Beyond the ceremonies, 127 children enrolled in two military schools for 2026–2027, Promo-LEX, a Moldovan rights group, said.

Promo-LEX says Transnistria’s military schools prepare children for service in the separatist administration’s security forces and paramilitary units. At the same time, Russian “patriotic education” programs expose them to indoctrination and security risks. Those programs connect Transnistria’s school system to Russia’s wider militarization and re-education of children in occupied Ukraine.

Beyond the classroom, dozens of Transnistrian children attended “patriotic education” programs in Russia and occupied Crimea this summer, the Association for the Reintegration of Crimea (ARC) said, citing Promo-LEX.

ARC said one group attended events at Artek, a Russian-run children’s camp, in June 2026. From 23 June to 13 July, another group participated in the “Circle of Friends” program at Russia’s Orlyonok children’s center.

The Artek camp is under EU, UK, and US sanctions over its role in deporting and re-educating Ukrainian children. Promo-LEX has documented Transnistrian children attending Artek-run camps for nearly a decade.

Transnistria is internationally recognized as part of Moldova but has remained under Russia-backed separatist control since a war in 1992, with Russian troops still stationed there.

A Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) video showed students raising Transnistria’s flag and singing its anthem at the start of the school week. Tiraspol authorities described the ceremonies as promoting patriotism and discipline.

Of the 127 children who enrolled in the two military schools (up from 120 the previous year), 65 entered the Tiraspol Suvorov Military School, and 62 entered a cadet school in Bender, according to Promo-LEX. About half of this year’s new students in Bender are girls.

Students from the age of 11 wear camouflage, live under a barracks regime, and receive training in handling weapons and drones, Promo-LEX says. The intake includes children from vulnerable families and boarding schools. The group has also warned that graduates may face pressure to sign contracts with Tiraspol’s paramilitary structures.

How Russia militarizes children in occupied Ukraine

Russia uses the same education-to-service pipeline across occupied Ukraine. More than 582,000 children at nearly 2,000 occupation schools study under an imposed Russian curriculum, while schools are adding military-training tracks and ideology classes, according to the Almenda Center.

In December 2025, UN monitors documented Russia imposing weekly “patriotic” lessons in occupied Ukraine on children as young as three and putting older children through combat training—including instructions on how to handle drones.

At “Zarnitsa 2.0,” a Russian military-training competition for children held in May 2026, a Kremlin-backed youth movement taught children to handle weapons and explosives and operate drones, Ukraine's military intelligence said.

Earlier, 24 teenagers from occupied Kherson Oblast received drone, combat, and cyber training at Russia's Avangard camp, according to Ukraine's Center for National Resistance.

A Russian state-linked espionage group ran much of its campaign against Ukraine on Claude, the AI assistant sold by US company Anthropic, which set out the case in a threat report published on 10 September, covering activity it disrupted between December 2025 and August 2026. Ukrainian government, military, and diplomatic staff recurred most often among the targets, with the drone supply chain second. Other Russian users of the same chatbot produced on-air tickers and voiceover scripts for state broadcasters, while Russian-speaking criminals went after the AI industry itself.

Ukrainian ministries and diplomats led the target list

Anthropic tracks the group as GTG-20006 and says its attribution matches public reporting that links it to Midnight Blizzard, a hacking group the US and UK governments attribute to Russia's SVR foreign intelligence service. A Russian-speaking operator using the handle JackPoterz ran campaigns against military intelligence targets in Ukrainian and European governments, plus diplomatic and defense bodies and individuals connected to US foreign policy.

More than 20 organizations appeared in the actor's planning and live operations, from ministries and embassies to think tanks and defense companies. Ukrainian government, military, and diplomatic staff came up most often, and the operators scanned email and remote-access systems across more than two dozen Ukrainian state organizations. Russia has worked these networks all war, treating Ukrainian media as a priority cyber target.

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Drone technology was the other target

The operators bulk-exported the mailboxes of at least two drone component manufacturers and went after a military drone maker. They also stole a complete proprietary software development kit for a drone vision system, the code and documentation engineers need to build on that hardware, then spent days pulling it apart. They recovered the product architecture, the parts list, the supplier dependencies, and details of a product the company had not announced. Military drone control and AI vision firmware drew their particular interest.

