Russia creates training camps in Serbia and Bosnia for sabotage agents in Europe

When Anatoli Prizenco met Maxim Roșca outside a market in central Chișinău, he offered him an easy “escape” from his job at a local car repair shop: a two-week paid trip, complete with outdoor activities and travel.

According to Roșca's testimony before a Moldovan court, Prizenco gave few details, telling him only that he would earn between $300 and $500 — and that further instructions would come from a contact in Moscow.

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

Moldova's investigations into Russia-linked recruitment efforts are taking place as European countries warn that Moscow is waging a "hybrid warfare" campaign aimed at destabilizing domestic politics.

French authorities, already on high alert ahead of next year’s presidential election, have 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 organized cyberattacks and interfered in last year’s general election.

Having experienced some of Moscow's most aggressive campaigns during 2024 and 2025, Moldovan officials say their country is well-positioned to help its European neighbors cope with Russian attacks.

Youth recruitment and paid offer

The Kremlin increased its use of proxies after many European capitals expelled dozens of Russian diplomats — some of them suspected of being intelligence agents — following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Moldovan prosecutors allege that Prizenco acted as a recruiter in a wider network based abroad, which they have now dismantled. The network, they say, had trained dozens of people as instruments for Russia-linked influence and disruption campaigns. He is expected to appear in court in Chișinău on Thursday.

French authorities are also investigating Prizence as the main suspect in recruiting a group of Moldovan citizens who painted Stars of David on the walls of Paris after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks in Israel — an action that appears to have been intended to incite political tensions.

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

“These young, Russian-speaking people were recruited, transported to specially organized camps and trained in tactics, including how to break through police cordons,” Moldovan Interior Minister Daniella Misail-Nichitin told POLITICO.

"Some were trained in the use of unmanned equipment. The training even went as far as providing first aid in the event of violence."

Roșca came to the attention of Moldovan authorities on October 11, 2024, when he was stopped while entering the country from Romania in a Mercedes-Benz minibus.

Inside the vehicle, police found Serbian and Bosnian currency, flashlights, SIM cards and USB sticks, as well as drone parts, virtual reality goggles and radio control devices. Six black objects, described in court documents as single-use devices for throwing grenades from the air, were also seized.

The three bus passengers were sentenced last month to between four and five years in prison on charges of inciting mass disorder. Roșca — who says he was beaten after refusing to participate in the training — testified as a witness.

In court, Roșca stated that he initially traveled to Republika Srpska, a region of Bosnia with an ethnic Serb majority, where he was taken to the dense forests around the city of Banja Luka.

There, he and other participants were informed that they would be trained to participate in protests, operate drones, and prepare smoke grenades.

The training took place shortly before the autumn 2024 presidential elections, where pro-European President Maia Sandu was re-elected, in a campaign accompanied by Russian interference.

According to court transcripts, participants were told that if Sandu won the election, “there would be war in the country, just like in Ukraine.”

A witness described several days of training in a four-tent camp near a river, where recruits learned to pilot drones with goggles and joysticks. The instructors were part of an international network with links to the Wagner mercenary group, according to Moldovan intelligence services.

Afterwards, the participants were sent to Banja Luka for a practical exercise: to record the locations of administrative and government buildings and identify potential drone launch sites.

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

Training camps and sabotage tactics

Although the surname is not mentioned in court documents, Moldovan intelligence services stated during the arrests that Mircho Angelov was among 11 “foreign nationals who had assisted in training camps in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia, acting as instructors.”

Roșca told the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network and the Moldovan portal CU SENS that Angelov was also tasked with supplying the participants with food.

Angelov, a Bulgarian national, was sentenced to three years in prison by a Paris court last fall for conspiring to draw red handprints on the wall outside the Holocaust Museum in Paris — an act that French judges described as a destabilizing operation coordinated from abroad.

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

Another person, Danil Dilan, 22, from the pro-Russian separatist region of Transnistria, was sentenced to three years in prison in November.

As part of a plea agreement, Dilan admitted in court that he had traveled to Düsseldorf in 2024 for a UEFA European Championship match between Slovakia and Ukraine, where he was asked to wave a Ukrainian flag, according to transcripts obtained by POLITICO.

Dilan said he had refused, but during the match a Ukrainian flag was unfurled with the inscription “Give us back the elections.” The Kremlin quickly used the incident to demand that Ukraine hold elections to replace President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Dilan also stated that he had received an offer from a camp instructor to travel to Paris during the 2024 Summer Olympics to carry out destabilizing actions, but had not accepted it.

