Students, teachers, workers and pensioners filled streets across Europe in September and October 2026 over schools, prices, wages, housing and corruption. Around those protests, a Russian disinformation network fabricated news about the French riots, Russian officials presented them as payback for Ukraine, French communist groups with ties to Russian party networks helped mobilise marchers, Iran's foreign ministry posted false content that brought a diplomatic summons, an Israel-origin influence-for-hire network had pushed claims about the Islamisation of France months earlier, US politicians and European far-right accounts recast the unrest as a migrant uprising and commercial accounts sold fake footage for clicks. Leaked Russian files set out a strategy of organising protests in NATO countries.
Fire spread through the town hall of Limoges on the evening of 17 October 2026 and its belfry gave way, Alouette reported. Rioters in Marseille broke down the main door of the town hall with crowd barriers and iron bars, Europe 1 reported, and protesters in Lille forced several entrances to theirs and ransacked part of it, Europe 1 reported. The Interior Ministry's consolidated figures the next evening recorded 2,397 arrests and 997 police officers and gendarmes injured, seven of them seriously, Belga reported. A police grenade blew off one protester's hand, and Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said it was a "miracle" that nobody had been killed, ITV reported.
Hooded groups threw stones and firecrackers at police around Milan's cathedral on the same afternoon, after a march against the cost of living, and looted shops on the two days that followed. Police took 271 people to the Questura on 18 October, 220 of them minors, and arrested 32, LaPresse reported. In Tirana that weekend, masked groups set fire to Police Station no. 3 and the entrance of the Interior Ministry after six days of student protests, and Albania's Health Ministry counted 272 people injured between 13 and 17 October, Koha reported.
Bots of the Russian network known as Matryoshka had already told audiences that French students were protesting against militarisation and that French politicians had fled the country, The Insider reported on 8 October. Iran's foreign ministry had posted false content about the French protests from its official accounts and France had summoned Iran's ambassador, the French Foreign Ministry said. The US vice-president, JD Vance, had written that "Western liberals imported the third world into France", ANI reported, and Kirill Dmitriev, Vladimir Putin's special envoy for investment and economic cooperation, had written that the West "is to blame for its own problems", 360.ru reported.
The protests began with domestic grievances: understaffed schools, deteriorating public services, rising living costs, low wages and corruption. The violence that followed gave foreign governments, political movements and commercial accounts an opportunity to advance their own narratives. Russian disinformation networks fabricated reports about the unrest, while Russian officials portrayed the riots as a consequence of European support for Ukraine. Iran’s foreign ministry circulated false content about the French protests. US politicians and European far-right accounts promoted misleading claims of a migrant uprising, while commercial accounts circulated fabricated footage for engagement. Several French communist organisations helped mobilise protesters and had documented, though markedly different, ties to Russian political networks. Russia’s history of paid provocations and leaked plans to encourage protests in NATO countries raises questions about possible interference.
A continent in protest
Teachers at the Saint-Exupéry lycée in Créteil struck over staff shortages on 17 September 2026 and students blockaded the school, the start of the French movement, BFMTV reported. German pupils held a "Schulstreik gegen Wehrpflicht", a school strike against conscription, in about 100 cities on 25 September, with organisers claiming more than 45,000 participants, ZDFheute reported. Several hundred pupils blocked about a dozen secondary schools in Liège on 1 October, and protests spread to Charleroi, Mons, Brussels, Arlon, Verviers and Tournai, Paris Match Belgique reported.
Tens of thousands marched in Madrid and about 50 other Spanish cities on 3 October after the Catalan party Junts voted down two housing decrees, Al Jazeera reported, and teachers in the Madrid region began an indefinite strike on 14 October, Daily Sabah reported. Portuguese unions scheduled eight strikes for October over the 2027 budget, among them teachers on 6 October and CGTP demonstrations in Lisbon, Porto and Coimbra on 17 October, A Bola reported. Albanian students marched on the Ministry of Education in Tirana on 13 October, and Greek university students camped in Syntagma Square in Athens the same day over rents and living costs, To Vima reported.
Italy's student marches of 16 October and cost-of-living marches of 17 October coincided with France's national day of mobilisation. ABC Australia counted further movements in Austria and Ireland by 20 October, ABC reported. The heaviest violence of 17 and 18 October came in France, around Milan's cathedral and in Tirana.
The domestic crises behind the demonstrations
France
Students cited "overcrowding in classrooms, regular shortages of teachers and dilapidated buildings", and the 2027 education budget rose by 1.7 per cent, below inflation, Reuters reported. A union blamed the loss of 3,256 teaching positions in 2026 and said some schools lacked drinking water, Reuters reported, and the draft budget presented on 1 October would cut a further 1,588 tenured teaching posts, Public Sénat reported.
Education Minister Édouard Geffray said by 1 October that a school had been set on fire and staff doused with petrol, AP reported. On 6 October the authorities counted 250,000 marchers against 500,000 estimated by organisers, nearly 2,000 schools were blockaded and a 15-year-old lost a hand in Lens, Al Jazeera reported; the authorities had arrested 6,547 people since 28 September by the next day, and Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez suspended the use of stun grenades, Public Sénat reported. Geffray accused La France Insoumise and said the movement had been "taken hostage by ultra-left groups", Fox News reported, citing Le Monde.
The CGT backed the national mobilisation on 17 October, which had multiple organisers. Solidaires and the Confédération paysanne also announced their participation, while the CFDT and Force Ouvrière reserved their mobilisation for 5 November; calls from Gilets jaunes spread on social networks and encrypted apps, with Telegram maps showing about 1,000 action points, LCP reported. The lycée union USL said its aim was "faire enfin vivre la convergence des luttes" ("finally to make the convergence of struggles real"), and demands ranged from replacing absent teachers and renovating schools to wages, pensions, fuel and taxes, Sud Radio reported. Many of the visuals promoting the day were generated with artificial intelligence and shared by accounts unconnected to the Gilets jaunes' historic figures and channels, Public Sénat reported.
Nuñez counted 550,000 marchers on 17 October, 110,000 of them in Paris, against 800,000 estimated by the organisers, Europe 1 reported. Lecornu wrote that evening: "Aujourd'hui, des groupes d'ultragauche ont organisé la violence dans plusieurs villes de France" ("Today, ultra-left groups organised the violence in several French cities"), Europe 1 logged. Nuñez said police had "lost control" and offered his resignation; President Emmanuel Macron refused it on 19 October and told him to ensure "transparency over the failures in planning and intelligence", while curfews were imposed around Place de la République and Les Halles in Paris and in Lyon, Nice and Lille, Al Jazeera reported. Nuñez blamed "hordes of troublemakers and looters" and "far-left activists", and Macron said "those who looted will have to pay back for the damage", ITV reported.
Who committed the violence in France
Lecornu told the National Assembly on 20 October that there had been "la planification, en certains endroits" ("planning, in some places") and "un schéma insurrectionnel mené par des groupuscules d'extrême gauche et de l'ultragauche" ("an insurrectionary scheme led by far-left and ultra-left groupuscules"), and that rioters in Marseille had moved "en essaim" ("in a swarm"); he left the groups unnamed and said supporting material would follow, mesinfos reported. Nuñez had said before the day that about 250 calls to action had been identified and that the ultra-left "très souvent en fin de cortège, provoque des dégradations" ("very often at the back of marches, causes damage"), LCP reported. Darmanin said on 19 October that intelligence services "ne savent pas lutter correctement contre l'ultragauche" and that "nous avons failli, incontestablement" ("we unquestionably failed"), actu17 reported.
Police arrested a 34-year-old man at Bussière-Boffy on 20 October as a suspect in the Limoges town hall fire, in a case of "destruction d'un bien par moyen dangereux en bande organisée" ("destruction of property by dangerous means as an organised group") handled by the anti-terrorism sub-directorate; police sources described him as flagged by intelligence for the ultra-left, and the national anti-terrorism prosecutor did not take the case, AFP reported. Darmanin said of Limoges that "des organisations d'ultragauche, d'extrême gauche se sont manifestement, je mets du conditionnel, organisées" ("ultra-left and far-left organisations apparently, and I use the conditional, organised themselves"), AFP reported.
Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau announced 557 people taken into custody and said profiling them was "très compliqué", with "une très forte proportion de gens peu connus" ("a very high proportion of people little known" to police), AA reported. Marseille prosecutor Nicolas Bessone said 101 people had been arrested, 74 of them adults, that 80 per cent were held for group theft with damage and that 68 would be tried, Marsactu reported; the Marseille defendants were mainly looters aged 19 to 46 with records for theft and drugs, mesinfos reported. Darmanin said 70 per cent of those in custody were adults, "donc ce ne sont pas des lycéens" ("so they are not lycée students"), and that "très souvent, ils sont connus des services de police" ("very often they are known to police"), actu17 reported.
Police seized home-made weapons and fake police armbands and found anarchist and anti-police tags in Paris, Lille and Marseille, but links to political structures "restent à établir" ("remain to be established"), and a police source in Mulhouse put about 90 per cent of offenders there as local youths in no organised group, Sud Radio reported. A police union official said "ce qu'on a vu, c'est du pilleur d'opportunité" ("what we saw was opportunistic looting"), Europe 1 reported. Mediapart reported that a territorial intelligence commissioner said he had been asked to write "que c'est LFI qui est derrière le mouvement" ("that LFI is behind the movement"), which he described as "objectivement faux de l'avis général des RT" ("objectively false in the general view of territorial intelligence"); Nuñez and Lecornu denied it and La France Insoumise said it would take Nuñez to the Cour de justice de la République, AFP reported.
As of 20 October, reporting and official findings had not established payments to rioters, advance planning documented in recovered messages or foreign involvement in the violence. Authorities and reports reviewed had not linked the MJCF, PCF, PRCF, URC or OCF to the violence, and the PRCF condemned the Limoges fire "dans les termes les plus forts" ("in the strongest terms"), the PRCF wrote.
Belgium
Belgian pupils protested against reforms by the French-speaking community's government that require teachers in the last three years of secondary school to teach 22 periods instead of 20, raise university tuition from €835 to €1,194 and scrap a cheap bus pass in Wallonia, WSWS reported; pupils quoted in Liège said they had come to support their teachers, "on vient soutenir les professeurs", Paris Match Belgique reported. Logan Verhoeven, president of the Comité des élèves francophones, told RTBF: "C'est vraiment éparpillé. Il n'y a personne derrière ces mobilisations" ("It's really scattered. There is nobody behind these mobilisations"), according to WSWS.
A firework landed in a primary school playground in Hannut on 5 October and lightly injured 15 children, and police in Charleroi and Gosselies arrested 25 minors, the youngest aged 12, Paris Match Belgique reported. The FGTB and CSC unions called a national demonstration in Brussels on 9 October against the federal government's plan to save €10 billion by 2029, Paris Match Belgique reported; about 30,000 people took part, hundreds of young people clashed with police and several days of protest in Liège ended in about 200 arrests, AFP reported.
Italy
Italian students held "No Meloni Day" marches on 16 October, with clashes in Turin, Bologna and Rome, where devices were thrown at the education ministry and Minister Giuseppe Valditara spoke of "teppismo politico" ("political hooliganism"), Il Post reported. The network Italia in Piazza, promoted heavily on TikTok, called marches in 13 cities the next day against rising prices, low wages and fuel costs; about 5,000 people set off in Milan, 104 officers were treated there, police across Italy arrested 28 people and recorded 141 injured officers, and Confcommercio put damage to Milan's shops above €500,000, Sky TG24 reported. Il Post found that those involved in the violence had no ties to political movements, student collectives or social centres and that they included both second-generation Italians and Italians of Italian origin, Il Post reported.
The Instagram account that launched the Milan march appeared on 4 October, and its content was circulated with Erick Jara and his movement Nuovi Italiani, Il Giornale reported; Jara said any account linking him to the violence was false, TerranostraNews reported. A Telegram group called Rivoluzione d'Agosto, run by the Fronte rivoluzionario italiano, relaunched the call and grew from about 500 to almost 6,000 members in under three months, Quotidiano Nazionale reported.
Il Giorno named Erick Jara, Gabriele Bruscagli, Sara Marini and Giulia Benedetti among the organisers around Italia in Piazza and reported that a figure using the name "Draco" runs the Rivoluzione d'Agosto group, with the Bitcoin author Cristiano Niceta among its administrators; Niceta denied being the organiser, and Il Giorno wrote that Spain and especially France acted as catalysts, Il Giorno reported. Participants in the Milan violence arranged to meet through TikTok and Telegram, Il Giorno reported. Senator Stefania Craxi of Forza Italia asked the government to "fare piena luce su eventuali amplificazioni e regie esterne" ("shed full light on any external amplification and direction"), without presenting evidence, LaPresse reported, and the Interior Ministry described the perpetrators as gangs of hooligans, mostly minors, who had gathered suddenly through social media, Sky TG24 reported.
Albania
Albanian students marched on the Ministry of Education on 13 October demanding cheaper tuition, decent dormitories and jobs after graduation, Citizens.al reported. Their protests merged with the Flamingo Revolution, a movement that has rallied since May against a luxury resort backed by Jared Kushner on a protected stretch of the southern coast, AFP reported, and with anger over corruption prosecutions of senior officials, among them former deputy prime minister Belinda Balluku, whom the anti-corruption prosecutor SPAK charged over infrastructure tenders, OCCRP reported.
Albania's Ombudsman, Endrit Shabani, recorded claims and visible signs of violence on 26 of 214 people deprived of liberty over 72 hours, and found minors questioned without a parent or psychologist present, Gazeta Tema reported. SPAK case files reported by Reuters say prosecutors suspect Artur Shehu, who sold the land for the Kushner project for €122 million, of laundering money for cocaine-trafficking gangs and assembling the plot with forged deeds; Shehu denies the charges, Balkanweb reported, while the reported case files do not implicate Kushner or the investors.
Rama said on 15 October that "perhaps some forces, at home and abroad, do not want Albania to succeed", Al Jazeera reported, and on 16 October that "these are foreign hands that do not wish for Albania to be at peace", AFP reported. In his address of 18 October he named Russia and Iran, Argumentum reported, and said the authorities held data on interference through social networks and had neutralised a drone carrying explosives aimed at his office, without releasing evidence of either. He had accused Iran of a "hybrid war" over the resort protests in June 2026, RFE/RL reported. The European Commission's statement of 18 October condemned arson and attacks on state institutions and focused on the violence rather than allegations of foreign interference, the Commission said.
How the movements spread
Greek student associations camping in Syntagma Square cited France and Spain directly: "Across Europe, young people are organizing and demanding change… Now it's our turn", To Vima reported. Luxembourg's national student union, Unel, backed the French movement on 5 October: "La solidarité entre jeunes ne s'arrête pas aux frontières" ("Solidarity between young people does not stop at borders"), lesfrontaliers.lu reported. Italian organisers in Udine said their movement drew on youth mobilisations in France and Spain, UdineToday reported, and the account that launched the Milan march held up protests in France, Spain, Belgium and Germany as a model, Il Giornale reported. Belgian pupils quoted in the press gave support for their teachers as their reason, and the comparison with France in Belgium came from journalists, who wrote that "le blocus des lycéens français s'exporte en Belgique" ("the French pupils' blockade is spreading to Belgium"), Paris Match Belgique reported, while the Albanian students quoted in the coverage reviewed focused on domestic grievances rather than France.
A group calling itself "Gen Z Revolution European Protest" called two Europe-wide days, 17 October and 20 November, under the slogan "ogni nazione, ogni città, la stessa lotta" ("every nation, every city, the same struggle"); ANSA reported that its organisers were mostly aged 13 to 18, had no clear leader and used TikTok and Discord, and that investigators and intelligence services were monitoring the calls, ANSA reported. The CGIL union had separately called a general strike for 20 November, Open reported, the Rete della Conoscenza student network called a European student strike for the same day, Progressista reported, and the Unione degli Studenti had announced 20 November on 11 September under a Europe-wide campaign called "Fight for Our Futures" with Socialist Students and Fridays for Future, Orizzonte Insegnanti reported.
Fight for Our Futures is the only multi-country organising label reviewed that has a named sponsor. The movements drew inspiration from one another across borders. The European Commissioner for youth, Glenn Micallef, called for proportionate policing on 6 October and said nothing about interference, Brussels Signal reported. The accounts that crossed borders most visibly were amplifiers: the Africa-based pages that NewsGuard found framing French footage as a "global revolution", Visegrád 24 carrying Milan to an international audience and Zakharova's video setting France, Italy and Albania side by side.