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To reach people indirectly, the group also compromised at least three vendors running hotel guest WiFi and redirected guests to its own servers, pushing malware at their devices and hunting for Ukrainian officials and drone manufacturers. To reach people indirectly, the group also compromised at least three vendors running hotel guest WiFi and redirected guests to its own servers, pushing malware at their devices and hunting for Ukrainian officials and drone manufacturers. Microsoft documented the same method on 31 July, calling it CaptiveCrunch and tracing it to a Midnight Blizzard sub-cluster. Russian services have tracked the weapons pipeline before, tapping private cameras in Europe to watch arms shipments bound for Ukraine.

What the chatbot did for the operation

Claude fingerprinted mail systems, built the phishing infrastructure, ran commands inside victim networks, harvested credentials, and organized hundreds of gigabytes of stolen data, Anthropic found. Automated agents also checked whether the group's implants were being detected, rewrote flagged malware until it passed, and staged it for the next intrusion. The operators also seized WhatsApp accounts and targeted at least two former high-level Ukrainian officials that way, and stole cloud email from at least eight bodies, including a national prosecutor office and a military education institute.

Russian state media used the same chatbot

Four individual operators fed state outlets, among them a former Sputnik Moldova editor-in-chief. Anthropic says content generated with Claude reached Sputnik Moldova, RIA Novosti, Sputnik en Español, Sputnik Africa, and RT's English newsroom, including fabricated claims about Moldova's President Maia Sandu before the parliamentary election of 28 September 2025. 

A Russian-speaking operator in Bangui also supplied daily material to Radio Lengo Songo, a station investigators say the Wagner Group founded and funded in 2017, coordinating with RT, Sputnik Afrique, and TASS.

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Two crews went after the AI company itself

A Russian-speaking actor moved from hotel-booking and fintech intrusions to attacking AI firms, planting instructions in one vendor's testing system and hitting roughly 30 companies in four days while chasing an unreleased Claude model. The hunt for the model failed, though the actor did take production API keys from that testing system, and Anthropic says its own systems were never breached. A Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking group meanwhile sold fake discounted access to the assistant, routing customers to a different model and stealing their logins.

Moldova's Victory bloc, a pro-Russian political alliance, plans to participating in the country's September parliamentary elections, the bloc's founder Ilan Shor announced on July 6.

Shor, an exiled pro-Kremlin oligarch, established the Victory bloc in August 2024. The bloc includes his own Shor party, which is banned in Moldova.

Victory will submit documents in the coming days registering the bloc for participation in the September vote, Shor said.

"Our main goal in these elections is to overthrow the fascist regime and hold early democratic elections within the next six months," Shor said.

The candidate list will be headed by Evghenia Gutul, the head of Moldova's Gagauzia region, who is currently on trial for illegally funding the banned Shor party. Gutul maintains ties to Moscow and is currently under U.S. sanctions.

The upcoming September elections carry high stakes for Moldova, one of the pooerest countries in Europe. Moldovan President Maia Sandu said on July 4 that Chisinau's European path rests on the outcome of the vote.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen pledged on July 4 that the European Union will help Moldova defend itself against hybrid threats by "agents of autocracy" as elections approach.

Moldova was granted EU candidate status in 2022. Sandu's ruling Party of Action and Solidarity aims to maintain its parliamentary majority and move the country closer to full membership by 2030.

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The Kyiv IndependentThe Kyiv Independent news desk

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen pledged on July 4 that the European Union will help Moldova defend itself against hybrid threats by "agents of autocracy."

"We are committed to protecting you against the hybrid attacks and the energy shocks that your country has been a victim of," von der Leyen said following the EU-Moldova summit in Chisinau.

"Who is behind those attacks is clear to all of us here. These are the same agents of autocracy trying to undermine our democracies everywhere in Europe."

Von der Leyen praised Moldova's support for Ukraine and the EU, noting its acceptance of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees and its assistance with European wildfire response efforts.

The visit was made in show of solidarity with Moldova, one of Europe's poorest countries, as it prepares for high-stakes parliamentary elections on Sept. 28.

The pro-European government of President Maia Sandu faces a challenge from the pro-Russian Socialist Party, amid growing fears of destabilization ahead of the vote.

Sandu has accused Russia of using its military presence in Moldova's Russian-occupied Transnistria region to stir unrest and derail the country's EU aspirations. On June 12, she warned that Moscow could provoke a crisis in Transnistria to influence the election outcome.

