PARIS — The banks of the Seine were still cloaked in early morning darkness when a security guard at the Paris Holocaust Museum, seated just a stone’s throw from the Notre Dame Cathedral, noticed a suspicious scene.

Two men in dark clothes were spraying red paint across the Wall of the Righteous — a stone monument inscribed with the names of those who saved Jews in France during World War II.

As the guard gave chase, a third man emerged from the shadows of a nearby building to film the night’s work: 35 red-painted handprints, splashed across the 25-meter wall.

The attack, which took place in May of last year, was not an isolated act of hate. Police quickly identified and arrested three Bulgarian suspects whose trial begins in Paris on Wednesday — a case that investigators and intelligence officials say offers a rare window into Russia’s escalating campaign to destabilize France through covert influence and psychological operations.

The vandalism of the Holocaust memorial was one of several symbolic assaults to shake the country over the past two years — featuring pig heads dropped at mosques, Stars of David sprayed on buildings, coffins left next to the Eiffel Tower— each seemingly designed to inflame tensions between France’s Jewish and Muslim communities or to erode French support for Ukraine ahead of a pivotal 2027 presidential election.

They point to how France has become a hot spot in Russia’s hybrid war against Europe, as Moscow seeks to undermine one of Kyiv’s most powerful backers by aggravating its political and social tensions. Analysts and officials say France presents both a prime target and a weak flank — a nation with global weight but domestic vulnerabilities that make it especially susceptible to manipulation.

“This reflects a geopolitical reality: Russia considers France to be a serious adversary, it’s the only nuclear power in the EU, and the president of the Republic is quite vocal on support for Ukraine, considering scenarios such as the deployment of French soldiers to Odesa,” said Kevin Limonier, a professor and deputy director at the GEODE geopolitical research center in Paris, where his team has mapped out Russia’s hybrid war operations in Europe.

“In France, we are a little further away from the eastern flank and we don’t have the same level of prevention as the countries from the former Soviet Union,” said Natalia Pouzyreff, a lawmaker from President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party who co-authored a report on foreign interference earlier this year.  “The population is more receptive to this kind of rhetoric.” 

Red handed

French authorities have accused four men of orchestrating the defacement of the Holocaust memorial. The three allegedly on the scene, Mircho Angelov, Georgi Filipov and Kiril Milushev, fled Paris that same morning by bus to Brussels, then boarded a flight to Sofia. 

Filipov and Milushev were later arrested by Bulgarian authorities and extradited to France. A fourth man, Nikolay Ivanov, suspected of financing the operation, was arrested in Croatia. Angelov remains at large.

The men stand accused of conspiring to deface the monument, with the aggravating circumstance of acting on antisemitic motives. French investigators also suspect they may have acted, knowingly or not, as Russian agents.

The operation could “correspond to an attempt to destabilize France orchestrated by the Russian intelligence services,” according to an assessment by the domestic intelligence agency DGSI cited in a note from the prosecutor’s office. 

The same assessment links the act to “a broader strategy” aimed at “dividing French public opinion or fueling internal tensions by using ‘proxies’, meaning individuals who are not working for those services but are paid by them for ad hoc tasks via intermediaries.”

During preliminary hearings, Filipov and Milushev did not deny being present but pointed to Angelov as the main orchestrator. The Paris raid wasn’t the first time members of the group had met: Angelov, Ivanov and Milushev are all from Blagoevgrad, a town in southwestern Bulgaria close to the border with North Macedonia.

Contacted by POLITICO, Milushev’s lawyer Camille Di Tella said her client, a longtime casual acquaintance of Angelov, had only filmed the tagging without actively participating in the vandalism and “was not aware of what he was really meant to do” when he agreed on the trip.

Martin Vettes, a lawyer for Filipov, declined to comment on the case ahead of the trial. 

Vladimir Ivanov, a lawyer for Nikolay Ivanov, said his client only paid for hotel nights and bus tickets as a service to Angelov. He strongly denied his client had antisemitic motives or was aware of any Russian connection.

POLITICO was unable to reach Angelov for comment. The DGSI declined to comment for this story.  

Angelov’s Facebook feed, identified by POLITICO, includes selfies from around Europe, from Greek beaches to the Swiss Alps. Pictures of him show large tattoos covering his chest, upper arms and legs, featuring neo-Nazi symbols including the numbers 14 and 88 and a black Totenkopf, the emblem of a prominent SS division. 

On May 12, two days before the attack on the memorial, Angelov posted a picture of himself in front of the Notre Dame Cathedral wearing a blue T-shirt and ripped jeans that partly concealed his tattoos. During his brief stop in Brussels he shared another picture taken in front of a glass building, followed by a winking emoji.

The red handprints painted on the memorial are a symbol used by some pro-Palestinian activists to denounce the war in Gaza. But they are also seen by Jewish groups and scholars as a reference to the killing of two Israeli soldiers during the second Intifada in the 2000s, and a call for antisemitic violence. 

The attack coincided with the anniversary of the first mass arrest of Jews in France under the Nazi occupation, drawing condemnation across France’s political spectrum. That evening, museum staff and local organizations held an impromptu vigil outside the site. “In a climate of rising antisemitism, we are shocked by this cowardly and heinous act,” Jacques Fredj, the memorial director, posted on social media.

Privately, museum employees were hesitant to attribute the attack to pro-Palestinian groups. “We didn’t see the logic of it coming from activists,” said one of them, who declined to speak on the record given the sensitivity of the subject. 

