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From Pig Heads to Social Warfare, Russia Stokes Tensions to Rip Democracies Apart
Russia’s hybrid warfare against the West is in full swing, with Russian services’ hands in increased disinformation campaigns aimed at sowing divisions in Western societies using Eastern European proxies and internal actors.
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The first worshipers coming to pray on the morning of September 9 at the Paris Javel mosque were horrified to see a bloody, severed pig head at the door.
Nine pig heads were discovered that day, scattered in front of different Muslim sites in Paris and its suburbs.
French authorities swiftly opened an investigation for "public incitement to hatred or violence based on origin, ethnicity, nationality, race or religion.”
Twenty days later, the Serbian police arrested 11 Serbian nationals in Serbia's capital, Belgrade, and Velika Plana, about 100 kilometers to the south.
The suspects are believed to have been recruited by another handler, still on the run and “acting under the instructions of a foreign intelligence service.”
Some of the individuals allegedly took part in the pig’s head stunt and other vandalism acts that occurred in France and Germany between April and September, according to Serbia’s Interior Ministry.
Serbia didn’t name the said “foreign service” but France had already pointed the finger at Russia, a source told French newspaper Le Monde.
French services reportedly suspect Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, of being behind the stunt.
The former Unit 29155 of the GRU, tasked with sabotage and assassinations abroad, is under France’s scrutiny, although there is no concrete evidence of its implication yet.
French intelligence suspects the unit contacted a Serbian intermediary who recruited other compatriots to conduct the operations with a “clear intent to tie these acts to current events in French politics and the sensitivities of public opinion,” Le Monde wrote.
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Russian hybrid warfare tactics in Europe
This tactic is part of a broader range of Russia’s criminality-based hybrid warfare, aimed at manipulating public opinion in Western democracies, according to a report titled “Russia’s Crime-Terror Nexus,” published on September 30 by the security think tank GLOBSEC.
“Acts of public disturbance and vandalism were generally designed to amplify polarisation,” the report read, citing other instances where the GRU was involved.
For instance, the red handprints’ graffiti on the Shoah Memorial discovered in May 2024, allegedly conducted by four Bulgarian nationals who claimed they had been drinking too much and that it was a protestation message about the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Yet, one of them, Mircho Angelov, has "14" and "88" tattooed on his calves, according to an investigation by French outlet Mediapart.
This team was “acting as agents provocateurs,” carrying out missions “on behalf of an intelligence service without exposing that service,” said the French security service DGSI, as quoted by Mediapart.
The DGSI was quick to link the operations to a “destabilisation campaign against France orchestrated by Russian intelligence services, an action that formed part of a broader strategy aimed at spreading misinformation, dividing French public opinion, and stoking internal tensions.”
France also believes that Russia's security service, FSB, was behind the spray painting of 60 Star of David graffiti in Paris conducted in 2023, after which a Moldovan couple was arrested and their alleged handler, a pro-Russian Moldovan businessman, was identified.
The DGSI subsequently urged French police forces to report even "weak signs" of potential Russian "subversion" aimed at "amplifying divisions" in French society.
Such tactics reveal a deep understanding of cracks and polarizing topics in Western societies targeted by Russia.
In France, for instance, a long-running debate over the authorization of wearing a muslim veil in public spaces in a country that builds its identity on the separation of religion and state politics has become a launching pad for the far-right’s islamophobia, an anti-Arabic hatred fueled by the terrorist attacks orchestrated by ISIS that killed 130 people and wounded 413 in November 2015.
Conservative and far-right-leaning TV channels such as CNEWS regularly point the finger at France’s Muslim population, linking Islam to criminality and ghettoisation.
Pigs and boars are a prominent symbol among far-right groups like “Les Identitaires,” who regularly target mosques.
A “pig festival” organized by the far-right party “Party of France” was recently cancelled over outrage that it was giving a platform for “xenophobic and racist ideology” to prominent far-right figures.
The pig’s heads stunt could have easily been attributed to these groups, fueling more profound polarization and division in French society.
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Kremlin information warfare against Ukraine
Georgi Filipov, one of the Bulgarians arrested on suspicion of taking part in the so-called “Red Hand” operation, allegedly also oversaw a stunt orchestrated in June 2024, when three men—a Bulgarian, a German, and a Ukrainian—dropped five coffins in front of the Eiffel Tower bearing the inscription 'French soldier in Ukraine.'
