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By Tuesday night, the seat of government had been badly battered and scores of people had been injured. But riot police had regained control of the president’s offices and Parliament Wednesday.

Young people have increasingly used the Internet to mobilize politically; cellphones and text messages helped swell protests in Ukraine in 2004, and in Belarus in 2006.

The immediate cause of the protests were parliamentary elections held on Sunday, in which Communists won 50 percent of the vote, enough to allow them to select a new president and amend the Constitution. Though the Communists were expected to win, their showing was stronger than expected, and opposition leaders accused the government of vote-rigging.

Election observers from the European Union and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe had tentatively accepted the voting as fair, though they expressed some concern about interference from the authorities. But the results were a deep disappointment in the capital, where Communist candidates lost the last round of municipal elections.

Behind the confrontation is a split in Moldova’s population. The collapse of the Soviet Union brought benefits to much of Eastern Europe, but in Moldova it ushered in economic decline and instability. In 2001, angry citizens backed the return of the Communists and their social programs.

But Moldova remained desperately poor, and young people flocked overseas to work. They have looked to the West as the best path to economic stability and have defied Mr. Voronin’s government by urging closer integration with Romania.

“I wouldn’t necessarily call it an anti-Communist movement,” Mr. Patterson said. “This really is a generational squeeze. It’s not really the Communists versus the opposition. It’s the grandmothers versus the grandkids.”

This morningelection officials in Moldova began a recount of votes, which was ordered by President Vladimir Voronin following the protests. The results of the recount will be announced on Friday.

"Not only did we underestimate the power of Twitter and the internet, we also underestimated the explosive anger among young people at the government's policies and electoral fraud," said Morar.

The demonstrations continued into Tuesday peacefully. But later that day, with no response from the government, protesters swept police aside to storm the parliament building and the towering presidential palace opposite. Fire broke out in one wing of the parliament, and the young protesters vented their fury by wrecking computers and office furniture.

Moldova, with a population of 4 million, is Europe's poorest country, and a large number of young people are forced to find work in the west.

She does not believe the current vendetta against her is purely the work of the Moldovan authorities, but sees the Kremlin's hand in it as well: "It was when Russia expressed strong support for Moldova's position on the elections, and condemned the protests, that they started targeting us."

Morar was expelled from Russia in 2007 after writing a series of articles accusing top Kremlin officials, including Alexander Bortnikov, the current head of the Russian security services, the FSB, of being behind the murder of Russia's central bank deputy head Andrey Kozlov in September 2006.

According to official results, the party took about 49.9% of the votes, but opposition leaders dismissed the result as fraudulent and have demanded a rerun.

Despite some economic progress under the communists, who have been in power since 2001, Moldova remains the poorest country in Europe. About 600,000 Moldovans have left to find work in EU countries.

Moldova's provinces largely support the pro-Russian communists, but the capital favours the more western-leaning opposition.

Andrew Wilson, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said: "Moldova's violent 'Twitter revolution' is totally different from the peaceful protest of Ukraine's Orange revolution."This time, the crowd are not angry at a stolen election, but at the growing corruption of the ruling Communist party, its recent turn towards Russia and an imminent economic crisis."

Russian analysts, however, suggested that the protests were unjustified because western observers had confirmed that the communists were legitimate winners of the election and had certified the poll as fair."This is an active attempt by a small minority to take power," Vladimir Zharikhin, the deputy director of the Moscow Institute for the Study of Post-Soviet Countries, said.

What Moldovans think about Romania and Russia depends entirely on whom you ask, even among the 76 percent of the population that, according to the 2004 census, identify themselves as ethnically Moldovan.

Moldova is the poorest country in Europe, with remittances from workers abroad making up 36.5 percent of its gross domestic product, according to the World Bank

Vasile Botnaru, a journalist, has a different perspective. He was 13 when he stumbled across Romanian books in his father’s attic and realized, to his astonishment, that the language was so close to Moldovan that he could read it without a dictionary. Everything he had learned in Soviet schools — that Moldovans were ethnically and linguistically distinct from Romanians — was wrong, he said.

As the Soviet Union entered its final years, a movement to reconcile the two countries burst into the mainstream. Moldova’s Parliament switched to the Roman alphabet, and Romanian replaced Russian as the state language. Clocks changed from Moscow to Bucharest time, and the government introduced a new flag virtually identical to Romania’s.

