President Maia Sandu’s speech in the Parliament of Latvia

Dzimtā valoda ir māte, māte Dzimtā valodā vīns vēl saldāks Dzimtā valodā pasmejies pie sevis pats.

In your own tongue you long for your mother. The wine is more wine. The bread is more bread. And only in your own tongue can you laugh to yourself - or stop your weeping.

You will recognise these words. But they were not written in Latvian.

They were written in Romanian.

În limba ta ți-e dor de mama, și vinul e mai vin, și prânzul e mai prânz. Și doar în limba ta poți râde singur, și doar în limba ta te poți opri din plâns.

They were written in Romanian, by a Moldovan poet named Grigore Vieru, in the 1960s. Back then, under Soviet rule, our language had been officially given a different name. To call it by its true name was an act of defiance. A declaration that a people exists as long as its language exists.

In 1985, as Latvia was recovering its independence, the band Līvi took that poem and set it to music in Latvian. Think about it. Two countries, two languages that share no common root, holding the same stubborn will: the refusal to be erased.

Moldova is here today because of that same stubbornness - the refusal to accept that our place is anywhere other than where we have always belonged. In the European family.

Honourable Speaker, Honourable Members of the Saeima,

I stand before you on behalf of the people who have been fighting the same battle you fought - on the same front, in a harder and less stable world. We are reclaiming what was taken.

In August 1939, two men sat down in Moscow and divided Europe on paper. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact drew lines through nations, through families, through lives that had no say in the matter. What it agreed was monstrous: that certain peoples would belong to an empire they had never chosen.

Latvia knows this in its bones. Your parliament was dissolved overnight. Your country was occupied. Families were loaded onto trains to Siberia - not for crimes, but for simply being Latvian.

Moldova's story runs parallel - and was written by the same hand. What is today the Republic of Moldova was carved out of Romania by that same secret protocol. Our land was occupied. Our language was renamed. Our history was rewritten. Our ties to Romania and to Europe were deliberately, systematically cut.

When the Soviet Union fell, Latvia had the moral clarity of a people who had never truly accepted what was done to them. Moldova emerged more fractured - decades under the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union had eroded our sense of ourselves.

A people unsure of who they are could not easily agree on where they belong. Latvia joined the EU in 2004. Moldova hesitated. Not because we were less European. Because what was taken from us took longer to reclaim. We are reclaiming it now.

And the consequences of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact will not be fully undone - not truly - until every nation it scattered into grey zones is anchored inside the European Union. Protected. Free. Finally home.

Honorable members,

The EU has been our anchor for the past two decades. We applied for membership in 2022 - only days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It was our way of saying, without ambiguity, whose side we are on. We opened accession negotiations in 2024.

We are catching up with you. Despite Russia's sustained campaign to hold us back and keep us out, Moldova's people have made their choice - not once, but three times in two years: a constitutional referendum anchoring EU membership, a presidential poll, and a parliamentary election. Each time the pressure came heavier. Each time, our people chose Europe anyway.

We are keeping that promise.

In three years Moldova has gone from one hundred percent dependence on Russian gas to zero. We are reforming our judiciary from the ground up - vetting judges and prosecutors, building courts that deliver real accountability. We are overhauling our anti-corruption architecture. We are closing the legal loopholes Russia exploited, equipping our institutions to follow illicit financing and align our legislation sector by sector with European standards.

The European Commission calls us the best student in class. And we are accelerating further.

This is the character of a country that has made its choice and understands what is at stake. Not a country asking for favours. A country asking for what Latvia had: the chance to finish the journey it has already begun.

Distinguished audience,

Latvia made that journey in peacetime. We are making ours with a war on our doorstep, a Russia more aggressive than it has been in decades, and a world less stable than any of us would have wished.

It is against this background that Russia has tried to take Moldova - not by force, but through our democratic processes. And for that, elections are the perfect instrument.

Moscow's strategy was systematic. Tested in regional and local elections. Refined. Then deployed in full force during our presidential campaign and EU referendum - which passed despite massive interference. But the real stake was the parliamentary election. The goal was to seize parliament, install a Russia-controlled government, crush our democracy, drag Moldova back into a grey zone, and use it against Ukraine and against Europe.

What made the assault so difficult to defend against is that it exploited the very things that make democracy worth defending. Freedom of association became a tool for manufacturing instant parties - seven Kremlin-financed parties created in three years, all pretending to be Moldovan voices. One was declared unconstitutional. Moscow created clones immediately. One was officially launched in Moscow itself.