The Intifada reference felt old and out of touch, the museum employee said. The attacks also felt similar to a 2023 incident in which Stars of David were tagged across the French capital in an operation French prosecutors described as possible foreign interference. 

The Paris prosecutor’s office also cited a report by Viginum, France’s national agency monitoring online disinformation, that found news stories about the red handprints were amplified by “thousands of fake accounts on Twitter” linked to the Russian Recent Reliable News/Doppelgänger network — a group already implicated in spreading reports about the Stars of David.

Foreign interference

The trial opening Wednesday is just one of nine cases involving attacks on religious communities or high-profile French monuments under investigation by the Paris prosecutor’s office since late 2023. 

The most recent is from Sept. 9, when Najat Benali, rector of the Javel mosque in southeastern Paris, was woken by a call from worshippers attending the early morning prayer. They had been shocked to find a pig head drenched in blood at the mosque’s entrance. 

Benali rushed to the scene. “It was still dark, I got scared,” she said. She alerted local officials and learned that eight other mosques had been targeted.

Prosecutors quickly traced the act to a group of Serbian nationals after a Normandy pig farmer flagged a suspicious bulk purchase.

The pig heads were dropped “by foreign nationals who immediately left [French] soil, in a manifest attempt to cause unrest within the nation,” said a note from the Paris prosecutor’s office dated mid-September. Later that month, Serbia announced the arrest of 11 of its citizens related to the incident. 

Serbian authorities said the group is also suspected of throwing green paint on Paris synagogues and a well-known Paris falafel restaurant situated in the capital’s old Jewish neighborhood. 

Allegations of foreign interference do little to alleviate the distress felt by the Muslim community, said Bassirou Camara, head of Addam, a nonprofit organization keeping track of anti-Muslim attacks. 

“It doesn’t diminish the feeling of fear and disgust,” Camara said. “Because we know they are exploiting a crack that already exists.”

France’s deep social, economic, cultural, religious and political divisions offer fertile ground for the Kremlin’s interference, several policymakers, academics and military officers told POLITICO.

Unlike Russia’s neighbors such as Estonia or Lithuania, France is also unused to being the subject of Russian propaganda. Even though it’s a NATO member, the country historically saw itself as an independent ally of the U.S. and before the invasion of Ukraine kept open channels with the Kremlin.

“Before, the Russians didn’t want to upset France because it had a kind of non-aligned role,” said a high-ranking French military officer, who was granted anonymity to talk candidly about a sensitive topic. “Now, they think they need to fracture our society and show the French that Emmanuel Macron is leading them down the wrong path.”  

Large segments of the French political spectrum are also historically friendly to Russia. Far-right leader Marine Le Pen, long accused of cozying up to Vladimir Putin, has sought to distance herself from the Russian president since he launched Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Meanwhile, leftist firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon is a fierce critic of NATO. 

“There is an ambiguous ground in France, with a primitive anti-Americanism that sometimes swings into pro-Russian sentiment as a mirror effect,” the military officer explained. “We are paying for our historical position on Russia; we have always allowed a certain amount of doubt to linger, and the French have been fed on that.” 

Stoking tensions in France requires little effort in a society already on edge.

“The Russian intelligence sphere understands the cleavages in society,” said Kristine Berzina, a senior fellow and security expert at the German Marshall Fund think tank. It has “this very particular awareness and desire to instrumentalize highly painful domestic political issues and opportunism to tap those pain points at the right moment of political salience.” 

One major flashpoint is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. France is home to the EU’s largest Muslim and Jewish populations — roughly 5 million and 450,000 people, respectively. “French society, with its Jewish and Muslim minorities, is the perfect breeding ground for provocation,” said a Paris-based European diplomat.  

On the day the pig heads were dropped, local leaders denounced a rise in violence against Muslims. 

“These clearly coordinated acts mark a new and sad step up in the rise of anti-Muslim hatred, and aim to divide our national community,” Chems-eddine Hafiz, rector of Paris Great Mosque, said in a statement. 

Figures from the left were quick to blame “a toxic climate … fueled by the stigmatizing rhetoric of certain politicians,” pointing their fingers at the country’s far-right leaders.

Eastern examples

Several experts said they expect Russia to ramp up operations ahead of the 2027 French election, when Le Pen’s National Rally — a party far less sympathetic to Ukraine’s plight than Macron — may have its best shot yet at taking the presidency. 

In the meantime, French officials have taken note of the spate of attacks. In May the government announced a new policy regarding Russian cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns, promising to call out foreign governments in an effort to raise awareness.

The country has also beefed up its legal arsenal. Last year, lawmakers toughened penalties for violence “committed at the behest of a foreign power.” 

French authorities are reaching out to countries such as Estonia, Poland, Finland and Sweden to better understand the Russian psyche, several French officials told POLITICO. 

France has valuable lessons to learn from frontline nations, many of which spent decades under Soviet control, the officials said. These include fostering media literacy and raising awareness of the threat of disinformation instead of focusing on countering fake news and spreading counternarratives.

The new approach may already be starting to bear fruit. The French public is becoming more savvy at spotting foreign interference, said Pouzyreff, the Renaissance party lawmaker, referring to the pig heads episode. 

“After having reported one, two, three attempts at interference, by the fourth the public was waiting for more information and [the controversy] deflated much more quickly,” she said.