After Ukraine, 'Moldova will be next' claims congressman at AOC 2025
NewsDecember 10, 2025
NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland. As peace talks between Russia and Ukraine falter, a prominent congressman predicted to attendees at the Association of Old Crows' 2025 annual conference on Wednesday that Russia would not stop with Ukraine and would seek to invade Moldova and threaten the Baltics -- although he did not provide evidence or details.
Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee’s cyber, information technologies, and innovation subcommittee, said that Russia will not stop with its war in Ukraine and predicted that "Moldova will be next." He also said the Baltic states are under “serious threat,” tying those assertions to his long-standing push for greater investment in electronic warfare (EW) and electromagnetic-spectrum (EMS) capabilities.
Bacon, a retired Air Force brigadier general and former electronic warfare officer, protested that Russia was being underplayed in the current U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS). “In the first administration of President Trump, it was clear we had to have a military that could compete with China and Russia,” he said. “In the new national security strategy, it does not say that. It has one line on Russia. It doesn’t treat it as a threat. … It doesn’t clearly outline China as a threat.”
Bacon did not say why he believed there would be a follow-on Russian campaign against Moldova or imminent moves against Baltic NATO members, instead using the scenario to underscore his criticism of the NSS and to argue for more aggressive defense budgeting. “If we have people in the Pentagon and on the National Security Council that feel this way, we’re going to have a hard time to get budget priorities on electronic warfare,” he said. “Our goal is to have dominance, or to be able to hit any target we want with these two adversaries, and it takes electronic warfare to do that.”
Bacon portrayed himself as a persistent internal critic of underinvestment in EW, citing his experience in the Pentagon in the early 2010s and his later efforts in Congress to expand the EA-37 Compass Call fleet as examples of what he called institutional reluctance to prioritize electronic attack and protection. “I said to my boss, we are not doing anything in electronic warfare. What are we doing?” he recalled of his time on the Air Staff. “And this is the answer: We don’t have any bandwidth for electronic warfare. Our priorities are the F-35, the KC-46, the B-21, the new ICBM. There is nothing for EW.”
