Don't know if this link will work - if it doesn't then I can post the whole interview. https://archive.is/PMdm1 The woman Putin tried – and failed – to break Adrian Blomfield - Senior Foreign Correspondent Maia Sandu is the Telegraph’s World Leader of the Year after defying the Kremlin to turn Moldova into Europe’s front line of democracy In 2025, Vladimir Putin went to extraordinary lengths to crush Maia Sandu, Moldova’s president. In this David-and-Goliath struggle, there should have been only one winner. Moldova is a poor country of just 2.4 million people, battered by an economic crisis sparked by the Ukraine war. The Kremlin funnelled a fortune into a campaign to unseat Sandu’s party in a parliamentary election that was arguably the world’s most consequential democratic contest of the year. Russia flooded the country with disinformation, fabricating claims that she was so devoted to “Western degeneracy” that she bought Sir Elton John’s sperm to give birth to a gay child. Yet against the odds, Sandu prevailed, preventing her country from becoming an agent of Russian influence that would have threatened Ukraine and the rest of Europe. It is not hard to see why Moldovans kept the faith. Unlike her boorish, corruption-tainted predecessors, she is scrupulously abstemious, living in a small flat and flying with budget airlines on official business. For her modesty, resolve and giant-slaying courage, she is a deserved inaugural winner of the title, Telegraph World Leader of the Year. Below is an excerpt from the article: Had she stumbled in this year’s poll, her role would have been reduced to symbolic meaninglessness, with a hostile pro-Russian government stripping her of meaningful power and threatening Moldova’s democratic future. The consequences for Ukraine would have been grave, further isolating it among former Soviet states. Western intelligence suggests the Kremlin hoped a friendly government in Chisinau would permit it to deploy 10,000 troops to reinforce the Russian garrison in separatist Transnistria, a Moscow-backed region that broke away from Moldova and shares a long border with Ukraine. Such a move would have imperilled Odesa, Ukraine’s largest port and maritime lifeline. “If Russia’s proxies had won, it would have meant that Russia would have run the country,” Ms Sandu says. But the Russian subversion campaign, she insists, was not just about knocking Moldova off its pro-European path or even opening a back door to Ukraine. Putin’s ultimate aim, she believes, was to turn Moldova into a hybrid warfare laboratory, rehearsing tactics that would then be deployed to interfere in and manipulate elections across Europe, from Hungary to Britain. “Moldova is one of the very few countries which has experienced the full range of Russia’s hybrid attack methods,” she says. “But the target is not Moldova. Moldova is just the testing ground. The target is Europe, and Europe should learn from us, from countries which are on the front line of the fight for democracy. Democracy on the continent is in danger.”