The activities of Iranian agents in Europe and Australia, often using third parties, are well known. These plots were mainly directed at Iranian dissidents and journalists who were living in the UK, and also at synagogues, which are the most obvious Jewish symbols in the diaspora.
What is less well-known – albeit in the Jewish context – has been the Russian impetus to cause discord and division. The Russians, too, have been involved in attacks on Jewish sites in Europe, but their assaults are profoundly different in their targets and desired outcome.
While the Iranians have targeted synagogues in London, Melbourne and Belgium, and employed crime gangs in Sweden to create anxiety and terror among the local populations, the Russian strategy has focused on trying to undermine European loyalty to Ukraine. It is also designed to rupture social cohesion more broadly in Europe by sowing discord between Jews and Muslims. Fake narratives were propagated through messaging apps such as Telegram to promote distrust and suspicion between these communities.
Last year, painted red hands appeared in neighbourhoods of Paris. The Wall of the Righteous near the Holocaust Memorial was similarly sprayed. The Wall recalls 3,900 French citizens who risked their lives to save Jews during the Shoah.
They were promoted by the Russian disinformation ecosystem – aided and abetted by social media devotees. The disinformation involved establishing fake online groups that purport to be far-right or Muslim organisations.
In October 2025, in a joint operation with Bulgaria, French national security charged four Bulgarian citizens with the desecration. Georgi Filipov and Kiril Milushev were tried and sentenced to two years for actually carrying out the daubing. They said that they were paid for doing this and apologised. They were said to be living on the margins of society in Bulgaria.
Nikolay Ivanov was sentenced to four years for recruiting them while the alleged ringleader, Mircho Angelov, had simply disappeared. This was the first trial in France against a network of Russian operatives.
The “red hands” symbolism had previously been used by pro-Palestinian protesters to represent the spilled blood of Gaza civilians. Until the French intelligence revealed it was done by the Russian FSB, it was widely thought to be the work of pro-Palestinians.
Around the same time as the red hands attacks, pigs’ heads were discovered near several mosques in Paris – many of them with the scrawled name of President Macron on them. It was originally assumed that these attacks were unrelated, but it is possible they too were the work of Russian operatives.
Russia wants to sow chaos and division in the West. This destabilisation campaign was initiated by Russia at the start of the Gaza war.
It occurs not only on the streets but also online. Within hours of the attacks on the memorial, images went viral. Russian operatives had established fake online groups that purported to be far-right or Muslim organisations to leverage the attacks.
The Russian media last week spoke of “a divorce” between Zelensky and the White House.
If Trump finds Zelensky “difficult”, someone who refuses to cave in to his demands, his Jewishness is clearly an irritant for Putin. In an interview in September 2023, Putin said: “Western managers put an ethnic Jew in charge of Ukraine in order to cover up the anti-human nature of modern Ukraine … this makes for an extremely disgusting situation in which an ethnic Jew is covering up the glorification of Nazism and of those who led the Holocaust in Ukraine, which brought the destruction of millions of people.”
The Putin regime is occasionally critical of Jews – not because it is classically antisemitic but because they have different values from the Kremlin, such as the defence of human rights. Indeed, earlier this month, the ornithologist, Sofya Rozenfeld, who holds both Russian and Israeli passports, was sentenced by a Moscow court to three and a half years in a penal colony for donating 2,000 roubles (A$34) to the Anti-Corruption Foundation.
Putin, of course, denies any antipathy to Jews. He told the St Petersburg International Economic Forum in 2023 that he had “many lifelong Jewish friends”, for instance, his teacher who taught him German at school, and this subsequently allowed him to be a KGB agent in Dresden in the 1980s.
Putin has also had to contend with growing opposition to Israeli policies within Russia. The onset of the Gaza war led to unrest amongst many Muslim communities, such as the incursion into the airport at Makhachkala in Dagestan. Hordes of rampaging young men looked for Jewish passengers who had just arrived from Tel Aviv.
Russia is now engaged in two conflicts where the Jews are a factor – in the Middle East and in Ukraine. It is seen by the Israelis and the Gulf states as having moved from a position of non-belligerency into the enemy camp. After all, Russia now arms Iran and provides it with intelligence.
The Gaza War has also presented Putin with an issue to further cultivate the Global South and to rail against imperialism and colonialism. Many countries in the developing world were thankful to the Soviet Union in the past for assisting them in their liberation struggles. They could therefore identify with the cause of the Palestinians.
The politics of today’s world link local issues with often far-flung conflicts. The Russian use of Jews and antisemitism is yet another example in this increasingly complex game.
Jewish Independent 4 November 2026