The Moscow connection: five communist organisations and the mobilisation of France's October protests
Five communist organisations helped build the French movement or called people out for 17 October and said so in their own publications: the Mouvement des Jeunes Communistes de France (MJCF), the French Communist Party (PCF), the Pôle de Renaissance Communiste en France (PRCF), the Union pour la Reconstruction Communiste (URC) and the Organisation Communiste de France (OCF). The PRCF has the most extensive contemporary links, through Russian passports, a cash contribution to Russia's Communist Party and a declaration that defends the invasion of Ukraine; the URC and the OCF have political and media ties to pro-Russian networks; the PCF's ties are mostly historical and its current leadership condemns the invasion; the MJCF's documented link is a single round table in 2021.
The MJCF
The Mouvement Lycéen, the student network at the heart of the blockades, is "édité par le Mouvement des Jeunes Communistes de France", the PCF's youth wing, from the party's headquarters at 2 place du Colonel Fabien in Paris, and its publication director is Tom Landry, "en qualité d'administrateur du MJCF", according to its legal notice. The MJCF said on 15 October that it had launched blockades with the Mouvement Lycéen at more than 300 lycées and called students, apprentices and workers out for 17 October: "Ce samedi 17 octobre, la convergence franchit un pas" ("This Saturday 17 October, convergence takes a step forward"), the MJCF wrote. Its then leader, Léon Deffontaines, attended a round table on Maurice Thorez at the Russian House in Paris, the office of the Russian Foreign Ministry's agency Rossotrudnichestvo, on 14 October 2021, the Russian House reported. That round table is the only contemporary Russian contact documented for the MJCF in the records reviewed.
The PCF
The French Communist Party said on 14 October that "le 17 octobre doit permettre de poursuivre et d'élargir la mobilisation lycéenne" ("17 October must allow the lycée mobilisation to continue and widen"), the PCF said, and called for mobilisation "là où les conditions sont réunies" ("where conditions allow"), the PCF said. Its national secretary, Fabien Roussel, had asked activists on 4 October to "aider" the students and "sécuriser les parcours" of the march planned for 6 October, while saying "aucune violence n'est légitime" ("no violence is legitimate"), Sud Radio reported, and attended the rally in Valenciennes on 17 October, VA-Infos reported.
The PCF's national council described Russia's war in November 2025 as "l'agression du régime capitaliste, autoritaire et expansionniste au pouvoir en Russie contre l'indépendance de l'Ukraine" ("the aggression of the capitalist, authoritarian and expansionist regime in power in Russia against the independence of Ukraine"), while opposing French commitments to deliver arms, the resolution says. Its contemporary contacts with Russian institutions consist of a representative of Roussel speaking at the 2021 Russian House round table, where the Russian Communist Party deputy chairman Dmitry Novikov, sanctioned by the US Treasury in March 2022, the Treasury said, quoted Thorez's pledge that "le peuple français ne combattra jamais contre l'Union soviétique" ("the French people will never fight against the Soviet Union"), and a Russian Communist Party delegation at the PCF's 2013 congress, the KPRF reported.
The Communist International's conditions of admission of 1920 made its decisions binding on member parties, the French party among them, the conditions state; Maurice Thorez told Stalin in Moscow on 18 November 1947 that the party was acting "according to the instructions of the conference of the nine", and Stalin said "we [the Soviets] have arms and we can give it, if it becomes necessary", the Soviet record shows. The Soviet Politburo allotted the PCF $2,000,000 for 1969, "transfer of these funds is entrusted to the KGB", the Politburo decision states, and again for 1981, a second decision shows, but the records reviewed do not document comparable funding since the Soviet era.
The PRCF
The PRCF said its leaflets, slogans and "drapeaux rouges et tricolores" had been "très bien accueillis" in the 17 October marches, called for a general strike, condemned the Limoges fire and ended its declaration with a call for "une Internationale communiste", the PRCF wrote. Its national secretary, Fadi Kassem, spoke at the opening of the Paris march alongside Gilets jaunes figures, according to the PRCF's own report. The PRCF promoted and joined 17 October; the day was called by unions, student unions and Gilets jaunes.
René Barchi and his wife received Russian passports from Ambassador Alexey Meshkov at the Russian embassy in Paris on 4 July 2023, RIA Novosti reported, and an "R. Barchi" was among PRCF representatives who handed Russia's Communist Party "une contribution financière à l'envoi d'aide humanitaire aux populations du Donbass" ("a financial contribution to sending humanitarian aid to the people of Donbas") in Moscow on 10 October 2022, according to the PRCF. The money in that case flowed from the French party to the Russian one.
The PRCF signed the World Anti-Imperialist Platform's Paris Declaration, which says the war in Ukraine "is not the result of 'Russian aggression'" and calls for "a campaign of active non-cooperation" with the Western war effort "aimed at sabotaging Nato's war machinery in every way possible"; the Russian Communist Party and SOVINTERN are also signatories, the declaration shows. Vladimir Bessonov, a member of the Russian Communist Party's central committee whom a Rostov-on-Don court had sentenced in absentia in 2018 to three years for assaulting police officers, Kommersant reported, spoke at the PRCF's Stalingrad commemoration in Paris on 4 February 2023, the PRCF reported. The PRCF's Jean-Paul Batisse spoke at the Russian Communist Party's international antifascist forum in Moscow in May 2026, the PRCF reported, which Putin greeted, the KPRF said, and whose appeal voiced "support for the anti-fascist and anti-terrorist activity of Russia", the KPRF published. These are political and ideological relationships with a Russian parliamentary party and a pro-Russian international platform; the public records reviewed document those political ties but do not establish Russian financing or direction of the PRCF.
The URC
The URC called on 16 October for "grèves, occupations, blocages, manifestation, désobéissance civile… tous les moyens sont légitimes et se complètent" ("strikes, occupations, blockades, demonstration, civil disobedience... all means are legitimate and complement each other"), the URC wrote, and on the night of the riots wrote that "la colère populaire est protéiforme, parfois violente" ("popular anger is protean, sometimes violent") and called for work "pour amplifier le mouvement" ("to amplify the movement"), the URC wrote. Its founding international resolution of 3 November 2024 describes Russia's invasion as "une guerre juste de défense nationale en Ukraine" ("a just war of national defence in Ukraine") caused by "l'encerclement de la Russie par l'OTAN" ("NATO's encirclement of Russia"), the URC wrote, and the World Anti-Imperialist Platform republished its 17 October call, the platform shows. The URC’s documented ties to Russia consist of ideological alignment with the invasion and participation in a shared platform.
The OCF
The OCF was founded in January 2026 by members who said they had been expelled from or had just left the PRCF, according to its founding resolution, and urged workers and students "à investir massivement les manifestations ce samedi 17 octobre" ("to turn out in force for the demonstrations this Saturday 17 October"), the OCF wrote. Its paper, Jeunesse du Monde, which describes itself as "l'organe central de l'Organisation Communiste de France", its about page says, reported from "le cœur de la manifestation parisienne", the outlet reported. Jeunesse du Monde and the website Le Grand Soir published a video interview on 22 August 2026 with Boris Litvinov, the Russian Communist Party's leader in Russian-occupied Donetsk, according to the upload, and the platform republished the OCF's 17 October call, the platform shows. The OCF's documented Russian tie is a media platform given to an occupation-era party official.
SOVINTERN
Sergey Mironov, leader of A Just Russia, a party represented in the State Duma, announced SOVINTERN, an "International Socialist Network", on 14 April 2026, his site reported. Its founding forum met at Moscow's House of Unions on 27 April, organised by A Just Russia, and a message from Putin was read out, Vedomosti reported. SOVINTERN's own forum page names Alexander Babakov, deputy chairman of the State Duma, as chairman of its organising committee, the forum page shows, and Babakov told the Duma on 13 May that the idea "родилась внутри России" ("was born inside Russia") and that the forum took place "под эгидой нашей партии, по инициативе нашей партии" ("under the aegis of our party, on the initiative of our party"), A Just Russia published. Kommersant wrote that the new international "призван прийти на смену Социнтерну" ("is meant to replace the Socialist International"), Kommersant reported, which had expelled A Just Russia in March 2022, Ukraine's foreign intelligence service said.
