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Moldovan oligarch, wanted at home in billion-dollar scandal, backs Russian interests from a haven in Israel
CHISINAU, Moldova (JTA) — Perched on a sofa somewhere in Israel, fugitive Moldovan-Jewish businessman-turned-politician Ilan Shor is seen in a video from last month speaking to his supporters back home. His message is, by his standards, relatively mild.
“Maia, you really are Hitler,” he says, addressing Moldova’s pro-European president, Maia Sandu. “Whether you like it or not, I will make sure my people live well.”
With backing from Russia, Ilan Shor has become a leading figure in Moscow’s campaign to destabilize Moldova, a tiny impoverished country wedged between Ukraine and Romania. Facing charges — and since last week, a conviction in absentia — that he stole $1 billion dollars from the Moldovan banking system in 2014, he has been sheltering in Israel.
From there, the opposition leader who is still a member of Moldova’s parliament has been denouncing his charges as politically motivated, organizing regular protests in his native country and spreading disinformation that critics say is designed to undermine Moldova’s efforts to align itself closer with the European Union and away from Russia. Last June, Moldova — which has repeatedly condemned the Russian war in Ukraine — was granted candidate status to the European Union, together with Ukraine. (A previous government collapsed in February under the weight of economic and political stress amplified by Russia’s invasion.)
Whether a fugitive from justice or a target of political retaliation, the presence of the pro-Russian oligarch has become frequently awkward for Israel, which has in recent years become more willing to extradite its citizens facing charges abroad. Shor is an Israeli citizen, and yet he has been sanctioned by the United States in October and the United Kingdom in December. The Israeli foreign ministry declined to comment on any issues related to Shor’s activities, with officials saying that it was a legal issue.
“We do not want the territory of other countries to be used as a launching pad for hybrid attacks against us and for attempts to bring violence here,” said one senior official in Chisinau, Moldova’s capital, when asked how they felt about Shor’s presence in Israel.
Last week, a court in Chisinau sentenced Shor to 15 years in prison for his involvement in the heist and ordered the confiscation of $290 million of his assets. Shor claims that the verdict was “revenge for the protest movement” and promised that it would be “annulled the day after the change in regime.”
Before the recent sentencing, Nicu Popescu, Moldova’s foreign minister, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency from his office in downtown Chisinau that Moldova had established information about “clear coordination between Shor and Russia in their joint attempts to destabilize Moldova.”
“The reality is that Shor is trying to bring violence onto the streets,” Popescu added. “He is operating from Israeli territory and that is problematic. This situation related to Shor is a factor that is problematic for our country, its stability, and for the stability of the region. The scale of the attempts to destabilize Moldova through violent means have risen recently and that is something that matters a lot.”
Ahead of a protest in downtown Chisinau last month, where 54 people were arrested, Moldova police said that they had detained seven people who had been promised up to $10,000 each to stir violence during the protests. Media here reported that the Shor Party, which Shor created in 2015, has been bribing people to attend protests and busing them in from towns across Moldova.
JTA requested an interview with a representative of Shor’s political party but received no response.
Ilan Shor was born in Israel to Moldovan Jewish parents who moved to Israel in the late 1970s, then moved back to Chisinau in 1990. He inherited from his father a successful chain of Moldovan duty-free stores and built a network of businesses across the country. He entered politics in 2015, in a move widely seen as an effort to try and protect himself from the legal fall-out of the banking scandal and fled to Israel in 2019.
Intelligence assessments in both Moldova and the United States have determined that Russia had been seeking to use such protests as a platform to topple Moldova’s government. Shor regularly addresses the protests on videos from his base in Israel.
Ukrainian and Western officials say Shor has links with the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB, which has been channeling money into Moldova as part of its attempts to support pro-Russian voices, The Washington Post reported. Shor, who is married to a Russian pop star, is allegedly known to the FSB as “the Young One” (he is 36).
Demonstrators in Chisinau protest the Moldovan government, Nov 13, 2022. Shor has been involved in organizing ongoing protests. (Vudi Xhymshiti/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
“Moldova is facing hybrid threats,” Popescu said. “We take our security very seriously and our institutions are doing everything they can to keep peace and calm, but it is totally unacceptable that people like Shor try to bring violence onto the streets of Moldova.”