Witnesses in court said that participants in the camps were paid in cryptocurrencies through platforms like Trust Wallet.

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

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

In the early 2010s, Prizenco was briefly detained in connection with a fraudulent financial (Ponzi) scheme involving a Russian bank where he appeared as a local representative, according to the Moldovan investigative newspaper Ziarul de Gardă.

He then became involved in politics. In 2014, he campaigned for a newly formed party, the People's Movement for the Customs Union, which supported closer economic integration with Russia and Belarus.

Prosecutors suspect he did not act alone. They say he collaborated with a “higher-ranking” person named Vladimir Firsov, who is believed to be in Russia, according to the lead prosecutor in the case, Vitalie Chișca.

“We suspect and understand that these operations are not really led by [Prizenco], but that there is someone behind them, some service,” 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 the Prizenco 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, the French national agency that monitors online disinformation, has accused a network of Russian trolls of amplifying the spread of photos of the Star of David on social media.

Veaceslav Valico, another participant in this operation, said that the operation cost less than the value of his watch and phone: about 2,000 euros.

“I am first and foremost an entrepreneur, a businessman, and secondly I am active in civic movements,” he told POLITICO in an interview in downtown Chișinău. “This action was not at all planned as anti-Semitic… it was a gesture towards the State of Israel.”

"When I accepted this action, I didn't see anything negative," he added.

While Prizenco coordinated from abroad, Valico photographed the stars and published them. Two other people — a man and a woman — who made the painting were arrested at the scene.

According to French police documents obtained by POLITICO, the two arrested men identified Prizenca as their employer. After being released by police, the two fled France.

The Russian network and hybrid campaigns

Valico said that Prizenco was first contacted on Telegram by someone named "David" and that he had sent the photos to that same person.

“I have known Anatoli Prizrenca for more than 10 years… He invited me to participate because he knows that I am an educated person and I know the world abroad well,” Valico said. “My job was to organize the logistics, to make sure that people did everything right, that they did not get hurt, and to help them return home.”

He added that he cut off communication with the Presidency after the consequences of the operation in Paris.

“I can assume today that Anatoly knew or had guessed more than he had 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 destabilizing operations, insisting he had only helped people register for recreational camps. His lawyer, Barba Daria, said he denies the charges.

Concrete operations and incidents in Europe

Nestled between Romania and Ukraine, Moldova sits on the outskirts of the European Union but within an area that Moscow has traditionally considered its sphere of interest. Transnistria, a strip of territory bordering Ukraine, has been controlled by pro-Russian politicians since seceding in the 1990s during the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Recently, Moldova has become a major front in Russia's hybrid war against Europe. Sandu's government has accused Moscow of interfering in the 2024 referendum on EU membership, as well as in parliamentary elections the following year. Moscow has denied the accusations.

In a document obtained by POLITICO and distributed by Moldova to EU officials shortly after the parliamentary elections, the government documented that Orthodox priests in the country had received “instructions to spread disinformation seven days a week, not just on Sundays.” Russia had also offered citizens “instructions on how to create and manage channels on Telegram.”

The government has also highlighted the use of massive vote-buying networks, staged protests, cyberattacks, troll farms, and artificial intelligence-generated "deepfakes" — with paid intermediaries, sometimes in cryptocurrencies, under a system of financial bonuses based on performance.

The role of Moldova and the Russian hybrid war

Moldova says it is dismantling networks of foreign-trained and Moscow-sponsored operatives by 2024.

"We are talking about trainings organized in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Russian Federation," said Minister Misail-Nichitin.

She said cases like Prizenco's show that networks targeting Moldova have extended their activity beyond its borders. As an example, she cited an alleged plot to assassinate public figures in Ukraine.

"We are talking about more than 90 targets, including prominent journalists, defense officials and leaders connected to Ukraine's critical infrastructure, who would be killed on orders," she said.

According to her, recruiters targeted “vulnerable young men,” with no criminal record and, if possible, with EU passports — some of them just 14 or 15 years old.

Operations in France, such as drawing Stars of David or red handprints, involved citizens from Eastern European countries, including Moldova, Bulgaria and Serbia.

“Moldova’s case is unique,” ​​the document obtained by POLITICO says. But it adds that “neither EU member states nor its neighbors are safe from hybrid threats.”/Poitico/