A trial has begun in a Paris court for four Bulgarian citizens accused of leaving red handprints on the building of the Paris Holocaust Museum and dozens of other Parisian buildings. The prosecution suspects that the raid in May 2024 was part of Moscow's hybrid war in Europe, writes Politico.
Documents from the French internal intelligence agency, partially quoted in court, claim that two of the suspects "received instructions in Russian from unknown persons through the encrypted messaging app Telegram".
The group came from Bulgaria specifically to make inscriptions as part of a "broader operation to destabilize public opinion", according to intelligence documents. French government disinformation experts tracked the spread of news about the red hands by thousands of fake accounts linked to Russia.
"The hiring of these intermediaries occurs within a certain hierarchy, at the top of which is an intelligence officer, and the intermediary is usually based in a satellite country and maintains contact with Russian-speaking individuals hired through social networks and Telegram to carry out paid missions," the report states.
Russian intermediaries are also suspected in nine other similar cases currently being investigated by French judges, which appear to have been aimed at exploiting and deepening societal divisions within the country.
In a memo reviewed by the publication, 42-year-old Nikolay Ivanov and 27-year-old Mircho Angelov are accused of being the "main organizers" and receiving orders via Telegram. Ivanov was born in Donbas before the collapse of the Soviet Union, spent several years in Russia, and was a member of a pro-Russian paramilitary group, according to court data. In the past, he "regularly contacted a pro-Russian activist arrested by Ukrainian special services in 2014 and a former high-ranking member of the Russian special service," the judge stated.
The other two suspects, 36-year-old Georgi Filipov and 28-year-old Kiril Milushev, were casual acquaintances of Angelov, who, according to them, offered them money in exchange for participation in the "peace" operation.
Soon after the trip to Paris, three members of the group went to Germany and Switzerland, where they participated in other hybrid warfare operations.
In France, they are officially charged only with vandalism of the monument and are suspected of anti-Semitic motives. All three admitted their guilt on the first charge but denied the second, as the country only recently introduced special, harsher penalties for violence "committed on the orders of a foreign state". Nevertheless, the prosecutor urged the judges to consider the hostile intentions and organized nature of the operation when requesting four-year prison terms for Ivanov and Angelov and two-year terms for Filipov and Milushev.