Moldova has submitted an extradition request to Israeli authorities for Ilan Shor’s role in the banking scandal but has received no response, according to senior officials at the Moldovan foreign ministry. Some officials in Chisinau say that Israel may have been waiting for the completion of Shor’s legal appeal process, and that there may now be movement following his sentencing in absentia. Shor is also currently under investigation as a suspect in a range of other cases related to his activities during and since the fraud scandal.
“He is operating from Israeli territory and that is problematic,” Popescu said. “Our institutions are and will be taking the security of our citizens very seriously and knowing how careful Israel is about its own security, I am sure that Israel can have a lot of sympathy.”
“Shor is the most important political ally of Russia in Moldova,” said Valeriu Pasha, the director of the Moldovan thinktank Watchdog.MD. “The Shor Party works as a classic organized crime group, and it looks like he is ready to be part of some of the tough scenarios of Russian influence in Moldova.”
“He has received almost total control of Russian-affiliated media which is broadcasting in Moldova,” added Pasha. Shor owns a number of channels, while outlets like Russia’s Perviy Kanal, or Channel One, are rebroadcast in Moldova, where Romanian is the state language and Russian is spoken by Russians, Ukrainians and other ethnic minorities. Pasha said that Shor was playing a “critical role” in spreading pro-Russian narratives about the war in Ukraine and the Moldovan government.
Officials in Chisinau said that they were concerned that Shor could flee to Russia if his seven-and-half year sentence is upheld by Moldova’s Appellate Court. “We would want to see him extradited now,” said Veronica Dragalin, Moldova’s chief anti-corruption prosecutor, “because we do not want that to happen.”
Dragalin dismisses allegations by Shor and his allies that the case against him is politically motivated.
“This tactic of trying to claim that you are being politically persecuted is something that happens quite often in these situations in Moldova,” said Dragalin. Bringing Shor to justice in Moldova “would have a significant ripple-down effect in terms of deterring crime,” by underlining that there are consequences for the “rich and powerful” when they break the law, she said.
Some among Moldova’s approximately 15,000 Jews — who have spent the past year dealing with an influx of Jewish refugees from Ukraine — worry that increasing anger towards Shor, who has a number of close Jewish associates in the country, might blow back onto the community.
“Speaking about the consequences of everything that is going on,” said Aliona Grossu, the director of the Jewish Community of Moldova, “when it is linked to some political figures, of course there is a spill-over effect on the community.”
This, she worried, had caused an uptick in antisemitism by causing the proliferation of stereotypes that most Jews in Moldova were either “illegally wealthy” or were “connected” to Shor.
Shor is not particularly close to the Jewish community in Moldova. Grossu emphasized that despite her having worked for the community for 13 years, she had never met him, and that he had never had any involvement with the community — beyond paying his membership dues.
There are pockets of support for Shor among the local Jewish population, which is overwhelmingly Russian-speaking. On a recent day in Orhei, a sleepy town in central Moldova that Shor was once mayor of and remains its member in parliament, the leader of the tiny local Jewish community welcomed a set of Jewish visitors from Chisinau. Iziaslav Mundrean, standing outside the town’s Jewish museum, said that Shor was “a good man.”
Shor, he added, had paid for the construction of a new driveway for the collapsing Jewish cemetery and a new gate to be installed. He had also funded windows for an old synagogue that has since been transformed into the Jewish museum for the town.
Two other Jewish men from Chisinau standing nearby raised their eyebrows at Mundrean’s comments and launched into a debate about whether there was anything to respect about Shor.
Shor simply “had not been given the opportunity,” Mundrean continued, adding that the widespread dislike towards him across Moldova was because “people by-and-large do not like rich Jews.”
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Klimt Portrait That Helped Save Jewish Subject From Nazi Persecution Sells for Record $236 Million at Auction
Painting by Gustav Klimt ‘Bildnis Elisabeth Lederer’ (Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer) on display at Sotheby’s auction house new global headquarters on Madison Avenue in the Marcel Breuer building in New York, NY on Nov. 12, 2025. Photo: Lev Radin/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
A Gustav Klimt portrait that helped safe its Jewish subject from Nazi persecution during the Holocaust sold on Tuesday for a record-breaking $236.4 million at a Sotheby’s auction in New York.
