Mircea Geoană, number two in NATO, attended the birthday celebrations of Marius Tucă, host of frequent broadcasts attended by propagandists of the Russian narrative and NATO attackers.
Mircea Geoană, the number two man in NATO, recently attended the birthday of journalist Marius Tucă, a former TV moderator, now online, who frequently hosts guests with anti-NATO, anti-Western and pro-Russia rhetoric. The NATO Deputy Secretary General, accompanied by his wife, was present along with PSD leaders at the journalist’s birthday party, who in turn feeds an anti-Western discourse in discussions with guests such as Dan Dungaciu, H.D. Hartmann or Ion Cristoiu, three house presences in the “shows” hosted by the publication Gândul.ro.
H.D. Hartmann, who calls himself a “political analyst” and “journalist”, even attacked Geoană’s boss, Jens Stoltenberg, in one of Tucă’s shows on February 23, 2024, when Stoltenberg announced that Ukraine would be allowed to use F-16 fighter jets to attack military targets in Russia and that it would be up to each state to decide whether or not to send the planes to Ukraine (min. 10:22) Hartmann called Radio Free Europe the “propaganda bureau of the United States”. It should be noted that Hartmann is not contradicted by Tucă during his anti-NATO, anti-EU, anti-US or anti-Geoană statements, but the discussion is fueled by the moderator who praises him for “making points” in the discussion and tells him that “he will get another invitation on the show”:
- “This means world war (…) I believe in this aberration, no state is going to see its F-16s because, let’s be very clear: You know how much bread has been taken out of the mouths of the respective peoples for the respective states to buy F-16s, because they’re expensive. The Americans don’t give them away for a small roll and they don’t give them away for a Maramureș brandy. The fact that sometimes they go just like a Maramureș brandy and that’s it, it’s over, the fact that sometimes they make famous blunders, that’s something else (…) The gentlemen from Ukraine will dream long and well about flying an F-16 (…) It means world war, it means the destruction of NATO (…) Stoltenberg has managed to turn anti-Russian propaganda into Russophobia (…) If you allow them to attack targets inside Russia you create a fundamental problem because you said that NATO is not at war with Russia”.
In the same broadcast (min. 40:30), Hartmann also talked about how “a Stoltenberg wakes up from a drunken binge or Geoană calls in the evening and says “, at which point he was interrupted by Marius Tucă and asked if he “has something against Mr. Mircea Geoană”: “Yes, a lot, a lot, his brother-in-law is out of the country…”.
Marius Tucă then recalls that “Mr. Geoană has a small problem and that he has to resign (from the post of NATO deputy) to run (for the Romanian presidency, ed.) because the elections are in September”. Hartmann complements Tucă by saying that Geoană should have resigned when “his brother-in-law was discovered in a NATO country while he was Deputy Secretary General of NATO” (from min 41:00).
- “The NATO-ist, white, hetero… homo… transgender, homo sapiens Occident did not win in Ukraine! (…) They were hoping that in two years in Crimea (annexed by Russia in 2014, ed.) Stoltenberg would go with Geoană and Biden and all of them would go to the Black Sea to take a bath there. Not only they didn’t get there, but they also lost Avdiika and they have nothing to justify at this point”, continued Hartmann who is not interrupted or contradicted by Marius Tucă, who, on the contrary, fuels the discussion.
Hartmann also says that Russia’s war in Ukraine is “the war with Europe” and that Russia “has become an Asian power instead of Europe”, but also that there is a “Russian war with Europe”. Hartmann also says that “Ukraine is not fighting for democracy, but for the corruption that has dominated it since 1991 (after the collapse of the USSR, which Vladimir Putin considers a catastrophe)” (min. 50:30).
Last but not least, the historian Armand Goșu, a specialist in Russian history, refuted several anti-Ukraine, anti-EU and anti-Western claims made by Hartmann on another Marius Tucă program, saying that “nobody but Putin” supports such things.
Another very frequent guest on Marius Tucă’s shows is Dan Dungaciu, a self-styled sociologist and geopolitician, one of those who strongly pushes the Russian narrative in Romania.
Asked by Tucă on July 10 (min. 04:32) how he sees NATO, especially in the context of the 75th summit of the alliance, Dungaciu says that it depends on the results of the US presidential elections, which “in the name of security will change the rules of the game” in order to preserve their “hegemony” in the world. Dungaciu is interrupted by the moderator: “Wait a minute, before they change the rules of the game they change the idea of democracy, and therefore of freedom…”.
In another broadcast, Dungaciu says of the war in Ukraine that “it is going down the Afghanistan scenario” (where the Americans had troops for 20 years, and shortly after their withdrawal, the Taliban quickly seized control of the country again).
