Moscow built a new left-wing international. Among the nine founders are a Moldovan and a Serbian party

At the House of Trade Unions in Moscow, a new international network of left-wing parties called Sovintern was established in late April. Among its nine co-founders are the Party of Socialists of the Republic of Moldova and the Serbian Movement of Socialists — groupings from countries the European Union monitors for Russian influence. The organizing committee is led by a deputy speaker of the Russian State Duma, and a greeting from Vladimir Putin was read out to the forum's participants.

Who built Sovintern

The initiator is the party A Just Russia, led by former Federation Council chairman Sergey Mironov. He announced the network under the slogan "Socialism 2.0," with the ambition of uniting more than a hundred left-wing parties and movements from seventy countries. The founding forum was held in Moscow from April 25 to 29, 2026; the organization itself was established on April 27 and today has more than fifteen member organizations. Robert Lansing Institute ↗

The nine co-initiators are a varied group. Besides A Just Russia, they include George Galloway's British Workers Party of Britain, the American Communist Party, the Party of Socialists of the Republic of Moldova, Serbia's Movement of Socialists, Nicaragua's Sandinista National Liberation Front, Morocco's Party of Progress and Socialism, the Congolese Union of Democratic Socialists, and Tunisia's Tunisia Forward movement. Robert Lansing Institute ↗

A Just Russia is not a random player. Analysts describe it as so-called systemic opposition — a controlled left wing that helps the Russian presidential administration retain socially minded voters without ever posing a real threat to power. The chairman of Sovintern's organizing committee is Alexander Babakov, deputy speaker of the State Duma and also first deputy chairman of A Just Russia itself. Robert Lansing Institute ↗

How Romania's Libertatea frames it

On August 1, the Romanian daily Libertatea published an extensive piece that calls the network around Sovintern directly a "new Comintern," drawing on findings from the exiled Russian investigative outlet The Insider. According to the piece, it is a cover for the Kremlin's international special operations, and at least several members of the network are directly involved in recruiting mercenaries for the Russian army. Libertatea ↗

Libertatea describes a three-stage model. First come innocuous activities — cleaning up neighborhoods, distributing food to homeless people, discussion clubs, and nature trips, targeted at immigrants, people below the poverty line, and the lonely. Then more radical actions follow, namely anti-NATO protests and rallies outside Ukrainian embassies. And finally, calls to the most active participants to go fight at the front or, at home, to seek out warehouses and factories supplying Ukraine with ammunition. Libertatea ↗

What is documented and what is a claim

The existence of Sovintern, its founders, and Putin's greeting are verifiable facts. So is the profile of both Western members — the American Communist Party split from the Communist Party USA in July 2024, subscribes to so-called MAGA communism, openly supports Russia's war on Ukraine, and has an estimated three hundred to a thousand members. Britain's Workers Party of Britain was founded in 2019 by George Galloway, a former Labour MP and a regular guest on Russian propaganda programs who, by his own account, lives in voluntary exile outside Britain and repeatedly appears in Russia. Wikipedia — ACP ↗ Wikipedia — WPB ↗

The individual fates on which the Romanian text builds are also documented. Michael Gloss, son of Juliane Gallina, the CIA's deputy director for digital innovation, was killed on April 4, 2024, in the Donetsk region at the age of twenty-one while fighting in the ranks of the Russian army. The CIA itself confirmed this. NBC News ↗ Briton Benjamin Stimson was sentenced in July 2017 by Manchester Crown Court to five years and four months for assisting terrorism after going to fight for pro-Russian separatists. RFE/RL ↗ Libertatea states his sentence as one year longer; the correct figure is five years and four months.

That pro-Russian recruitment channels exist in Europe is also not a hypothesis. The OCCRP consortium documented recruitment via Telegram, where recruiters offered money for surveilling military bases, setting fire to NATO vehicles, and even for murder, with a rate of ten thousand dollars per head. Western and Ukrainian security agencies link these networks to Russian services; Moscow denies this. Since 2024, Ukrainian prosecutors have convicted eighteen foreigners for acts related to sabotage. OCCRP ↗

What remains undocumented is precisely the connecting link that gives the Romanian text its force — namely, that Sovintern as an organization directs or coordinates the recruitment. That, for now, is a claim by The Insider that no one has independently confirmed.

Limits of this account

The Insider is an exiled Russian outlet with an openly anti-Kremlin stance that has a track record of verified exposés, but it also has its own stake in this particular topic. Libertatea is a Romanian tabloid-style daily, and its piece is a pickup, not original investigation.

More important is the question of scale. The American Communist Party has on the order of hundreds of members, and the British Workers Party of Britain has seven local councillors — these are fringe groupings, not the mainstream of the Western left. Conflating one with the other is exactly the kind of distortion on which such texts most often stumble, and one that ultimately helps Moscow, since it makes its fringe allies look bigger than they are.

For a Central European reader, something other than exotic names of American Marxists matters more. Sovintern was not formed as a club of enthusiasts in Latin America — it includes parties from Moldova and Serbia, that is, from countries currently deciding their orientation toward the European Union. That is measurable and trackable even without accepting the sharpest version of the story.

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