Unification with Romania became a high-profile political cause. Its splashy figurehead, Iurie Rosca, spoke beside huge maps of a “greater Romania” that included most of Moldova.

But the notion was anathema to Russian-speaking Moldovans, the Soviet-era elites who made up about a quarter of the population. And in 2001, after a decade of unruly capitalism had left the country bankrupt, there was a swing back to the old order. Voters elected the Communist government of Mr. Voronin, who promised to restore the Soviet-era safety net and join a union with Russia and Belarus.

However, the Communist (and anti-Romanian) influence also has passionate defenders in Moldova, since Romanian troops allied with Nazis had a cruel record in Moldova during World War II. Russia is seen as a protective big brother against the Romanian influence in parts of Moldova -- especially Transnistria, a breakaway region with many Russian speakers and its own, but still internationally unrecognized, president.

some of the anti-Communist opposition parties in Moldova want to join the EU, if possible by reunifying with Romania. The two nations were unified for a while before World War II, and about two-thirds of Moldovans claim Romanian descent. Reunification was a campaign issue in Sunday's election.

"If Romanians and Moldovans decide in favor of a union," one European diplomat said in last week's run-up to the vote, "the EU will not oppose them."

"The Moscow authorities are afraid of spontaneous mass protests in the regions … and, for this reason, Russian television is showing what is happening in an exclusively negative light," Dmitry Oreshkin, a Moscow-based political analyst, told Reuters. "It is beneficial for the Kremlin to show the consequences of peoples' protests to justify why it needs to be tough."

Russian troops have kept the peace in Transnistria since 1992, and Russian support for the region has been compared to Russian support for breakaway regions in Georgia and Ukraine.

a large protest in the capital was brewing on Friday -- organized on a Twitter stream tagged #pman, which stands for the initials of Chisinau's biggest square-- with protesters claiming the government would use the threat of a Romanian coup as a reason to arrest people illegally.

The violence on Tuesday was a setback for the protesters' cause even within Moldova's anti-Communist community, and some experts wondered if it wasn't orchestrated.

"The protests were initially very peaceful, but then a small group, which seemed to be very well-organized, started these violent riots," Igor Munteanu, who runs a think tank in Chisinau called Viitorul, told Britain's Independent newspaper. "My suspicion is that this was provoked and directed from within. Elements of the Communist leadership do not want closer relations with the EU, as it will mean loosening their grip on power. They know that if they provoke a crisis with Romania and the EU, and improve relations with Moscow, they will be able to continue running the country as they please."

Some Russian analysts on Wednesday were blaming President Barack Obama for the Moldovan unrest, saying American's interest is to hem in Russia.

Russia’s foreign ministry, in a statement on Wednesday, said the riots were a plot aimed at undermining Moldova’s sovereignty and it pointed a finger at forces which favour a reunion with Romania. “The Russian foreign ministry hopes that common sense will prevail, public and constitutional order will be restored in the next few days and the choice of the Moldovan citizens will be confirmed by all politically responsible forces,” it said.

Official election results from Sunday’s vote put the Communists in front with close to 50 percent. The vote is important because Moldova has a single-chamber parliament which is responsible for choosing the country’s president.

He ordered that Romania's ambassador be expelled, recalled the Moldovan envoy from Bucharest, and said Romanians would in future need visas to cross into Moldova.

Earlier the president described the violence as "a coup d'etat".

Some of the protesters on Tuesday had carried Romanian flags and called for the unification of Moldova with Romania, its bigger neighbour.

Russia's foreign ministry said there was a plot aimed at undermining "the sovereignty of Moldova". But Romania's foreign ministry said: "This accusation is a provocation aimed at the Romanian state."

Senior Czech officials organising yesterday's summit openly acknowledged that the eastern partnership was aimed at countering Russia's influence in its backyard."Foreign policy is always about the projection of interests," said Alexandr Vondra, the outgoing Czech deputy prime minister. "You can project your interests, but you must give the respective countries the freedom to make choices."

The policy launched yesterday breaks new ground by seeking to entice the authoritarian regime of Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus. The instability in Georgia, the recent unrest in Moldova, and the permanent feuding among Ukraine's political elites all point to the formidable challenges for a policy that the European Commission describes as "a strategic imperative".

