By Madalin Necsutu

Moldova’s opposition pro-European leader, Maia Sandu, won the presidential election race in Moldova on Sunday by a wide margin, after winning 57.63 per cent of the votes cast in the run-off, way ahead of the 42.37 per cent won by the pro-Russian incumbent, Igor Dodon.

By that point, 99.86 per cent of the ballots had been counted, making the result indisputable.

Just over 1.65 million Moldovan citizens cast votes on Sunday, out of a total electorate of 3.2 million.

Moldovans living abroad set a new record in terms of voting, casting over 262,000 votes, mostly in Western Europe. About one million Moldovans live and work in the diaspora.

Between the two round of the presidential race, the pro-Russian incumbent, Dodon, called them a “parallel electorate” – remarks that triggered dissatisfaction both at home and in the diaspora. Most families in Moldova have relatives working and living abroad thanks to the right rate of emigration – one of the highest rate in Europe, especially among the young.

After polling stations closed on Sunday night,  Sandu appeared in front of the Action and Solidarity Party headquarters, where a group of supporters greeted her with applause and flowers, chanting “Victory” and “President Maia Sandu”.

“Moldova has a future thanks to the good people in this country,” she said.

In his first speech after the polls closed, Dodon urged everyone to be calm. He added that as leader of the largest political party in Moldova, the Socialists, he remained ready to engage in dialogue with all parties to maintain stability in the country.

Political experts in Chisinau said use of  fake news against Sandu and her campaign appeared to have backfired against Dodon in the end.

Dodon denied employing Russian advisors on this campaign although some Moldovan investigative media insisted Russian advisors were in fact active in his campaign headquarters.

On Sunday the Central Electoral Commission, CEC, reported that hackers tried to launch several cyber-attacks on its servers. However, tech specialists rejected them all.

To be sure, leading an indirect campaign was not an instinctive step for Washington. He was naturally aggressive and inclined to be impatient. But like everyone else, generals are altered by the extravagant pressures of war, and Washington, relatively young at the age of forty-four when he took top command, could observe, reflect, and adjust more than most senior commanders. The George Washington of 1777 would not be the same man he had been in 1775. At the war’s outset, he did not understand three of its key elements: the role of the militia in the fight, the kind of war he needed to pursue, and the allied intervention that would eventually reshape the war.

There were three stages in Washington’s evolution. First, in 1775 and much of the following year, he was inclined to take the offensive. Second, after a string of stinging setbacks around New York City in the summer of 1776, he shifted to a war of posts. This interim step was, again, not a Fabian approach, but was rather a retreat into fortresses from which he would invite the enemy to bring the fight to him. American troops may not be able to meet British regulars on the open battlefield, Washington was calculating, but perhaps they could fight from behind barriers. The stunning American victory at Bunker Hill a year earlier was the model for this.

But when Washington tried it in the New York area later in 1776, this approach of entrenching failed miserably. So by early 1777 he was reluctantly figuring out a third approach—that is, what an indirect, Fabian strategy might look like. He would pursue this for years, only occasionally offering battle when politics forced him to or when the British left an opening.

Winning battles does not necessarily win wars. Indeed, losing a battle can sometimes be an advantage, because a tactical setback can sometimes result in a strategic gain, if by engaging the enemy one slows his movement, distracts him from other targets, or just wears him down. For example, Benedict Arnold’s confrontation of the British on Lake Champlain in October 1776 resulted in him being “defeated soundly, but the tactical defeat proved an immense strategic gain. The lengthy naval arms race prevented [Major General Sir Guy] Carleton [the British commander] from conquering upstate New York before the winter of 1776–77.” That in turn gave the Americans time to rebuild their forces and go on to win the Battle of Saratoga in the same area a year later.

Astute chroniclers of military operations therefore focus not just on battles but on what actually wins wars. As Mark Kwasny describes it, the Revolutionary War began with a militia fight in Massachusetts. In the South, it mainly was a war of skirmishes. And even in the cockpit of the war, the middle colonies area surrounding New York City, more often than not it took the form of “partisan war”—that is, an irregular or guerrilla war waged in the shadows, often by part-time fighters operating in small, fluid units and then melting back into the civilian population. Part of Washington’s education was recognizing that this was indeed the nature of the war in which he was engaged. The British persisted in perceiving the war as similar to the conventional eighteenth century European dynastic fights they knew, writes R. Arthur Bowler. They were wrong, he finds: “It proved instead to be a popular war, a war in which the people were involved.”