Another team of Moldovan nationals later painted depictions of coffins accompanied by the same message on buildings near the National Assembly on June 7, 2024, where Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy was due to address MPs during an official visit.
Yet again, the investigation over the stunt pointed at a Russian interference to weaken Ukraine’s support in France after Macron raised the possibility of sending Western troops to Ukraine, a suggestion described as “dangerous” by the Kremlin.
“Other stunts sought to instil fear of direct European involvement in the war,” Globsec’s report read. “These events were often linked to Russia’s broader information operations amplified through proxy networks.”
The “Doppelganger” operation is a prime example of “a large-scale Russian information operation that cloned media and government websites, created pro-Russian portals, and deployed fake social media accounts to spread and promote narratives aimed at undermining support for Ukraine and sowing polarisation in the EU and NATO,” the think tank said.
But France isn’t the only one being targeted, the report says.
In Germany, for instance, individuals recruited by Russian intelligence “filled car exhaust pipes with construction foam and left signs blaming climate activists, apparently to influence the federal election.”
In the Baltic states, monuments from both the Soviet and resistance periods were repeatedly defaced, while in Warsaw, Vienna, Berlin, and Paris, stickers and posters depicting Ukraine as a right-wing extremist state have been regularly displayed, according to the Globsec report.
EU domestic unrest and Russian interference
However, Russia can count on real divisions within its targets’ domestic policy.
In France, on September 10, between 175,000—according to French authorities—and 250,000 people—according to the protesters—took to the streets in a mass protest titled “Block Everything.”
Born on social media this summer, the anti-government movement was fueled by outrage over inflation, austerity, and a political class deemed out of touch. It notably received support from some left-wing parties.
However, the movement was also amplified by online accounts linked to the Kremlin, according to data analysis agency Bloom.
6% of active accounts on the movement were attributed to inauthentic behavior, the agency report showed. The figure accounts for 33,000 inauthentic accounts, which generated 1.9 million activities (i.e., the number of posts and engagements generated).
In its report, Bloom states that accounts close to the Kremlin, which had been active since July 14, activated artificial content promotion techniques around September 10.
"It is always difficult to attribute behavior to a country," Matthieu Ponzio, head of operations at Bloom, told French newspaper Le Parisien. “However, we can observe that the accounts that historically relay Kremlin propaganda also experienced an acceleration in their activity from July and even more so in August."
"The strategy adopted by pro-Russian accounts in particular is to deploy editorial content with the aim of being picked up by activists," Bruno Breton, the founder of Bloom, told the newspaper. "The strategy behind these interferences is to achieve an editorial line that satisfies opinion leaders and political activists so that they can deploy this idea.”
Nevertheless, the activity generated by the pro-Russian offensive represents no more than 3% of conversations about September 10 on social media, says Bloom.
Meanwhile, in the UK, back in 2024, the government warned that “foreign actors were seeking to exploit the chaos and inflame and cement divisions in society through the further dissemination of misinformation and disinformation,” the UK defence and security think tank Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) reported.
In the aftermath of a stabbing spree that killed three children in July 2024, far-right movements were quick to accuse a Syrian refugee, unleashing a massive wave of unrest before the investigation revealed the suspect was a UK-born citizen.
RUSI doesn’t downplay the existing underlying issues that led to the riots in its report.
“They demonstrate a confluence of multiple issues, including genuine grievances around migration, the evolution of the far right, and the problematic model of social media platforms,” the report reads.
Yet, the think tanks’ analysis shows how “the Kremlin was likely the most prevalent threat actor in this case” as it was “swift to amplify the lie” in a “parasitic rather than proactive way.”
In such a case, Russia’s tactic is to deploy bots to repost, like, and engage with “genuine inflammatory posts, accompanied by provocative commentary to con social media algorithms into assessing that a point of view is more popular than it is.”
Some profiles reposting the content were established in 2022 or in the run-up to the UK elections, during which analysts saw a spike in Kremlin-sponsored interference.
And this is where the danger lies, according to the think tank.
The Kremlin has shown the greatest awareness of the environment it acts in and how to obscure and legitimise its narratives by outsourcing and franchising its campaigns to witting and unwitting proxies.
Royal United Services Institute (RUSI)
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