Kommersant named the co-initiators as the Movement of Socialists of Serbia, Morocco's Party of Progress and Socialism, Tunisia Forward, the Workers Party of Britain, Moldova's Party of Socialists, Nicaragua's Sandinista National Liberation Front and the American Communist Party. The forum page lists the World Anti-Imperialist Platform, Moscow State University, Renmin University of China, the outlet Vashi Novosti and a company, TROPASS LLC, among participating organisations, but identifies French parties neither as members nor as speakers or delegates. SOVINTERN’s website does not identify a legal entity, address or funding source. Its financing remains undocumented in the records reviewed. Ukraine's foreign intelligence service said SOVINTERN's claim of more than 100 parties from more than 70 countries was inflated.
SOVINTERN's "Moscow Network Hub" posted "Even children are protesting" about France on 3 October, its channel shows, "The red banner over France. Youth demands justice" on 12 October, its channel shows, a post mocking Macron's promise that those who "tried to overthrow the Republic must answer for their actions", its channel shows, and a post tagged as a meme claiming, citing Le Parisien, that the riots were coordinated through the Russian messenger MAX and inviting readers to subscribe to SOVINTERN's channel there, its channel shows, though no Le Parisien report making that claim was found. The posts comment on the unrest and invite readers to subscribe, but do not identify a French partner or call for protest action.
Nikolai Novichkov, a Duma deputy, said in September 2026 that the Moscow hub "возглавляет депутат Государственной Думы, мой коллега по фракции «Справедливая Россия» Александр Воробьев" ("is headed by State Duma deputy, my A Just Russia faction colleague Alexander Vorobyov"), EADaily reported. US prosecutors charged Babakov and his chief of staff Aleksandr Vorobev in April 2022 with conspiring to have a US citizen act as an agent of Russia, alleging they used a nonprofit as "a front"; both are in Russia and the charges have not been tried, the US attorney's office said. Ukraine's military intelligence sanctions register lists the sanctioned aide with the date and place of birth that a Russian profile gives the deputy and with the deputy's A Just Russia party posts, the register shows, and OpenSanctions merges the US sanctions entry with its record of current Duma deputies, OpenSanctions shows; no Russian or US official record reviewed states that the deputy and the indicted aide are the same man.
The Insider reported in August 2026 that "several of its participants are directly involved in recruiting foreign soldiers for the war in Ukraine", naming the recruiters Benjamin Stimson and Aiden Minnis, and that Minnis urged supporters to find the locations of warehouses supplying Ukraine and stop the deliveries "by any means"; it wrote that the network "appears to function as a cover for Russian special operations abroad", The Insider reported. SOVINTERN delegates went from the founding forum to Russian-occupied Donetsk, Mariupol and Luhansk, Prilepin's channel posted. The evidence reviewed shows SOVINTERN publishing commentary about France and identifies participants involved in recruitment for Russia’s war.
Russian money and the European far right
The Front National, now the Rassemblement National, borrowed €9.4m from the First Czech-Russian Bank in 2014 and said on 19 September 2023 that it had repaid the remaining €6.1m ahead of a 2028 deadline, The Local reported. Babakov's chief of staff, Aleksandr Vorobev, sent the Front National MEP Jean-Luc Schaffhauser "an example of a statement on the situation in Ukraine that Le Pen was to make" in July 2014, according to emails first published by Mediapart, InformNapalm reported. Documents from Russia's presidential administration reported by the Washington Post in April 2023 set out a plan to unite Sahra Wagenknecht with the AfD, The Moscow Times reported.
The EU listed the Voice of Europe network in May 2024, finding that it "has been used as a vehicle for funneling of financial resources designated for remuneration of propagandists", was "building a network influencing representatives of political parties in Europe" and targeted "civil society, asylum seekers, Russian ethnic minorities, gender minorities", the Council said. The European Parliament lifted the immunity of the AfD MEP Petr Bystron in May 2025 over suspicion that he took payments from the network, which he denies, Euronews reported; the decision allowed an investigation and is not a finding of guilt.
The international disinformation campaign
Russian operations
The Insider, drawing on posts collected by the volunteer group AntiBot4Navalny, reported on 8 October that Matryoshka bots told audiences French students were protesting militarisation and circulated fake videos saying French politicians had fled the country and withdrawn from the presidential race. The bots impersonated the Institute for the Study of War, with a fake Kimberly Kagan accusing Macron of "toxic masculinity", Radio France Internationale, NewsGuard and Bellingcat, with a fake Eliot Higgins claiming that German Chancellor Friedrich Merz would personally receive €250m of a €1bn aid package for Ukraine, The Insider reported. NewsGuard counted 20 fabricated Matryoshka stories about the French protests in two days, most drawing little traffic, among them a fake Le Monde report that the presidential candidate Gabriel Attal was suspected of financing the riots and a fake DW claim that "54 teachers had been killed", NewsGuard reported (Eunews).
France's disinformation watchdog Viginum reported in June 2024 that Matryoshka had targeted media and fact-checkers in more than 60 countries since September 2023, with France a prime target, by posting fake content under news outlets' posts on X and pressing fact-checkers to investigate it; most of the content traced to Russian-language Telegram channels, and Viginum concluded that "the criteria for foreign digital interference have been satisfied", the Alliance for Securing Democracy reported. Viginum linked a second operation, Storm-1516, to the GRU in a report documenting 77 operations up to March 2025, the French defence ministry published, and its deputy head said on 14 October 2026 that more than 100 foreign operations, mostly from Storm-1516 and Matryoshka, had targeted France's 2027 presidential election since the summer, AFP reported.
NewsGuard counted 906 fake news reports impersonating 163 media outlets over three years in a report of 28 September 2026, with Euronews the most frequently cloned at 82, and attributed them to Matryoshka and Storm-1516, NewsGuard reported. An editor's note on the report withdrew an earlier comparison between the first halves of 2025 and 2026, saying it "may have overstated the uptick" because NewsGuard's monitoring in 2025 was less rigorous.
Viginum identified a network it named Portal Kombat in February 2024: at least 193 sites spreading pro-Russian content aimed at France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Spain, the UK and the US, with low audiences averaging about 31,000 visits in November 2023, Euronews reported. EU DisinfoLab exposed the Doppelganger operation in September 2022, which cloned at least 17 outlets including Bild, The Guardian, 20 Minutes and ANSA; its researchers cited indicators pointing to Russia-based actors but stopped short of formal attribution, EU DisinfoLab wrote. The US Justice Department later said that the Social Design Agency, Structura and ANO Dialog operated "under the direction and control of the Russian Presidential Administration" when it seized 32 domains in September 2024, the Justice Department said, and the EU sanctioned the Social Design Agency and Structura in July 2023, the EEAS said.
The EU's diplomatic service counted 540 foreign information manipulation incidents in 2025, involving about 10,500 channels and targeting more than 100 countries, in a report published on 12 March 2026. Ukraine was targeted 112 times, France 107 times, Moldova 94 times and Germany 71 times; 29 per cent of incidents were attributed to Russia and 6 per cent to China, and artificial intelligence played a part in 147. "Today's wars are not only fought with tanks and drones but with lies and algorithms too," Kaja Kallas, the EU's foreign policy chief, wrote, according to the report.
Russian officials and state media
RIA Novosti ran a column on 3 October under the headline "Школьные бунты как расплата Макрона за Украину" ("School riots as Macron's payback for Ukraine") that described the movement as "a revolt at times turning into an uprising", RIA Novosti published. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on 16 October that France was spending "billions, tens of billions" on Ukraine and offering "guns and shells instead of school desks and textbooks", Rambler reported, and that she was waiting for France "to find the Kremlin's hand somewhere in the pocket of a school jacket", Vzglyad reported. Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said on 19 October that "nobody anywhere takes such absurd accusations seriously any more. Even in Europe itself", BFM reported.
Peskov said on 7 October that "schoolchildren who burn their own schools, rubbish bins and cars and attack police officers are bad schoolchildren" (in translation), Rossiyskaya Gazeta reported, and Zakharova said the same day that the centre of Europe was seeing "simply a Battle on the Ice with unarmed children" (in translation), Piter.tv reported. Zakharova posted a video on 19 October that set European leaders' warnings about Russia against footage of riots in France, Italy and Albania and ended "No, Europeans attacked the 'blooming garden'" (in translation), RIA Novosti reported, a reference to Josep Borrell's 2022 description of Europe as a garden. Margarita Simonyan, RT's editor-in-chief, had posed the US commentator Candace Owens in June beside a sculpted head of Macron at RT's stand at the St Petersburg economic forum and wrote of "a death mask of Macron", RT reported.
