In the past few weeks, a parade of senior Western officials has streamed through Skopje, the modest capital of the tiny republic of Macedonia, which is smaller than Maryland and has a population of barely 2 million.

The most recent VIP, last Monday, was Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who called Macedonia “a reliable security partner and a valued contributor to global peace and security.”

Why all the fuss? On Sept. 30, citizens will vote on whether to change the country’s name to North Macedonia, to end a decades-old dispute with neighboring Greece and to open the way for membership in the European Union and NATO. That choice, in turn, has touched off another geopolitical joust between the West and Russia, which is doing its best to undermine the Greek-Macedonian agreement and, thus, block another NATO expansion.

What’s striking is the difference in tactics: While the democracies are wooing Macedonians with appearances and speeches by the likes of Mattis, Russia is conducting a veiled propaganda campaign, flooding social media with fake news and subsidizing local extremists who have organized protests. Moscow’s operation resembles those it conducted in the United States, Britain and other democracies before recent elections. A principal feature is fake social media accounts disseminating poisonous – and blatantly false – information. Some tell people to burn their ballots. They peddle lies about police attacks against opponents of the name change.

Macedonia does not border Russia but is surrounded on three sides by NATO member states.

It poses no conceivable threat to Russia, but its entrance into the trans-Atlantic alliance and European community will help stabilize a historically volatile corner of Europe. Moscow’s spoiling campaign is another reminder that Russian President Vladimir Putin views relations with the West in stark zero-sum terms: Any gain by the democracies, however small, is regarded as a mortal threat.