Klimt’s “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” is a 6-foot-tall painting that the artist worked on for two years between 1914 and 1916. It depicts the 2o-year-old only daughter of August and Szerena Lederer, wrapped in an East Asian emperor’s cloak adorned with dragons. The Lederers, who were Jewish, were Klimt’s greatest patrons and also the second wealthiest family in Vienna, Austria, only behind the Rothschilds. Klimt painted portraits of other Lederer family members as well and their art collection included many Klimt paintings.
The painting is one of only two full-length Klimt portraits that remain privately owned, while the majority of the rest are in museums. The portrait sold for $205 million plus premium to a buyer over the phone. It marks a record for a piece of modern art and doubled the previous record for a Klimt painting, according to Reuters. Sotheby’s declined to share the identity of the portrait’s buyer.
Following Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938, which took place two years after August Lederer died, Nazis looted the Lederer art collection but left behind the family portraits because they were considered “too Jewish” to be worth stealing, according to the National Gallery of Canada, where “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” was on loan for three years.
In an attempt to save herself from Nazi persecution, Elisabeth fabricated a story that Klimt, who was not Jewish and died in 1918, was her real father. The fact that Klimt had a reputation as a philanderer and spend years obsessing over Elisabeth’s portrait helped support her story. Szerena even signed an affidavit supporting the false claim about Klimt’s paternity in an effort to save her daughter, according to the National Gallery of Canada. The Nazi regime ultimately gave Elisabeth a document stating that she was descended from Klimt and along with help from a former brother-in-law, who was a high-ranking Nazi official, she lived safely in Vienna until she died of an illness in 1944.
The painting was then looted by the Nazis and nearly destroyed in a fire during World War II, but miraculously survived. It was returned to a Lederer family member in 1948, who kept the piece until selling it in 1983. “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” joined the art collection of Estée Lauder heir and Jewish billionaire Leonard Lauder in 1985. He died in June at 92 and five Klimt pieces from his collection have sold at Sotheby’s for a total of $392 million.
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Iran Seeks Saudi Leverage to Revive Stalled Nuclear Talks With US
Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman speaks during a meeting with US President Donald Trump, in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, DC, US, Nov. 18, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Iran has asked Saudi Arabia to persuade the US to revive stalled nuclear talks, underlining Tehran’s anxiety over a possible repeat of Israeli airstrikes and its deepening economic woes, two regional sources with knowledge of the matter said.
A day before Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s visit to the White House earlier this week, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian sent a letter to the de facto Saudi leader, Iranian and Saudi media reported on Monday.
In the letter, Pezeshkian said Iran “does not seek confrontation,” wants deeper regional cooperation, and remains “open to resolving the nuclear dispute through diplomacy, provided its rights are guaranteed”, the sources told Reuters.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said on Wednesday that Pezeshkian’s message to the Saudi crown prince was “purely bilateral.” The Saudi government media office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
IRAN‘S NUCLEAR SITES BOMBED IN JUNE
Prior to the 12-day war in June triggered by Israeli airstrikes, during which US forces struck three Iranian nuclear sites, Iran and the US held five rounds of talks on the Islamic Republic’s contentious uranium enrichment program.
Since the war, the negotiations have hit an impasse, even as both sides insist they remain open to a deal.
One of the sources in the Gulf said Iran is seeking a channel to reopen talks with Washington, and that the Saudi leader also favors a peaceful solution and conveyed that message to US President Donald Trump during his visit.
“MbS [the Saudi crown prince] also wants this conflict to be over peacefully. This is important to him, and he relayed this to Trump and said he is ready to help,” the Arab Gulf source said.
On Tuesday, the Saudi ruler told reporters: “We will do our best to help reach a deal between the United States and Iran.”
Riyadh and Tehran have been long-time strategic rivals in the Middle East, often backing opposing sides in regional proxy wars, until a China-brokered rapprochement in 2023 eased hostilities and restored diplomatic relations.
Saudi Arabia’s growing political weight has made it an increasingly decisive actor in regional diplomacy. Its deep security ties with Washington – and particularly the leadership’s close relationship with Trump – endow Riyadh with leverage few others in the Middle East possess.
Meanwhile, Iran‘s regional standing has weakened over the past two years from devastating military blows inflicted by Israel on its allies Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the fall of its close ally, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
“Shifting mediation channels from countries such as Oman and Qatar to Saudi Arabia – a country with structural power, direct influence in the US and a practical resolve to reduce tensions – is the best strategic decision under current circumstances,” said Hamid Aboutalebi, a former senior Iranian diplomat.
