(Paris) - Three men sat side-by-side in the defendant’s box: a lean blonde athlete, a tattooed man with a distant gaze, and a young man with a short beard. These three Bulgarian nationals, unable to speak French, appeared in Paris’s Judicial Court on Thursday, September 12th, for a hearing to set a trial date, scheduled for late October.

They are accused of tagging red hands – a symbol evocative of the 2000 lynching of Israeli soldiers in Ramallah, West Bank – on the Wall of the Righteous at the Holocaust Memorial in Paris, during the night of May 13th-14th, 2024. All three maintain they had “no anti-Semitic intent.” Two requested release, but the court denied their request, also confirming the standing arrest warrant for a fourth Bulgarian individual, still at large.

These men represent the visible face of likely Russian interference regularly targeting France. From Stars of David spray-painted on Parisian walls to pig heads deposited in front of mosques in the Île-de-France region, these material acts of destabilization – coupled with a decade-long increase in cyberattacks – have escalated since 2023. The aim is to widen societal fissures, particularly those exacerbated by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict following the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th, 2023.

Investigations have opened nine related inquiries since 2023, revealing a pattern of escalation in tactics and potential foreign state sponsorship. Authorities are increasingly concerned with the ability to trace these acts back to coordinated campaigns aimed at undermining French social cohesion.

82.35% of this article remains to be read. The remainder is reserved for subscribers.