In a July 11 broadcast, Dungaciu and Tucă talk about how the “big bad problem” is no longer Russia, how the USSR during the Cold War was the “evil empire”: “The evil empire is no longer the Russian Federation. At the perceptual level, not at the declarative level. On a perceptual level the Evil Empire is, if you want, China for the Americans” (from min. 02:30)”.
“(…) The world of American hegemony no longer exists and the Americans have understood this very well”, Dungaciu also says in the same program (min. 06:00).
Asked by Tucă where Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalnyi (who died in obscure conditions in a Siberian camp) went wrong, Dungaciu said in another program that “he trusted the West too much”, drawing a parallel between Navalnyi and Putin:
- “It’s paradoxical, that Putin says that his strategic mistake was that ‘we believed too much in the West’.” Probably also that Mr. Putin believed a little too much in us, or if you like in the values he proclaims, or he believed that at some point we want regime change, or that we support regime change, or that the West will not let anything happen to him.”
A G4Media analysis conducted after the 2021 Moldovan parliamentary elections shows that Dan Dungaciu claimed, completely erroneously, that AUR Moldova would achieve a historic score. AUR did not even cross the threshold. A few days before the Republic Moldova elections, Dungaciu declared:
- “Until yesterday, everyone thought that the polarization in Moldova was Maia Sandu vs. Igor Dodon. A polarization in which Mrs. Maia Sandu was by far the winner. (…) Subsequently, two things happened. The first element refers to the intervention of Voronin, who formed a coalition with Dodon and brought geopolitics into the campaign across the Prut. The second element is the emergence of a coalition of unionist forces represented by the surprising AUR Party, which may be the black swan in Moldova. This party can carry the unionist vote of 44-47 percent in Parliament. And at that moment it could be a party that could even play politics there,” Dan Dungaciu said in a program on Radio Guerrila by Liviu Mihaiu.
AUR obtained a score more than 10 times lower than the 5% threshold that Dungaciu estimated the party would pass.
Dungaciu also stood out in early 2022, when he repeatedly claimed that it was impossible for Russia to invade Ukraine. The last time – four days before the invasion, on February 20, 2022, according to Antena 3. On January 26, he published an article headlined “Don’t look up! There will be no invasion in Ukraine”. In that article published in Adevărul, Dungaciu picked up on one of the favorite ideas of Russian propaganda – of the supposed “American hegemony”.
- “The Americans are neither naive nor inexperienced. If they were, they would not have ruled the world for so long. Therefore, those who accuse them today of failing to be coherent, of not being able to solidarize NATO, of not knowing how to negotiate with Russia and of having poor communication – they don’t know what they are talking about. In fact, the Americans have never started from the real hypothesis of a Russian invasion, with all the necessary precautions, because they know Russia and the region well. All that is going on now is the appearance of invasion, its exacerbation – sometimes ridiculous, it is true – and the preparation for the ‘exit’ from the crisis,” wrote Dan Dungaciu less than a month before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, an invasion he has always played down.
Ion Cristoiu, a journalist and writer who founded Evenimentului Zilei in the 1990s, is another frequent guest of Marius Tucă on Gândul.ro. In one of his shows, Tucă tells Cristoiu: “The European Parliament has blocked EU Council funding until Ukraine receives Patriot systems. Do you understand?”.
Ion Cristoiu: “We are now witnessing, if you want to talk about it, a new batch of drones, lazy, illiterate people, sent there who do nothing but vote with the herd led by Ursula. (…) He can give it to the Ukrainians, let the Martians come, the war is lost. They give the Patriots. Meanwhile the Russians found the answer for Patrion So then what? It’s stupid”.
Cristoiu also says in another program that the recently held 75th NATO Summit is just “another step towards the apocalypse”:
“It is a very dangerous summit. Because it’s a summit that is another step towards the apocalypse. This war is very strange. World War I was never supposed to happen. It happened just like this. That is to say, everyone was crossing a line without thinking that the other would do the same”, says Cristoiu.
In another program, Ion Cristoiu says that it was not the Russians who brought communism to Romania and that he cannot say he is “anti-Russian when I fought alongside the Russians from 1944 to 1945”:
Ion Cristoiu: The gentleman in question, this guyin Cotroceni, was at something, at the NATO celebration, NATO was celebrated, it was a kind of a celebration, every day, and he gave a speech and said, something like, that we Romanians and those from the East are specialists in enmity with the Russians. Could you please tell me how many times we were at war with the Russians compared to… When?
Tucă: In the Second World War, when we turned up our guns.
Ion Cristoiu: That’s all. We were with them between 44? 1711 I was with them? The Great Union, the Little Union, well didn’t we do it with them?
Tucă: Yes, but there’s the perspective that they took Bessarabia and Northern Bucovina.