Transnistria has been under Russian-backed separatist control since the early 1990s, with approximately 1,000 to 1,500 Russian troops still stationed in the region.

On June 11, Transnistrian authorities declared a 30-day state of emergency after a sharp drop in natural gas supplies. The unrecognized region has faced mounting energy shortages since January, when Russian energy giant Gazprom halted deliveries in what many see as an attempt to destabilize the situation in Moldova.

Moldova was granted EU candidate status in 2022. Sandu's ruling Party of Action and Solidarity aims to maintain its parliamentary majority and move the country closer to full membership by 2030.

Moldovan Prime Minister Dorin Recean earlier told the Financial Times that Russia plans to send 10,000 troops to Transnistria and establish a pro-Kremlin government in Moldova.

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The Kyiv IndependentTim Zadorozhnyy

Moldovan President Maia Sandu said on July 4 that her country's European Union aspirations depend on Moldovan citizens as a crucial September 28 election approaches.

Sandu hopes her pro-European Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS) will retain its parliamentary majority, paving the way for Moldova, one of Europe's poorest nations, to join the EU by 2030.

Sandu made her remarks at the conclusion of the 27-nation bloc's inaugural summit with Moldova. Her PAS party faces a challenge from the pro-Russian Socialist Party and its allies in the upcoming election. Sandu secured re-election last year by a narrow margin against a Socialist challenger in the ex-Soviet state, located between Ukraine and Romania. A referendum seeking public backing for EU membership also just barely surpassed a 50% majority.

"Prosperity and peace do not occur for nothing, you have to build them. With collective effort and unity. When citizens are united and choose the correct path and proceed along it," Sandu told a news conference after the summit. "The European Union is already happening here. The only risk is if we stop. If we decide this autumn that nothing will stop us, then everything is possible."

Sandu and her party have condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine and accuse Moscow of destabilizing Moldova. Russia, in turn, claims many Moldovans desire to maintain ties with Moscow and accuses Sandu of fostering Russophobia.

Opinion polls suggest that no single party will likely secure a parliamentary majority. If no majority emerges, pro-European parties would need to engage in coalition talks.

At the summit, which included European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council head Antonio Costa, the EU announced the disbursement of the first €270 million ($318 million) tranche of an Economic Growth Plan for Moldova.

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The Kyiv IndependentAnna Fratsyvir

Moscow may instigate a crisis in Moldova's Russian-occupied Transnistria region to destabilize the country ahead of parliamentary elections scheduled for September, Moldovan President Maia Sandu said on June 12, according to Moldovan outlet Newsmaker.

"All these years, Russia has been using the residents of Transnistria and can provoke an even greater crisis at any moment if it suits its plans in Moldova," Sandu said.

"We can expect this crisis to deepen in the coming months, before the elections."

The president's comments come after Transnistria declared a 30-day state of emergency on June 11, due to a sharp reduction in natural gas supplies.

The unrecognized region, located along Moldova's eastern border with Ukraine, has faced mounting energy shortages since January, when Russian gas giant Gazprom halted deliveries.

Sandu, a pro-European leader of the country, warned that Moscow could combine voter bribery and political manipulation with "blackmail" in Transnistria.

"Russia may promise assistance in exchange for votes on the Right Bank. We can expect all sorts of games," the president said.

In February, Moldova's government revealed that Transnistria rejected a 60 million euros ($62 million) EU energy aid package under pressure from Moscow.

The Moldovan president assured that the country's institutions are monitoring the risks and pledged that the elections would be "free and fair," despite growing instability.

Sandu emphasized that Chisinau is prepared to support the population in Transnistria but must first address "the main problem — the withdrawal of Russian troops."

"This is a key issue that we must resolve peacefully, because otherwise we will not be able to justify our financial support," she said.

Moscow continues to maintain a military presence in Transnistria, which has been under the control of pro-Russian separatists since the early 1990s. President Volodymyr Zelensky said in February that around 1,000 to 1,500 Russian troops are currently stationed in the region.  

Chisinau has repeatedly called for the peaceful reintegration of Transnistria and the withdrawal of Russian forces, citing it as essential to Moldova's security and development.

Moldovan Prime Minister Dorin Recean earlier told the Financial Times that Russia plans to send 10,000 troops to Transnistria and establish a pro-Kremlin government in Moldova.

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The Kyiv IndependentAnna Fratsyvir