The new policy treats the six countries as a regional bloc, aiming to establish free trade areas between them and the EU, to tap their energy resources, and to promote human rights and democracy-building projects. But while the initiative is aimed at bringing the six countries in, it is also intended to keep them out. The declaration adopted yesterday was changed to call the six countries "east Europeans" rather than "Europeans" lest the latter description encourage applications to join the EU, as pushed by Ukraine and Georgia and opposed by western Europe.Eastern clamour for visa liberalisation to make it easier to travel to the EU was also blocked, with the issue parked for the long-term.

Moldova’s main opposition leaders announced Tuesday that they would not participate in a vote recount in disputed parliamentary elections, and the president of Romania angrily rejected accusations that Romanian agents were behind huge anti-Communist rallies last week.

“We will not allow Romanians to be blamed simply because they are Romanians,” President Traian Basescu of Romania said in an address to Parliament in Bucharest that was posted on his Web site. “We will not allow Romania to be accused of attempting to destabilize the Republic of Moldova. We will not allow Romanians who live across the Prut to be humiliated simply because they believe in an open society.”

Communists made a better-than-expected showing in parliamentary elections held April 5, leading to youth demonstrations that turned violent. President Vladimir Voronin of Moldova immediately cut diplomatic ties with Romania, saying its secret services had staged the events in an attempt to topple his government.

Mr. Voronin ordered a recount of votes last Friday. But Vlad Filat of the Liberal Democratic Party said at a news conference that he would insist that the elections be invalidated and held again, Interfax reported. Mr. Filat said voter lists had included the names of long-dead people, minors and longtime expatriates.

His party would also have four other ministers in the cabinet, including national security minister, as well as the post of deputy foreign minister.

Lieberman, 50, a Russian-speaking immigrant born in Moldova, resigned from the government in January last year in protest at the restarting of peace talks with the Palestinians, saying: "Negotiations on the basis of land for peace are a critical mistake ... and will destroy us."He is an unashamed hardliner who campaigned on the promise of a new law aimed at the country's Arab minority which would require Israelis to swear an oath of loyalty to Israel as a Jewish state or lose their citizenship.He also advocates carving out part of the Galilee that is home to Arab Israeli villages and handing it over to Palestinian control, stripping the residents of their Israeli citizenship. Those policies proved popular enough for him to come third at the polls, but the oath of loyalty is thought unlikely to come into law.

The agreement between Netanyahu and Lieberman gave a taste of the policies that would follow. "Toppling the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip will be an Israeli strategic goal," the agreement said. The new government would act "with determination" to stop rocket fire by militants in Gaza.It also said: "The government will not conduct political negotiations with terrorist organisations or terrorist elements."Settlements are likely to continue to grow – Lieberman himself lives in Nokdim, a settlement south-east of Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank.

Netanyahu has said the current peace talks with the Palestinians will not succeed and that he would rather pursue an "economic peace", by which he means financial investment in the occupied West Bank.

He also intends to make Iran the centre of his foreign policy. The agreement said: "Israel will make every effort, especially with regard to the international community, to prevent the nuclear armament of Iran, while emphasising that a nuclear Iran, representing a danger to Israel, countries in the region and the entire free world, is unacceptable."

Riad Malki, the Palestinian foreign minister, said: "We have to declare that sadly there is no partner on the Israeli side to negotiate with."

Lieberman, an immigrant and former nightclub bouncer from former Soviet Moldova, does not talk about Palestinian independence. Instead, his party's vision on the two-state solution states: "Israel needs to explain that the demand for a Palestinian state and the refugees' right of return is a cover for radical Islam's attempt to destroy the State of Israel." Lieberman was a member of the current Israeli government, but walked out in January last year as soon as peace talks restarted with the Palestinians.

Britain, in particular, is critical of Israel's settlements in east Jerusalem and the West Bank, all of which are illegal under international law. But that cause might be harder to argue in future given that the almost 500,000 Israeli settlers include Lieberman and his family, who live in Nokdim, deep inside the West Bank.

Lieberman's main target has been his country's own Arab minority, who make up a fifth of the population, and of whom he has said: "Israel is under a dual terrorist attack, from within and from without. And terrorism from within is always more dangerous than terrorism from without."

It was this campaign, particularly his call for Arabs to swear an oath of loyalty to Israel as a Jewish state, that won him so much support in the elections. He has even suggested that some elected Arab MPs in the Israeli parliament should be tried for treason and then executed.He also appeals to more secular Israelis, arguing in favour of civil marriages, as well as advocating a more presidential style of government.

