RT journalist Chay Bowes has been detained by the Romanian authorities upon arrival in Bucharest on Thursday, where he had traveled to cover the country’s upcoming presidential election.
According to the Irish reporter, police boarded the plane immediately after landing and were specifically looking for him. “They only wanted me. Came onto the plane, asked who is Chay Bowes, and six of them took me from the plane,” he said.
The officers reportedly told Bowes that their “superiors” wanted to interview him and questioned him about the purpose of his visit to Romania.
Following the brief detention, Bowes – who is an EU citizen – was deported from Romania. According to his wife, he was put on a plane bound for Istanbul.
Bowes has worked with RT since 2023. Prior to that, he co-founded the Irish investigative journalism website The Ditch in 2021 and helped to run it until his resignation in 2022. He previously helped expose a leak of sensitive documents by then-Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar. The story sparked an uproar and led to a criminal investigation against Varadkar that was later dropped.
The presidential election in Romania is scheduled to take place over two rounds, on May 4 and May 18. The dates were set in January after Romania’s Constitutional Court annulled the results of the initial vote held in November 2024.
The original first round had been won by Calin Georgescu, a vocal NATO critic and opponent of supplying weapons to Ukraine. Running as an independent candidate, Georgescu secured 23% of the vote. However, the court invalidated the outcome, citing alleged “irregularities” in his campaign and intelligence reports claiming Russian interference – allegations that Moscow denied.
It later emerged that a TikTok influencer campaign had been paid for, not by the Kremlin, but by the pro-EU Romanian National Liberal Party (PNL), which has governed the country for much of the last three decades. Its most prominent member, Nicolae Ciuca, was a losing candidate in the November election.
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