Ion Cristoiu: Well, they divided Poland three times.
Tucă: I was trying to find an answer, but we had them as adversaries in the Second World War. There’s also this thing that communism came and 50 years is linked to the fact that the Russians came here.
Ion Cristoiu. Did the Russians bring us communism? Romanian communists brought it, Romanians brought it. (…) The Russians did not impose the regime. (…) We weren’t just friends, but I don’t want to say now that we were enemies.
Marius Tucă: The Romanian intelligentsia was sent to the sewer and they were all thrown in prison?
Ion Cristoiu: Which intelligentsia was sent to the gutter? Did they fight against the Russians?
A Context.ro investigation has shown how Ion Cristoiu is part of a network of websites, along with Sorin Roșca Stănescu, Cozmin Gușă and Adrian Severin, that disseminate pro-Kremlin rhetoric, anti-NATO, anti-Western and anti-EU discourse, conspiracy theories or the narrative of the far right in Romania.
For example, the biggest fine that the National Audiovisual Council has ever fined a radio station was the one Gold FM received – 100,000 lei for disinformation. The station’s license is held by a company owned by Cosmin Andrei Gușă, the son of Cozmin Gșă, a former politician and media owner. According to the CNA, Adrian Severin, Cozmin Gusă, Sorin Rosca Stănescu and Ion Cristoiu touched on Russian propaganda, presented distorted information and made biased statements with a pro-Kremlin message in several broadcasts.
Ion Cristoiu is promoted by Sputnik, an important element in the Russian media ecosystem, which picks up his analysis and opinions. According to CNSAS, he was a Securitate collaborator during the communist period, code-named “Coroiu”.
Info Sud-Est sent Marius Tucă a request for a point of view, in which we asked him:
- What is your relationship with Mr. Mircea Geoană, given that he attended your birthday party, in a restricted format, according to the information in the media?
- Why did you invite NATO’s No. 2 to your birthday party, given that in many of the programs you moderate on Gândul.ro you frequently have guests who spout pro-Kremlin and anti-NATO, anti-EU and anti-U.S. rhetoric?
- Do you think it is normal for a journalist to invite politicians or people holding important positions to his birthday party?
- Marius Tucă replied: “Only stupid questions, one more stupid than the other. You should wait, think about it and maybe you will have better questions. If I can help you, I’m here. All the best”.
- Mircea Geoană did not respond to Info Sud-Est’s request for a comment by the time this article was published.
Context
Marcel Ciolacu and Mircea Geoană were caught having dinner at the same table in a restaurant on Monday evening, together with other politicians, including former Prime Minister Victor Ponta, who gave details of the anniversary dinner they attended on the program Decisiv on Antena 3 CNN, reports Antena3.
Marcel Ciolacu and Mircea Geoana listened to the Romanian anthem, played at the Olympic Games after David Popovici’s victory, in a restaurant in the capital. Victor Ponta says that those at the table discussed the Romanian athlete who became Olympic champion in swimming and that it was not a “political meeting”.
- “Even if you cut me and put salt on my cuts, I won’t talk about a private meeting. It was a good friend’s birthday. I don’t know how the birthday guy invited people, but by no means was it a political meeting. I think we stayed more than two hours. It seems perfectly normal to me that people go to birthdays. Even if you torture me, burn me, I won’t talk about private meetings, because it’s in bad taste,” Victor Ponta said on Antena 3.
On Wednesday, Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu, president of the PSD, said that during the recent private meeting he had with Mircea Geoană, Deputy Secretary General of NATO, he did not enter into political negotiations with him on the issue of his presidential candidacy, the discussions being about “football, politics and swimming”, Agerpres reports.
He responded when asked by the media if he had made a political offer to Mircea Geoană during the private meeting the two recently attended at a restaurant in Bucharest, on the occasion of journalist Marius Tucă’s birthday.
- “Me there, together with Mr. Geoană, Mr. Victor Ponta and other guests, with Mr. Tucă’s mother, so there were a lot of people invited, not excessively many, we attended the birthday of a famous journalist in Romania. A journalist that I, Sorin (Sorin Grindeanu – editor’s note), and Olguța (Olguța Vasilescu – editor’s note) are firmly convinced that we were watching on TV when we were still young, each of us, and from whom we all learned”, said Marcel Ciolacu.
The PM pointed out that the talks that evening were not about political negotiations.
- “Normally, when more than two Romanians get together, they talk about football and politics. That evening we also talked about swimming, but we did not enter into political negotiations,” Ciolacu added.
On Wednesday, the Chief of the Executive branch, together with Transport Minister Sorin Grindeanu and the Mayor of Craiova, Lia Olguța Vasilescu, paid working visits to check the works on section 1 and section 4 of the Craiova – Pitesti Express Road.
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