Ukraine, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and the 27 EU states signed up to a declaration promising a “more ambitious partnership”. The EU is also planning to boost the amount of aid it provides to the region to about €600 billion and provide technical assistance to the six states.

Moscow rejects European accusations of meddling in the region and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov criticised the proposed partnership when he met his European counterparts, telling them it should “not get in the way of the post-Soviet era”.

EU diplomats attempted to soothe Russian concerns to prevent tensions between Nato and Russia worsening. “This is not anti-Russian,” said Czech deputy prime minister Alexandr Vondra, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency. “They are our close eastern neighbours and we have a vital interest in their stability and prosperity. This is an offer, not an EU projection of force.”

However, the commitment of EU states to the eastern partnership initiative came under question, with several high-profile EU leaders staying away. British prime minister Gordon Brown, French prime minister Nicolas Sarkozy, Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and Spanish prime minister José Luís Zapatero did not attend.

Polish hopes that the partnership may be used to give countries such as Ukraine the chance to apply for EU membership face opposition from Germany and the Netherlands. Diplomats from both states insisted on watering down the declaration, which initially referred to the states as “European countries”. Instead, they were described as “partners” and promises of fast-track visa liberalisation were deleted.

In addition to the money, international institutions, including the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the European Investment Bank, have been asked to increase their lending in the six -- Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine -- some of which have been hit hard by the downturn.

But the EU may be losing the competition for influence with a more-determined Russia. Only €350 million of the money is new, suggesting limited commitment. Moscow sees the Eastern Partnership, which it has described as EU "meddling," as an attempt by the West to carry on with a failed attempt to expand NATO into the region, says Alexander Rahr, director of the Russia program at the German Council on Foreign Relations.

In a sign of EU divisions over the Eastern Partnership plan, Ms. Merkel was the only leader of a big EU nation to attend the summit. Leaders of the six Eastern Partnership countries also gave the offer a mixed reception. Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus, and Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin, who have close ties to Moscow, didn't attend.

The project was the initiative of the Czech Republic, which holds the rotating EU presidency till the end of next month.

Prague was unable to convince key EU leaders to attend -- with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and Italian counterpart Silvio Berlusconi among the no-shows.

Overall the meeting was turned into something of a semi-summit, with just over half of the 27 EU nations represented by their heads of state or government.     A senior European Commission official said the absences increase the danger of "policy for the East made by countries from the East (of the EU), and a policy for the Mediterranean made by Mediterranean countries".

The draft shows some of the tensions over the eastward rapprochement, with subtle but key text changes in the final version reflecting the wishes of western Europe -- France, Germany and the Benelux countries in particular -- not to go too far with the project.     The six partner nations are clearly referred to as "Eastern European Partners" whereas the Czechs wanted to drop the "Eastern" tag.

The reference "long-term goal" was also added to a paragraph on visa liberalisation.

No mention of EU membership goals for the six is made, with several EU nations feeling they have enough on their hands with the European aspirations of the Balkan nations.

The Eastern Partnership was promoted by Czech, Polish and Swedish concerns that the EU's political focus had moved to areas where it had little real influence rather than stay on more "European" states.

Today Medvedev joked with a group of students that the remote summit venue, 3,800 miles from Moscow or 5,300 miles via the epic Trans-Siberian Express, had been chosen to remind the Europeans of Russia's vast size. Several EU delegates moaned when Russia held last year's summit with the EU in western Siberia, Medvedev said."They complained: 'Oh, it's a long way.' We said: 'If you don't like it you can fly somewhere else.' They thought for a bit and said: 'OK, we're ready,'" Medvedev said. He added: "They [the Europeans] should understand how big Russia is and should feel its greatness. On the other hand, we also want a partnership with the EU. It's important for us to get together."

"Russia and EU relations are in stalemate. There is a serious lack of mutual understanding, a lack of willingness to understand each other, and a lack of strategic common values," Fyodor Lukyanov, editor-in-chief of Russia in Global Affairs, told the Guardian.He went on: "Relations with Obama and the US are now better. At the same time relations with the EU are getting worse. Since the 1990s Russian-EU relations have been governed by the assumption that Russia would go the European way without applying for membership. This model is now exhausted. They need a new model."