Dmitriev posted on X on 7 October in reply to a video of the Paris unrest posted by the influencer Mario Nawfal, blaming migration, "energy miscalculations", the fuelling of wars and "wokeism", and describing the energy crisis as the product of "short-sighted Russophobic policy", 360.ru reported. Le Monde wrote on 19 October that "rarely have the reactions of the United States and Russia been so similar in substance and form", setting Dmitriev's claim that the West "is collapsing as it has made costly mistakes on immigration, energy, and war" alongside Trump's call to "close the borders and take back control before it is too late", Kyunghyang Shinmun reported, citing Le Monde.
Zakhar Prilepin, a former co-chairman of the party A Just Russia under EU sanctions since February 2022, according to his biography, forwarded a post on his Telegram channel on 17 October asking "Why are we not at war with Paris with the hands of these protesters?" and calling for "a real guerrilla war in the cities of France, with killings of French police officers and officials", the channel shows. Two days earlier the channel forwarded another post ending: "France is our enemy, and the more misfortunes befall it, the better for Russia" (in translation), the channel shows.
The migrant-uprising narrative
The European Digital Media Observatory found in early October that the French education protests were being reframed online as ethnic and religious conflict, that some posts used old and unrelated footage and that no reliable data supported claims that Black, Arab or Muslim people were inherently more violent, EDMO wrote. It linked posts by accounts including Donald Trump Jr., Tommy Robinson and the Remigration Institute and quoted an AfD Bundestag member describing "severe race riots".
Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social on 6 October: "This isn't about schools, this is about Islam wanting to take over a once great Country!", Newsweek reported (AFP). On 19 October he wrote: "The migrants have taken over France. They must CLOSE THE BORDERS, FAST!", Gulf News reported, which set the posts against the approaching US midterm elections. Vance's post of 17 October said: "Western liberals imported the third world into France and other countries in the name of diversity and compassion. They ignored fundamental questions of assimilation and compatibility", and ended: "This is the future congressional Democrats seek for your country", ANI reported.
Elon Musk posted "!!" on 2 October in response to a Visegrad24 post claiming that "young second and third-generation migrants" had set a firefighter on fire in Bordeaux. ZDFheute found that a spray can had exploded in burning rubbish as the firefighter approached on 29 September and that he left hospital the same day, ZDFheute reported (archive of the post). Visegrád 24, an X account with more than a million followers, also posted on 17 October that an alliance of migrant gangs and Antifa extremists was attacking police in front of Milan's cathedral, according to the post; the Milan Questura's figures for that day listed seven Italian adults, five foreign nationals and five minors among the 17 people arrested, Tuttonotizie reported.
RT, the Russian state broadcaster, published a Milan report on 18 October whose own text described Italia in Piazza as a movement of students and young workers protesting about energy prices, rents, wages and military spending, and embedded the Visegrád 24 migrant-gang post beneath it, RT published. Breitbart described the Milan events as "multicultural riots" on 18 October, Breitbart reported, and RedState headlined a day earlier that a "sacred Christian landmark" had been attacked, though its own text said the cathedral was not reported damaged, RedState reported.
Fact-checkers in four countries traced clips presented as the 2026 unrest to older events. ZDFheute found footage from the March 2023 pension protests, photos of a December 2022 Kurdish demonstration, a 2023 bus fire in Nîmes and a music video shared by accounts including @bulllaw, @EYakoby, @bennyjohnson and @RadioGenoa, ZDFheute reported. Alex Jones shared the Nîmes bus fire, filmed on 13 January 2023, Mimikama reported. Maldita traced clips to December 2022, March 2023 and the PSG riots of 30 May 2026, Maldita reported, and Open traced images of overturned cars to the Place de la République on 24 December 2022, Open reported.
An image of protesters firing fireworks with Palestinian flags at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, shared with the captions "Paris has fallen" and "France is approaching civil war", was made with AI and carried an invisible SynthID watermark, Full Fact found on 19 October, tracing it to a satirical Babylon Bee article of 6 October. The Combat Antisemitism Movement counted 1,384 posts on X between 16 and 18 October that blamed Jews or Israel for the riots, among them "Mossad is burning France right now" and "The Jews did this to France. Don't let them do it to America.", the Jerusalem Post reported.
NewsGuard found that a clip shared as an attack on the Paris stock exchange was April 2023 footage of the pension protests, and Euronext said "no protesting students, nor anyone else, are or have been near the Euronext Paris building". Clips of police and firefighters supposedly joining protesters dated from March 2023, and footage shared as "Africans" at the Gare du Nord came from a December 2017 tribute first broadcast by RT. Africa-based accounts posing as US users and celebrities, Mel Gibson among them, reposted the stock exchange clip on 3 October, and NewsGuard suggested advertising revenue as their motive, Eunews reported.
Commercial and paid amplifiers
AI-generated TikTok videos of vast anti-immigration marches in Madrid, Rome, Dublin, London, Berlin, Lisbon and Paris circulated in the weeks before the riots. TjekDet, the Danish fact-checker, found that at least two Madrid marches shown had no matching real event, that one video featured a reporter from "Canale 24", an outlet that does not exist, and that the profiles sought followers they could turn into income; the reporting did not identify a state sponsor, TjekDet reported. Maldita had counted 550 TikTok accounts posting more than 5,800 AI-generated protest videos linked to 18 countries, with over 89 million views, from accounts aiming to pass 10,000 followers so they could earn money from TikTok's Creator Rewards programme, Maldita reported.
Fox News Digital counted 50 organisations in the French protest movement and its international amplifiers, 15 of them student or youth groups, and reported that BreakThrough News, a New York outlet in the network funded by the businessman Neville Roy Singham, ran the headline "French students shut down schools in historic strike against austerity", Fox News reported. The New York Times reported in 2023 that Singham's money funded groups including the People's Forum in New York, according to his biography.
US prosecutors charged two RT employees, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, in September 2024 with funnelling about $9.7m through shell companies in Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Mauritius to a Tennessee content company between October 2023 and August 2024, about 90 per cent of the company's deposits; it posted nearly 2,000 videos, and its YouTube videos alone drew more than 16 million views, the Justice Department said. The indictment did not name the company, and Axios matched the details to Tenet Media, whose commentators Tim Pool, Benny Johnson and Dave Rubin said they were victims, Axios reported. Benny Johnson was among the accounts ZDFheute found sharing out-of-context footage of the French unrest in October 2026.
Iran and China
Iran's foreign ministry posted false content about the French protests from its official accounts, and France summoned Iran's ambassador on 7 October over "the disinformation campaign conducted by the Iranian authorities about the lycée movement in France", which it described as "absolument inadmissible" ("absolutely unacceptable"); it rejected Tehran's own summons of the French ambassador the previous day and said "these disgraceful provocations must stop", the French Foreign Ministry said. Iran's foreign ministry spokesman, Esmaeil Baghaei, had condemned French police treatment of students on 2 October, PressTV reported. Sweden's security service said in May 2024 that "criminal networks in Sweden are proxies that Iran uses", The National reported.
Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said on 13 October that "les manifestations lycéennes en France ont été elles-mêmes exploitées par des récits hostiles… venus de Russie, de Chine, d'Iran, de la communauté MAGA" ("the lycée protests in France were themselves exploited by hostile narratives from Russia, China, Iran and the MAGA community"), the Foreign Ministry published. His speech gave no examples of Chinese activity, while the reviewed official and research reports do not substantiate a Chinese state network exploiting the October protests; China's foreign ministry did not address them at its briefing on 6 October, according to the transcript. The EU attributed 6 per cent of the information manipulation incidents it recorded in 2025 to China.
Israel-linked operators and officials
Viginum, the French agency that detects foreign digital interference, published a technical report on 11 June 2026 on an operation it named Rokh Solis, which ran fake websites and accounts on Facebook, X, Instagram and TikTok against La France Insoumise candidates in the municipal elections of 15 and 22 March, Viginum published. A site called "Le Blog de Sophie" made false rape accusations against Sébastien Delogu, the party's candidate in Marseille, other content falsely accused candidates of paedophilia and a fake voting guide addressed Muslim voters, and Viginum said the operation sought to denigrate La France Insoumise and to polarise national debate by instrumentalising France's Muslim community, Next reported. La France Insoumise is the party Lecornu's office blamed on 1 October for organising the school blockades.
