Expert: Patriot Center Is a Murky Scam of PAS

While the Center for Strategic Communications and Combating Disinformation is looking for a director for the next five years, no one has explained to the public exactly what this structure deals with and how it spends tens of millions of lei allocated for its maintenance from the budget and foreign grants

Semyon ALBU, RTA: Recently, reports came that the delayed competition for the position of director of the Centre for Strategic Communications and Combating Disinformation, aka Patriot, is at the finish line. The candidates will be considered by a special commission of “the best people”: Sandu’s advisor Igor Zaharov, PAS MP Marcela Adam, the head of the President’s Cabinet Adrian Balutel and other no less respected persons. There are four people willing to be the main “patriot for the next five years, all of them are experts, public figures, consultants. It is characteristic that Ana Revenco, who was honored to head the Centre in the first year of its work, was not among them. Apparently, “the Moor has done his duty, let him go”. However, it is not very clear what Revenco and her team have done over the past year or so. To be more precise, it is absolutely unclear. Patriot is the most closed and secret of all the bureaucratic institutions that the regime has created during its rule. There is no official website with information on current activities, no reports on work, no contacts - nothing. And we are talking about an organization, one of the main tasks of which at its creation was “to disseminate reliable information to the general public and ensure a constant dialogue with citizens”! This, by the way, is a direct quote from the President’s speech. As a result, we know only the actual location of the center, but it does not help much - mere mortals or journalists will not be able to get there. This is a bad scene. Although this is quite natural for a regime that likes only to rant about “democracy” and “transparency”, but in fact has been stubbornly building an information dictatorship all these years. What do we actually know about Patriot, affectionately nicknamed Ministry of Truth? The idea for its creation came personally from Maia Sandu. In May 2023, in a pompous speech filled with repeated accusations of the Kremlin and certain “criminal groups” of hybrid attacks, promotion of lies in the media, etc., she announced that “Moldova needs an institution that will fight propaganda, provide objective information to citizens, contribute to the information sustainability of society and protect information security”. To the envy of Veronica Dragalin, the new department has easily found a comfortable building, a VIP head in the person of the former head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and a solid budget of 20 million lei to maintain a staff of several dozen employees. According to Ion Chicu, the average salary in the center is something around 43 thousand lei, and this year Sandu ordered to raise salaries by 40%. But the “patriots” did not feed only from the budget. There were, of course, ubiquitous grants from international partners, who are extremely interested in keeping the heat of the struggle against the Russian “hybrid aggression” on for a second. It is not known exactly how much foreign funds the center has accumulated. But, for example, only from the extremist organization USAID, as we have now learned from the new White House administration, in September 2024, 4.5 million lei was allocated “to fight against information manipulation and foreign interference”. What they do in Patriot, what they do and how they spend Moldovan and foreign money on, is a mystery and a secret behind seven seals. Accordingly, it is almost impossible to assess the success and efficiency of the Centre’s work: we can only guess based on unverified information and personal observations. Thus, it is said that it Revenco’s department that “gave birth” to the Moldovan analogue of the infamous Ukrainian website Peacemaker. In fact, it is such a database of “enemies of the people” or, better to say, “enemies of the regime” and all those who disagree with the current “party policy”. Without wisecracking, without even inventing a new name, our guardians of “good times” also publish questionnaires of politicians, including foreign politicians, journalists and public figures, who are undesirable to the authorities, accompanied by a “persona non grata” label. There is no creativity, and it is of no use either, but it is probably necessary for the most stubborn PAS supporters, so that they know exactly where the “enemies” are. Or for their foreign partners, who, at the behest of the regime, have become accustomed to imposing personal sanctions. The quality of this fake is such that some pro-government experts, defending their patrons, suggested that this website was another Kremlin attack to frame the “yellow” authorities. However, they immediately screwed up when the idea of the “Moldovan peacemaker” was supported by Dorin Recean himself. I wonder how much money was “allocated” in the reporting payments for this “project”? Also, when referring to her center, madame Revenco constantly stressed that it diligently monitors content on the Internet and social networks. And this may not be far from the truth, because since last year we have seen a characteristic trend – insertion of censorship state regulation where there was none before. Namely, in the very social networks. In fact, since 2022, representatives of the regime have dreamed of being able to shut not only the traditional media, but also all sorts of blogs and Telegram channels. And with the appearance of Patriot, the fairy tale became reality. The accounts of political figures, journalists, and the media was attacked. For example, Telegram channel of the Moldovan Sputnik, which had several tens of thousands of subscribers, was recently shut down. Whether all these “successes” are worth more than a million dollars out of an already skinny deficit budget is a question that needs no further commentary. In fact, under the pretext of “information hygiene” of the population, the regime, using our taxes, has strengthened its censorship ‘sprue’, which has been able to extend its tendrils into the World Wide Web, disconnecting citizens from “unnecessary”, as the regime sees it, content. I would like to believe that one of the steps of the new government will be the immediate closure of this socially harmful mudbath, blatantly violating freedom of speech in our country.