.

"Why was nobody punished for the false bomb alerts at Chișinău airport in 2022?" Harabara asked.

His question opened a recent workshop in Chișinău that brought together about 25 people, including Moldovan police, civil servants and Estonian experts to discuss modern security threats to Moldova's stability. 

The room broke into a lively discussion. Someone answered Harabara's question, almost apologetically: "Because we couldn't trace the calls right away." Heads nodded. 

The discussion continued, covering disinformation and psychological pressure, and how Russia uses these tactics to weaken democratic states from within. Russia considers Moldova part of its "privileged zone of influence", as stated in last year's report by the European Center of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats. The Kremlin will likely use every hybrid tactic to block Moldova's accession to the European Union and tighten its grip on Chișinău.

Estonia supports reforms to police training in Moldova

The workshop was part of a broader program funded by the Estonian Center for International Development (ESTDEV). It's designed to strengthen Moldova's institutional resilience, from communication strategies to legal coordination and strategic planning.

The project draws on Estonia's own experience with hostile influence campaigns, starting from the 2007 cyberattacks and evolving through more recent confrontations in the digital and political spheres.

Within the framework of this program, Estonian experts are helping Moldova turn its police academy into a modern training center aligned with EU standards. ESTDEV has joined forces with NGO ODSS to provide leadership mentoring, curriculum design support and training in digital tools, all based on Estonia's reform experience.

The goal is practical: to equip Moldovan trainers and future officers with the skills to recognize hybrid threats, handle disinformation and respond to crises. Experts working in Estonia today participated in the reforms made prior to Estonia joining the EU. Their experience in building strong, trusted institutions means they're not only fixing problems but also preventing them.

"Hybrid threats are not just about information," said Inge Lindsaar, advisor on internal security at the Estonian Academy of Security Sciences. "They are about weakening public trust, slowly, from within."

As Harabara continued, he followed with examples familiar to those in the room, such as wintertime energy cuts with unclear origins, bomb scares without suspects and politicians misappropriating funds to reinforce personal myths instead of public institutions.

"This is how they would normalize the unacceptable," said Harabara. "Where does disinformation work best? It's where people feel excluded from language, from opportunity, trust."

After Harabara spoke, officers and professors began to share cases they had encountered, such as regional misinformation about military mobilization and Telegram rumors about phantom security threats.

One participant recalled the gas supply crisis in 2023 and Moldova's struggle with supporting citizens or avoiding a humanitarian disaster in the breakaway region of Transnistria. It wasn't just a theoretical discussion. Everyone in the room had experienced the effects of misinformation.

Ramon Loik, a hybrid threats analyst at the Research Cener of the Internal Security Institute at the Estonian Academy of Security Sciences, shifted the focus from identifying hybrid threats to fighting them.

His presentation showed how hybrid threats are defined across the EU and how countries have built tools to counter them. He described the architecture of coordinated influence operations, using media platforms, cultural networks and local intermediaries.

"Russia doesn't always need to create a new story," Loik said. "They just need someone local to repeat it."

For Igor Lesnic, the head of information and communication technology at the Ștefan cel Mare Police Academy, the difference between visible and invisible pressure struck a chord.

 "At the academy, we train for physical defense," Lesnic said. "But this was about invisible pressure. It's harder to prepare for but just as real."

Later in the day, theory gave way to practice.

Using Estonia's CATEX methodology (a framework developed for crisis response based on realistic simulation), participants split into groups. They worked through case studies, including a protest escalating through Telegram and a local official having a quote manipulated and reused across Russian-language media. Teams worked together to identify vulnerabilities, mapped stakeholders and proposed immediate, coordinated responses.

Ana-Maria Gherman-Grimailo, a university assistant, described how the workshop shifted her thinking. "At first, [the workshop] felt theoretical. But then I started recalling specific cases," said Gherman-Grimailo, quickly realizing she, too, had experienced hybrid threats.

As part of the program, the Moldovan police academy will be cooperating with two Estonian universities. The Moldovan government is also planning to adapt the Estonian model to bring the police force and border guard under the same roof. Overall, Estonian model of resilience offers more than methodology; it's about changing mindsets.
"[Estonians] have gone through this already," Harabara said. "They know how fragile trust can be. That's what we need to learn from."

Tackling hybrid threats cannot be done solely through designing perfect strategies. Instead, it's about building habits, sharing experience and establishing a common ground to prevent them in the first place.

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This article was originally published by the Estonian Center for International Develpment (ESTDEV) here.

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