NCMC at Moldova Security Forum 2026
Speech by the Director General of the National Crisis Management Center at the Moldova Security Forum 2026:
Distinguished guests, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen,
We no longer operate in an era of isolated crises. Today's disruptions do not respect borders, institutional jurisdictions, or bureaucratic timelines.
While policy analysts often categorize crises as energy, cyber, environmental, or natural disasters, citizens experience them holistically. They experience them when critical infrastructure fails, schools close, or essential services collapse. Because vulnerabilities are deeply interconnected, our strategic response must be equally integrated.
True national resilience, is not measured by the total prevention of shocks, but by the systemic capacity of our institutions and communities to maintain core functions when multiple cascading failures occur simultaneously.
Throughout 2026, Moldova served as a live testing ground for managing interconnected, transboundary risks:
Infrastructure Dependencies: In March, kinetic attacks on neighboring Ukrainian energy infrastructure instantly compromised the Isaccea-Vulcănești line, threatening our domestic power grid and proving that extra-territorial assets directly impact our national security.
Cross-Sectoral Escalation: Simultaneously, contamination of the Nistru River threatened drinking water across multiple municipalities, requiring immediate, synchronized action across public health, environment, emergency services, and local governments.
These events confirmed a vital structural truth: a crisis is not a technical problem for a single agency; it is a complex governance and resource-allocation challenge. Institutional silos must not dictate the boundaries of our crisis preparedness.
To address this reality, Moldova has fundamentally restructured its governance framework by establishing the National Crisis Management Center (NCMC). Operating under the direct authority of the Prime Minister, the NCMC supports the National Crisis Management Commission. It serves as a strategic integrator rather than a replacement for sectoral agencies, ensuring a unified situational picture and synchronized executive decisions.
Today, this national platform connects over 70 institutions. It bridges the gap between top-tier decision-makers, technical specialists, and local territorial hubs ubs to to ensure centralized policy translates to immediate coordinated action.
A vital pillar of this architecture is enhanced civil-military cooperation. By bridging civilian agility with military logistics, conducting joint operational exercises, and pooling capabilities, we ensure faster decision-making cycles and more efficient resource deployment when time is the most critical variable.
We are anchor-building our system on three core capacities:
Common Situational Awareness: Replacing fragmented institutional assessments with a single, verified, and real- time data stream.
Coordinated Decision-Making: Setting clear strategic priorities and resource mapping across sectors when multiple essential services are compromised at once.
Operational Continuity: Guaranteeing that the state maintains its core functions and continuity of government even under extreme operational disruption.
State capability represents only half of the resilience equation. During large-scale disruptions, central governments cannot act alone. True resilience requires an active ecosystem consisting of local authorities, private critical infrastructure operators, utility providers, and civil society networks.
Our strategy directly aligns with the EU Preparedness Union Strategy, embedding a whole-of- government and whole-of-society methodology into our national fabric. This framework shifts focus heavily toward population readiness, specifically cultivating the capacity of citizens to remain self-sufficient for a minimum of 72 hours during a major breakdown.
To institutionalize this shift from reactive management to proactive societal readiness, I am pleased to announce the launch of "Moldova Prepared". This is a targeted, three- year national program designed to build practical civil preparedness and societal resilience across the country.
This initiative will systematically:
Empower households with clear, actionable operational protocols for temporary utility or service outages.
Strengthen localized governance by tailoring emergency capacities to specific regional vulnerabilities.
Build cross-sector partnerships spanning academic institutions, private enterprises, media, and volunteer networks.
As a foundational milestone of this initiative, we will execute Moldova's national 72-hour preparedness campaign from November 2026.
The first 72 hours of an emergency are the most critical for public infrastructure stabilization. When households possess basic contingencies and verified information, it mitigates panic and frees up emergency services to focus their high- value assets on the most acute, life-saving priorities. This is not an admission of institutional limitation; it is a optimization strategy that makes state and society stronger together.
Resilience is not defined by the absence of crises, but by the systemic capability to anticipate risk, absorb shocks, maintain continuity of service, and recover rapidly.
Through the NCMC and the Moldova Prepared framework, we are transitioning from a system of reactive crisis response to a culture of permanent, proactive national readiness. We are investing not in fear, but in the institutional confidence, stability, and enduring security of our nation. Thank you.