According to Lukyanov, the Kremlin was furious after the EU pressured Belarus this month not to recognise South Ossetia and Abkhazia. "The message was: choose Russia or not Russia. It was absolutely unnecessary from the European side. Alexander Lukashenko [Belarus's president] wasn't going to recognise them anyway for his own reasons," Lukyanov said.

On the divisive issue of energy supplies, President Medvedev raised questions about whether Ukraine can afford billions of dollars to top up its gas stocks. "We have doubts about Ukraine's ability to pay," he said. He also proposed that Moscow and the EU should help Ukraine get a loan for gas payments.

"I would simply not want this partnership to consolidate certain individual states, which are of an anti-Russian bent, with other European states," he said.

There are other examples, like Turkmenistan’s May signing of a gas exploration deal with a German company, and Armenia’s awarding of a major national honor to Moscow’s nemesis, President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia. But the biggest came last week when Kyrgyzstan — set to receive $2.15 billion in Russian aid — reversed a decision that had been seen as a coup for Moscow, last winter’s order terminating the American military’s use of the Manas Air Base there.

There are few projects that matter more to Russia than restoring its influence in the former Soviet republics, whose loss to many in Moscow is still as painful as a phantom limb. Competition over Georgia and Ukraine has brought relations between Moscow and Washington to a post-cold-war low, and the matter is bound to be central to the talks that begin on Monday between Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, and President Obama.

Russia’s ability to attract its neighbors to its side and keep them there is unimpressive. The Kremlin’s methods have been reactive and often bullying, combining incentives like cheap energy or cash disbursement with threats of trade sanctions and gas cutoffs.The war in Georgia seems to have hurt Moscow in that regard. Rather than being cowed into obedience, as most Western observers feared, the former republics seem to have grown even more protective of their sovereignty. Moreover, the leaders themselves have thrived by playing Russia and the West and, in some cases, China off against one another, although that has not brought stability or prosperity to their countries. In Moscow’s so-called zone of privileged interests, in other words, Russia is just another competitor.

Kyrgyzstan’s reversal on Manas is a case study in canny horse trading. Russian officials, including Mr. Medvedev, have said they blessed the decision, and that may be true, but President Kurmanbek S. Bakiyev is the one who walked away with what he wanted. Moscow wanted the base, a key transit hub for the United States’ war in Afghanistan, shut down; Kyrgyzstan wanted more money. In February, Moscow seemed to have achieved a master stroke — at a news conference announcing the pledge of $2.15 billion in Russian aid, Mr. Bakiyev said the United States would have to leave Manas in six months.

The first Russian payments — a $150 million emergency grant and a $300 million low-interest loan — arrived in April, allowing Mr. Bakiyev to pay wages and pensions as he began his re-election campaign. Then Kyrgyzstan shocked the region by announcing a new agreement with the United States. Washington will pay more than triple the rent for the base — now called a “transit center” — increasing its annual payment to $60 million from $17.4 million, while kicking in upwards of $50 million in grants to the government. No one knows if the Kremlin will make good on the rest of its pledge.

Moldova, which has just received a Russian pledge of $500 million four weeks before voters go to the polls to elect a new Parliament.

Belarus’s president, Aleksandr Lukashenko, who is avidly pursuing Western partners, has been barraged with carrots and sticks from Moscow — first promised $2 billion in Russian aid, then bitterly chastised for his economic policy, then punished with a crippling ban on the import of milk products, then rewarded by a reversal of the import ban. Russia regards Mr. Lukashenko’s truculence as a bluff.

In early January, a spokesman for the Czech presidency described the Israeli offensive in Gaza as more defensive than offensive, taking a position that was anathema to most big European nations, including France, which had strongly condemned Israel’s action. That prompted the Czechs to revoke their comments, which they said had been misunderstood.

Likewise, the Czechs apologized to several countries for a public artwork they commissioned in Brussels to celebrate their presidency. The art installation consisted of an avowedly satirical map of Europe that depicted Bulgaria as a Turkish toilet and Germany as a highway resembling a swastika, among other offenses.

Ahead of Mr. Obama’s first presidential trip to Europe, Mr. Topolanek called the American fiscal stimulus package “a road to hell” in a speech to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France.

With Mr. Topolanek a lame duck, the signature event of the Czech presidency — a May meeting to engage with the European Union’s eastern neighbors, including Georgia, Moldova and Belarus — was snubbed by leaders of the main European players, including France, Britain and Italy.