Reuters reported on 13 May that French authorities were examining whether BlackCore, a firm it described as Israeli and could not find in Israeli corporate records, had run at least part of the campaign against Delogu, François Piquemal in Toulouse and David Guiraud in Roubaix, and that Meta had linked a network tied to a BlackCore operation for an African government to the French campaign, a network Meta said originated in Israel and "primarily targeted France", Reuters reported. Israel's Foreign Ministry told Reuters it was not aware of BlackCore, whose website and LinkedIn page went offline after Reuters contacted the company. The Paris prosecutor opened an investigation on 27 May into foreign espionage, electoral fraud through false news and online advocacy of terrorism, Reuters reported.
Libération and Haaretz, which analysed BlackCore's digital footprint, found a toolkit of influence systems routed through servers in Britain, Germany, Finland and Lithuania and found that BlackCore's systems appeared to share web infrastructure with sites housing the internal systems of two Israeli companies, Galacticos and SNI, Haaretz reported. A London server that hosted two BlackCore sites from August 2025 also carried locked systems including a "Galacticos AI Avatar Generator Login Page" and one bearing SNI's name. Galacticos had developed technology for producing and managing social media avatars, and the investigation found no direct connection between Galacticos and the operation under French investigation. BlackCore's marketing site offered 1,600 avatars and fake accounts for "infiltrating Facebook groups, manipulating trends, and skewing polls on TikTok and Instagram", and the reporters could find no legal entity called BlackCore registered in any country.
Doron Afik, a commercial lawyer, holds 51 per cent of Galacticos and Guy Geyor, a technology entrepreneur, 28 per cent, and the two are the main shareholders of SNI, which is registered at the same Tel Aviv address, Haaretz reported; the address, on HaHashmonaim Street, also houses Afik's law firm, Yahoo Actualités reported. Geyor told Haaretz: "I and the company don't know who BlackCore is, and we never had any connection with them. We have no activity in France", and that there was "certainly no political activity". He confirmed that the company was linked to Omri Systems, a network domain on the London server, and said it was an internal system still in development that had never been sold or operated. Afik said Galacticos "has no affiliation, partnership or prior knowledge regarding BlackCore, and no connection to the party France Unbowed" and that it had never owned, operated or used Electric Marinade, another domain on the server. The remaining infrastructure of BlackCore and Galacticos went offline less than two hours after the two men were asked for comment. Yigal Unna, the former head of Israel's National Cyber Directorate, told Haaretz and Libération that he never played any role at Galacticos, which he had been told worked in social media monitoring.
Marc-Antoine Brillant, Viginum's director, said on 11 June that the investigation "did not make it possible to identify the sponsor or sponsors, if indeed they exist", and that the method appeared to have been used in Angola, Togo, the elections in Scotland and the 2025 New York City mayoral election, the Times of Israel reported. The French government asked Israel for explanations and for help identifying the sponsors, and Israel's embassy in Paris said it was awaiting details from the French inquiry and that "Israel has, of course, no intention of interfering in the French political process".
Meta removed 215 Facebook accounts, four Pages and 1,044 Instagram accounts in 2026 from a network it said originated in Israel and targeted France, the United Kingdom, Australia, Iran, Togo, Gabon, Angola and the United States. Ahead of France's municipal elections the network created local brands to attack candidates and spread narratives about the "Islamization" of France, and it ran anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim campaigns in France, the United Kingdom and Australia; Meta wrote that "this is an influence-for-hire operation, likely run on behalf of a number of distinct clients", and said its operators inflated engagement with clusters of AI-driven fake accounts they called "Mother-Child", Meta reported. The Islamisation narrative Meta describes is the frame that Trump, Vance, Musk and the far-right accounts in the EDMO assessment applied to France's school protests in October. Meta's report also described a Russian operation that invented an "International Burke Institute", presented as an academic body in Israel, to publish a "Burke Sovereignty Index" claiming European states had lost their sovereignty to NATO, the EU and the United States.
OpenAI disrupted a covert influence operation run by STOIC, a commercial company in Israel, in May 2024, OpenAI reported, and the New York Times reported, citing four Israeli officials and documents, that Israel's Ministry of Diaspora Affairs had commissioned the campaign for about $2m to target more than a dozen members of the US Congress, a charge the ministry denied, the New York Times reported. A Romanian court gave suspended sentences in March 2022 to the Black Cube co-founders Dan Zorella and Avi Yanus and an employee for intimidating Laura Kövesi, then Romania's anti-corruption prosecutor, the Times of Israel reported, and Slovenian authorities accused Black Cube in March 2026 of helping leak recordings to damage Prime Minister Robert Golob before an election, Eunews reported. Tal Hanan, operating as "Team Jorge", told undercover reporters in 2023 that his team had worked on 33 presidential-level campaigns, according to the Forbidden Stories investigation.
Amichai Chikli, Israel's minister for diaspora affairs, met Jordan Bardella of the Rassemblement National at the Conservative Political Action Conference in the United States on 21 February 2025, the Times of Israel reported, and invited him with representatives of Spain's Vox, the Sweden Democrats and Hungary's Fidesz to an antisemitism conference his ministry organised in Jerusalem in March 2025, Ynet reported. He called Bardella "one of the clearest voices in Europe against Hamas" on 30 September 2026, Euronews reported, and hosted Tommy Robinson in Israel in October 2025, a visit the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council condemned, The New Arab reported. Robinson was among the accounts EDMO found recasting the French protests as ethnic and religious conflict, and the Social Design Agency counted the Rassemblement National's rise among its own successes.
Chikli wrote on X on 17 October, as rioting spread across France: "I was convinced that the Right coming to power in France would trigger a civil war. It turns out I was being optimistic: it has already begun! I wish France victory over barbarism, despite its betrayal of Israel. Belgium and Britain, you are probably next. Get ready.", JNS reported. Haaretz reported on 18 October that Israel's Foreign Ministry and Chikli had linked the riots to pro-Palestinian activism and immigration on little evidence beyond Palestinian flags among demonstrators, Haaretz reported. Mossad Commentary, an X account with no link to Israel's intelligence agency that kept a blue check after presenting video-game footage as an Israeli air-defence system in 2023, ProPublica reported, posted about the riots and arrests as Macron prepared his address.
At least 70,000 people crossed from Morocco into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in late July 2026 after Arabic-language Facebook posts misread a Spanish Supreme Court ruling, and Maldita found no evidence of foreign interference before 30 July, EDMO and Maldita reported. Danny Danon, Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, wrote on 30 July that Spain "never misses an opportunity to lecture Israel" and asked why it kept colonial enclaves in Africa, and Dana Erlich, Israel's acting ambassador in Madrid, said his post did not represent Israel's position, the Algemeiner reported; pro-Israel accounts began using #FreeCeuta on 31 July, Maldita found. Pedro Sánchez said on 31 August that "rumours and disinformation spread on social networks linked to Russia and Israel" after 30 and 31 July, citing research by the EU's diplomatic service, Al Jazeera reported. An EU diplomatic service spokesperson confirmed Russian attempts to exploit the crisis and said there was no conclusive evidence that foreign state disinformation triggered it, JTA reported, and Sánchez told parliament on 3 September that intelligence services had found no evidence that the states of Morocco, Russia or Israel were directly behind it while pro-Russian and pro-Israeli networks had been active, Euronews reported. Israel's foreign minister, Gideon Sa'ar, accused Sánchez of "lying shamelessly", Al-Monitor reported.
Large amplifiers in Europe, Canada and South America
Musk described the French school protests as "a slow-motion invasion, but still an invasion" (in translation) after Trump's post of 6 October 2026, Berliner Zeitung reported, citing Le Monde, and wrote on 7 October that Quebec, Alberta and Saskatchewan should separate from Canada, AP reported. Trump tied France's riots to the US midterm elections at a rally in Wichita on 19 October, Fox News reported. Visegrád 24, whose false posts about Bordeaux and Milan circulated during the French and Italian unrest, was among the accounts Musk interacted with most in January 2025, Sky News reported, and a source for Zero Hedge's coverage of France, Zero Hedge published. Mario Nawfal, the influencer whose video of the Paris unrest Dmitriev answered on 7 October, had posted the claim of protests in 120 Brazilian cities that Musk reposted in February 2025, Público reported.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk wrote during the riots that followed the Southport stabbings in August 2024 that civil war in Britain was "inevitable", replying to a user who blamed the unrest on mass migration; the justice minister, Heidi Alexander, said the comments were "deeply irresponsible", AFP reported. He shared a fake Telegraph headline about "detainment camps" in the Falklands from the Britain First co-leader Ashlea Simon, which Full Fact rated false after the Telegraph confirmed it had published no such article, Full Fact found; screenshots showed nearly two million views before he deleted it about 30 minutes later, AAP FactCheck reported.