Freedom of assembly became paid protests - investigators found lists of participants, transport routes, envelopes of cash. As election day neared, people were openly offered up to three thousand euros a month to show up to protests.

Freedom of religion became a recruitment channel - priests sent on so-called pilgrimages abroad, returning trained in political messaging and social media influence. And on election day itself, independent media and electoral infrastructure came under cyberattack - with the clear intent of creating the perception that it was the government, not Russia, interfering with the results.

Meanwhile the disinformation machine ran at industrial scale. The Kremlin's message was that Europe means war, the government is selling the country, the President is involved in child trafficking. A troll farm of 100 TikTok accounts amassed over fifty-five million views. In a country of two and a half million people.

Law enforcement officials protecting the integrity of the election were threatened. Prosecutors investigating electoral corruption and judges on those cases received death threats.

All of this was underpinned by unprecedented flows of illegal money. When conventional channels were blocked, the operation shifted to cryptocurrency. One crypto wallet alone, uncovered by our anticorruption agency, held over one hundred million euros - funds flowing into troll farms, fake media, protests, and vote buying. We estimate that Russia deployed roughly two percent of our GDP to influence that election - double what it spent to skew our EU referendum the year before.

What we learned is that its most dangerous instrument is not the one that waves the Russian flag openly. That threat is visible - and visible threats can be defended against.

The more dangerous form of interference does not always arrive dressed in Russian colours. Sometimes it wears the clothes of reasonable doubt. It asks: why spend so much on defence? Should we not talk to Moscow rather than confront it? Are these sanctions not hurting our own people more than theirs? These are not always bad-faith questions. But in the wrong hands they become instruments - tools for hollowing out a society's will to defend itself.

And sometimes the goal is not to elect Russia's candidate. The goal is to create enough noise, enough cynicism, enough exhaustion, that when the moment of decision comes, a society cannot act with clarity.

What protects against all of this? In our experience: prevention, exposure, and coherence. A whole-of-government, whole-of-society response. All institutions working as one. Journalists going undercover to show how these networks operate from within. And one discipline above all others that proved its worth - following the money.

Follow the money - and the line between genuine democracy and malign interference becomes legible. Is this a party funded by citizens, or by transfers wired from abroad? Is this a genuine debate, or one amplified by algorithms and troll farms? Is this a protest born of conviction, or one fuelled by cash? The answers do not always come easily. But they come.

I share this because Moldova has been a laboratory - and because Russia will learn from its failings and will calibrate its strategy to its next target. The specific shape it takes will differ. The underlying logic will not.

Ladies and gentlemen,

This brings me to why Moldova's EU membership is not only Moldova's concern.

Moldova shares 1,200 kilometres of border with Ukraine. Ukraine has been our shield. Every day that Ukraine holds, Moldova holds. The survival of Ukrainian sovereignty is not separate from Moldovan sovereignty. It is the condition for it. Moldova will not forget this.

Latvia has been one of Ukraine's most principled supporters since the first hours of the invasion - giving more, relative to its size, than almost any other country. Because you understand, from lived memory, what it means when an imperial power decides a neighbour has no right to exist. On behalf of Moldova: we see this. We are grateful. And we stand with you in it.

We are sheltering Ukrainians, providing humanitarian aid, training their deminers, and adding our voice in support of Ukraine in every forum. We want to be part of the coalition of the willing that helps secure Ukraine when the war ends.

Supporting Ukraine, anchoring Moldova in the European Union, and defending the integrity of our democracies are not three separate objectives. They have the same strategic logic. A Europe that is serious about its security must be serious about its Eastern neighbourhood. It cannot support Ukraine with one hand while leaving democratic nations in grey zones with the other. And it cannot warn its citizens about the forces working to divide them while leaving those forces a ready target just outside its borders.

Moldova belongs in the European Union. Not as an act of generosity. As an act of strategic coherence.

Honourable members,

Grigore Vieru's poem survived the empire that tried to silence it. It crossed into Latvian and became part of your national revival. That is not a coincidence or a curiosity. It tells us something true: we have always been on the same side of this. We were occupied by an empire neither of us chose. You found your way back to Europe. We are on the same path - and we are nearly there.

Latvia's voice in Brussels carries the weight of a country that made this journey and has not forgotten what was at stake. Use that voice - in the European Council, in every room where our future is being decided. Not only for Moldova's sake. But because the same forces that try to stop Moldova from joining the EU will work, in every way they can, to divide Europe. Supporting our accession and defending the integrity of your own democratic life are, in the end, the same act of resistance.

We are nearly there. Help us finish the journey.

Paldies. Mulțumesc. Thank you.