Despite being the only former Soviet republic where Communists regained power, controlling Parliament and ruling the country from 2001 to 2009, Moldova has long set its sights westward, so much so that in 2004, it renamed its foreign office the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and European Integration.

For parts of the 19th and 20th centuries, Moldova was part of Romania, and its language is virtually identical to Romanian. Early this month, Mr. Rogozin, the Russian deputy prime minister, posted a Twitter message suggesting that Romania had a secret plan to annex Moldova, after supporting Moldova’s integration into Europe.

Some Moldovan officials have also accused Russia of fomenting unrest in the country by inflaming the dispute with Trans-Dniester, a breakaway territory that has declared independence and where about a thousand Russian troops remain stationed, and also by financing political groups aiming to topple the ruling coalition.

The Communist Party, which still has the single largest bloc in Parliament and currently opposes the political and trade pacts with Europe, this month began demanding early elections in an effort to dislodge the current government. On Tuesday, Parliament for the second time in two weeks rejected a vote of “no confidence” in the government proposed by the Communists.

The government nearly fell apart earlier this year after a bizarre series of events that began last December when a businessman was accidentally killed on a hunting trip involving some of the country’s top officials. Vlad Filat, then the prime minister, was ousted in the ensuing controversy.

The current prime minister, Mr. Leanca, said that while the government was pursuing overhauls, including anticorruption measures and an overhaul of the judicial system, in hopes of eventually joining the European Union, the outcome was not yet certain. “There are still threats, and it comes from the fact that we have not reached yet the irreversibility of our development, of our future path,” Mr. Leanca said.

In an interview, he described Moldova as at a crossroads. “We could go one way, which would mean embracing democratic values and on those values to build a viable society, and a functioning society with a prosperous economy,” he said. “Or we can stay forever in this gray area, where there is no rule of law, where people do not have confidence in their future and therefore they leave the country.”