Sky News reviewed more than 2,000 of Musk's posts in January 2025 and found that about a third of his recent output concerned grooming gangs, drawing at least 40 million engagements, and that the accounts he interacted with most included Visegrad 24 and Tommy Robinson, Sky News reported. The Center for the Study of Organized Hate found that 51 of his posts accounted for 1.2 billion of the 1.51 billion views in a sample of 1,208 posts on the subject that month, Tech Policy Press reported. Health Secretary Wes Streeting said some of Musk's criticisms were "misjudged and certainly misinformed", APA reported. Musk told the Unite the Kingdom rally in London in September 2025 that "violence is coming to you" and "you either fight back or you die", and Downing Street condemned "dangerous and inflammatory language", AP reported.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate counted more than 115 million views in June 2026 for posts by Robinson, the MP Rupert Lowe and Musk about unrest in Belfast, 55 per cent of them on Musk's posts, and more than 3,900 replies calling for lynchings and other crimes against immigrants; "Musk's amplification has been instrumental," its chief executive, Imran Ahmed, said, AFP reported. Musk had written that "murderous migrants beheading innocent people in their home town is what's making people angry", IBTimes reported; the suspect in the Belfast knife attack was charged with attempted murder, and AAP FactCheck debunked claims that the victim had died, AAP reported.
Musk wrote in Welt am Sonntag in December 2024 that the AfD was "the last spark of hope" for Germany and that "portraying the AfD as far-right is clearly false", Euronews reported; German domestic intelligence classifies AfD branches as extremist, The Local reported. In his live conversation with the AfD leader Alice Weidel on X on 9 January 2025, Correctiv rated false her claim that Hitler was a communist and rejected Musk's claim that Hitler nationalised companies, Correctiv found.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot accused him on 13 October of "online harassment campaigns against European leaders", AFP reported.
The European Commission found in July 2024 that X's blue checkmark "negatively affects users' ability to make free and informed decisions", the Law Society Gazette reported, and on 5 December 2025 fined X €120 million, the first fine under the Digital Services Act, over the deceptive checkmark, its advertising repository and researcher data access, The Register reported. The Commission opened an investigation into the Grok chatbot in January 2026, SCL reported, and accepted X's plan to fix the breaches in July 2026 while X's appeal against the fine continued, Report.az reported.
Prime Minister Mark Carney said on 8 October, the day after Musk's separatism posts, that Canadians should be free of "foreign governments and large tech firms that think they can tell us what to do", AP reported. Canada's heritage minister, Pascale St-Onge, had accused him in January 2025 of "meddling in other countries' elections and politics", the Western Standard reported.
Brazil's Supreme Court justice Alexandre de Moraes added Musk to the court's inquiry into fake news in April 2024, describing his posts as a "disinformation campaign" about court decisions, SCMP reported, and ordered X suspended in Brazil from 31 August 2024 for failing to name a legal representative and comply with blocking orders, Lupa reported. The ban was lifted in October after X paid about $5.2 million in fines and complied; Musk had called Moraes an "evil dictator", Fortune reported. In February 2025 Musk reposted Mario Nawfal's claim of protests in "120 ciudades" demanding President Lula's impeachment with the comment "Wow", Público reported.
Researchers at QUT and Monash University found that from July 2024 views of Musk's posts rose 138 per cent, against 57 per cent for other prominent political accounts, QUT reported, and the Center for Countering Digital Hate counted at least 87 Musk posts on the 2024 US election that fact-checkers had rated false or misleading, with more than 2 billion views, TechCrunch reported.
Trump administration officials
JD Vance told the Munich Security Conference on 14 February 2025 that "what I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values" and that "there is no room for firewalls", and met the AfD's Weidel, Axios reported. Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote on 2 May 2025 that Germany's surveillance powers over the AfD were "tyranny in disguise", and Germany's foreign ministry said that "it is independent courts that will have the final say" and that "rightwing extremism needs to be stopped", CNN reported.
The US National Security Strategy of December 2025 warned of "the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure" in Europe, said "the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less" and that "the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism", AP reported. European Council President António Costa said that "allies don't threaten to interfere in the domestic political choices of their allies", AP reported, and Kallas told the Munich conference in February 2026 that "woke, decadent Europe is not facing civilizational erasure", AP reported. A State Department adviser, Samuel Samson, wrote on the department's Substack of "an aggressive campaign against Western civilization itself" in Europe under the title "The Need For Civilizational Allies In Europe", TPM reported.
Trump wrote on 18 October 2026: "France is burning! The immigration of people from an entirely different world, people with hatred in their hearts, has shattered that once great country", AFP reported. He told reporters the next day that the unrest "has to do with immigration. Not schools, not anything", and told a rally in Wichita: "If you want to see what is at stake in this election, just look at what's happening in France", Fox News reported. Macron blamed "insurrectionist elements from radical far-left groups, joined by numerous criminals", and French authorities and police had not linked immigrants to the rioting, AP reported.
Trump said on 21 January 2025 that "the fentanyl coming through Canada is massive"; US Customs and Border Protection figures for fiscal 2024 showed 43 lb of the 21,889 lb of fentanyl seized at US borders came at the Canadian border, about 0.2 per cent, CTV's fact-check found.
Trump's letter of 9 July 2025 imposing 50 per cent tariffs on Brazil called the trial of Jair Bolsonaro "a Witch Hunt that should end IMMEDIATELY", the Fiscal Times reported, although US Trade Representative figures showed a US goods surplus with Brazil of about $7.4 billion in 2024, Al Jazeera reported. Brazil's foreign ministry, in terms close to Costa's rejection of US interference in Europe, said in September 2025, after the US sanctioned Moraes's wife and 11 days after Bolsonaro was sentenced to 27 years and three months, that Brazil "não se curvará" ("will not bow") to "ingerência indevida" ("undue interference"), Diário do Comércio reported.
Zero Hedge and Inevitable West
Zero Hedge, a financial and political website launched in 2009, was written under the shared pseudonym "Tyler Durden" by Daniel Ivandjiiski and two others, one of whom, Colin Lokey, said the house line was "Vladimir Putin=greatest leader in the history of statecraft", Bloomberg reported in 2016; Ivandjiiski called Lokey's account "sour grapes". US officials said in February 2022 that the site, then followed by 1.2 million accounts on X, republished articles from outlets they described as controlled by Russian intelligence, while not alleging direct links between the site and Russia; Zero Hedge said it "has never worked, collaborated or cooperated with Russia", AP reported. A University of Texas at San Antonio study found its coverage "often appeared to be supporting the same criticisms offered by Sputnik", EurekAlert reported. Zero Hedge's coverage of France in October 2026, under the headline "France's Triple Crisis: Far-Left Riots, A Ticking Debt Bomb, And Mass Migration Collide", quoted Trump's mass-migration post and a commentator describing protesters as "an unassimilated third world horde", and drew on Visegrad24's posts, Zero Hedge published.
Inevitable West, an X account created in October 2024 that describes itself as a "Defender of Western values and culture" and says it operates from England, "frequently posts polarizing and false political content", the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab found. On Canada's election day, 28 April 2025, it posted that a man had "caught poll workers bringing boxes of unsealed ballots home" and that "the Left are stealing the election again", drawing about 2.4 million views; Elections Canada said the "ballot boxes in the video are not full of marked ballots", DFRLab reported. The account posted in November 2024 that veterans would turn their backs on Keir Starmer at the Cenotaph, which drew 3.7 million views and did not happen, The London Economic reported, and Musk has frequently shared its posts, Mother Jones reported.