“These characteristics make Saudi Arabia an effective mediator and a genuine channel for conveying messages, a position that neither Oman nor Qatar nor the Europeans possess,” Aboutalebi wrote on X.
Given that it is seeking to establish its own uranium enrichment programme, Saudi Arabia has an interest in promoting a US-Iranian nuclear deal, said Firas Maksad, Washington-based managing director at consulting firm Eurasia Group.
During MbS’s Washington visit, he and Trump signed a declaration to complete talks on a civilian energy program, without saying whether Riyadh would be able to enrich.
“The Saudi quest for enrichment is related to US-Iran nuclear diplomacy,” Maksad said. “Saudi has an interest in promoting the US-Iran nuclear talks via a quiet back channel.”
IRAN, US SAY THEY BACK DIPLOMACY, BUT DEMANDS CLASH
The stakes for reviving nuclear diplomacy are high.
Conditions set by Tehran’s clerical establishment and the Trump administration remain sharply at odds, and a failure to narrow differences risks igniting a new regional war.
Gulf states, wary of being dragged into a broader conflict if Israel strikes Iran again, have previously acted as intermediaries – particularly Qatar and Oman.
Iran accuses Washington of “betraying diplomacy” by joining its close ally Israel in the June war, and insists that any deal must lift US sanctions that have crippled its oil-based economy. Washington, meanwhile, demands that Tehran halt uranium enrichment on its soil, curb its ballistic missile program and stop backing regional militia proxies – terms Iran has rejected.
Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have warned they will not hesitate to strike Iran again if it resumes enrichment, a potential pathway to developing nuclear bombs.
Western powers and Israel accuse Tehran of using its declared civilian nuclear program as a cover for developing bomb material. Iran says it seeks only peaceful atomic energy and vows a “crushing response” to any more Israeli aggression.
ECONOMIC ISOLATION, PUBLIC ANGER PUSH RULERS TO SHIFT COURSE
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a hardliner who has the final say on foreign policy and the nuclear program, has ruled out negotiations under threat.
“They want to impose their demands and advance their goals through military and economic pressure. This approach is unacceptable, and Iranians will not submit to it,” he said.
But that line-in-the-sand approach does not cut it for many ordinary Iranians struggling with the privations of daily life.
The economy is buckling under a collapsing currency, soaring inflation and chronic shortages of domestic energy and water – chiefly driven by years of mismanagement and sanctions.
Hemmed in by mounting public anger and the risk of further Israeli attack if nuclear diplomacy fails, Iran’s clerical elite is scrambling for a breakthrough with Washington to ease its crushing economic isolation, two senior Iranian officials, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters.
Kamal Kharrazi, a senior adviser to Khamenei, last week appealed to Trump to pursue “genuine talks with Iran grounded in mutual respect and equality,” according to Iranian state media.
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Israel Expects to Keep Regional Military Edge Despite Planned Sale of F-35s to Saudi
An F-35 jet performs at the Dubai Airshow in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Nov. 17, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Amr Alfiky
Israel expects to maintain access to more advanced US weaponry, a government spokesperson said on Thursday when asked about Washington’s plan to sell F-35 warplanes to Saudi Arabia.
Israel is the only Middle East country operating the F-35, one of the most advanced warplanes ever built. US law guarantees Israel a “qualitative military edge” in the region.
“The United States and Israel have a long-standing understanding, which is that Israel maintains the qualitative edge when it comes to its defense,” spokesperson Shosh Bedrosian told reporters.
“That has been true yesterday, that has been true today, and the Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] believes that will be true tomorrow and in the future,” she said.
The spokesperson’s remarks were the first official comment from the Israeli government on the Saudi sale, announced earlier this week by President Donald Trump.
Saudi Arabia does not officially recognize the state of Israel. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, said during a visit to Washington this week that the kingdom wanted official ties with Israel but also wanted to ensure a clear path for a two-state solution with Palestinian independence.
Israel‘s Netanyahu opposes Palestinian statehood.
US officials have said the Saudi jets will not have superior features found in Israel F-35 fighters, which include advanced weapons systems and electronic warfare equipment.