Russia's established methods of destabilisation
Staged incidents
French domestic intelligence attributed the stencilling of Stars of David on Paris buildings in October 2023 to the FSB's fifth division, in an internal note revealed by Le Monde in February 2024 and confirmed to AFP by a source with knowledge of the investigation, The Local reported. The couples who painted them were Moldovan and had been paid, and 1,095 bots from the Russian network RRN posted 2,589 times about the graffiti on X, France's foreign ministry and Viginum found, AP reported. A Paris court jailed four Bulgarians in October 2025 for painting 35 red hands on the Shoah Memorial in May 2024 and found a concerted and hostile operation in a context of foreign interference, Euronews reported.
Small groups of men were recruited and paid in 2023 to pose with identical anti-Ukraine and anti-NATO placards in front of unrelated crowds, a pension protest in Paris and a climate rally in The Hague among them, so that photographs posted online suggested mass support for their message, Le Monde's video investigation showed. The investigation, based on leaked documents, described the operation as organised by the Russian intelligence services and did not identify the organisation responsible for financing it.
Severed pig heads, some marked "Macron", were left outside nine mosques and Muslim cultural centres in and around Paris in September 2025. A leaked "Report on Operation Pig's Head" says six operatives arrived on 7 September, carried out reconnaissance the next day, delivered the heads that night and "successfully left the country", and it contains photographs of the prepared heads that had never been published, VSquare reported in a joint investigation by Delfi Estonia and OCCRP. The documents point to the Social Design Agency, headed by Ilya Gambashidze, with presidential administration officials seen overseeing its work and initials in the files matching those of Sergei Kiriyenko, the first deputy head of the administration. Many of the documents lack clear authorship, and neither the agency nor the administration responded to the reporters’ requests for comment.
Serbian courts convicted the men who carried out the pig-head attacks in December 2025 and found that their orders, instructions and money came from "structures of the intelligence service of the Russian Federation", Forum 18 reported. The group also sprayed "10 September" graffiti in Paris before that month's mass protests, The Geopost reported, citing Radio Free Europe's Serbian service, and the verdict tied it to green paint thrown at the Holocaust museum and synagogues in Paris and plastic skeletons left at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.
The Social Design Agency files
Delfi Estonia obtained a cache of several dozen files, including internal reports and screenshots of chats between Social Design Agency staff and presidential administration officials, and shared it with OCCRP and other partners, which published in May 2026; the reporters did not say who leaked it, OCCRP reported. The files date from May 2023 to 2026, and Shomrim reported that most were the correspondence of Sofia Zakharova, a senior official in the presidential administration, Shomrim reported. The reporters checked them against Serbian court verdicts, document metadata, chat timestamps, a spreadsheet linking an alias to Zakharova that matched her EU sanctions listing and photographs of the pig heads that had never been published; OCCRP wrote that it is "not always evident" whether a given file came from the agency, the administration or elsewhere.
The passage on protests comes from a strategy document created in May 2023, according to its metadata, which proposes "delivering consecutive cognitive strikes" and states: "We consider the organization of mass protest actions in NATO countries to be an important supporting measure. We have the necessary capabilities to involve a special contingent permanently residing abroad for such events." The document is a proposal addressed to NATO countries generally rather than France specifically, and its approval or implementation remains unconfirmed in OCCRP’s reporting. The "opinion tracker" to monitor the 100 "most prominent French opposition opinion leaders" is one of eight items in a "Projects 2026" file, which also lists an "AI News" project aimed at France, and OCCRP reported only that some projects were "partially begun".
The "Report on Operation Pig's Head" describes a completed operation in France: "A team of 6 (six) people was engaged", the work was done between midnight and 05:00 on the night of 8 to 9 September 2025 and "after carrying out the operation, the team successfully left the country", according to a translation. The report says the operation was "carried out simultaneously with the '#10September' operation" and that the team "had no contact with the team responsible" for it; the Serbian verdicts found that the same network sprayed "10 September" graffiti in Paris before that month's mass protests, The Geopost reported. The files also describe green paint thrown at the Paris Holocaust museum and synagogues and stickers on Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day in 2025, and plans for a de Gaulle statue and sex dolls in the Seine that never materialised or were not reported.
An earlier leak of Social Design Agency files in September 2024 recorded success metrics that included the Rassemblement National polling at 20 per cent and the share of French people unwilling to make sacrifices for Ukraine passing 44 per cent, VSquare reported. An FBI affidavit of the same month described an agency "International Conflict Incitement" project aimed at Germany and France to "escalate internal tensions" and "artificially generate conflicts" through false stories, fake videos and social media comments, the affidavit states.
The British government said in October 2024 that the agency had "attempted to incite protests in half a dozen European countries" that year, the UK government said.
Dutch intelligence wrote in 2026 that "in the physical domain, Russia focuses on the covert organisation of demonstrations" or tries to piggyback on demonstrations of a mainly pacifist or anti-NATO nature. In May 2023 it used an Extinction Rebellion demonstration in The Hague to spread pro-Kremlin statements, and "Extinction Rebellion does not appear to have been aware of this at any moment", the AIVD and MIVD wrote.
A 13-year-old Russian-German girl who went missing in Berlin for 30 hours in January 2016 said she had been abducted and raped; Russia's Channel One carried her aunt's account of an "Arabic looking man", about 700 people protested outside the Chancellery and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused Germany of "covering up reality in a politically correct manner", The Local reported. Prosecutors found she had not been raped and had stayed with an acquaintance, according to the case record, and Germany's foreign minister warned against using the case "for political propaganda and to interfere and inflame the already complex discussion over migrants", The Moscow Times reported.
Training for disruption
Moldovan police detained 74 people after 250 searches on 22 September 2025, six days before parliamentary elections, and alleged that an officer of the Russian military intelligence directorate, known as the GRU, had directed a plan for mass riots through the network of the fugitive businessman Ilan Shor and Telegram, with recruits paid $300 to $500 a month and $300 per action, Moldovan police said. Recruits had travelled to Serbia for training in firearms, crowd control and resisting detention, presented as religious pilgrimages, Euromaidan Press reported. Serbian police arrested two suspected trainers on 26 September 2025, bne IntelliNews reported, and President Aleksandar Vučić confirmed on 15 October 2025 that three Russian citizens had been present at the camp, without saying whether they worked for Russian intelligence, OCCRP reported; the police allegations have not been tested at trial.
Moldovan police had said in March 2023 that seven people were promised up to $10,000 each to cause mass disorder at a protest backed by Shor's party, NBC reported, and in October 2024 that more than 300 activists had been trained near Moscow and others in Serbia and Bosnia by Wagner-linked instructors, OCCRP reported. A Chișinău court had sentenced Shor in absentia in April 2023 to 15 years over the theft of $1bn from Moldovan banks, AP reported.
A separate set of camps ran in 2024 at Glamočani near Banja Luka, in Bosnia's Republika Srpska, and then at Radenka in Serbia, where police searched in October that year. At least three groups of five to 12 Moldovans attended between July and early September 2024, were paid €450 to €800 each and trained on military drones costing €3,000 to €5,000 apiece and on incendiary devices; they photographed embassies in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia, among them the US embassy in Bosnia, and logged drone take-off sites in an app, Detektor reported. A court in Chișinău sentenced Aliona Gotco to four years and one month, Ludmila Costenco to four years and Vladimir Harcevnicov to five years and four months in February 2026, all in absentia and subject to appeal; the three admitted attending the Bosnian camp and denied plotting unrest, and a Russian drone instructor known as "Viktor" took part in the training, Detektor reported. Ion Chirita and Nikita Sirenko received suspended sentences in March, and Bosnian prosecutors have opened a case without issuing indictments.
The Russian Imperial Movement, a St Petersburg ultranationalist group, gave two members of the Swedish neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement paramilitary training in 2016, and the two later carried out bombings in Gothenburg that targeted a left-wing café and refugee housing. The US State Department designated the movement and three of its leaders as terrorists on 7 April 2020, the first time it had designated a white supremacist group, and said it gave "paramilitary-style training to white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Europe", the State Department said. The US Treasury sanctioned Alexander Zhuchkovsky in June 2022, finding that he had taught at the movement's Partizan training centre in St Petersburg and had raised more than 200 million roubles since 2014 through VK, the Treasury said. The UK proscribed the movement in July 2025, Searchlight reported. The movement is a private group, and the US findings document training and fundraising on Russian soil, not Russian state direction.
Spanish police dismantled a cell of The Base, an accelerationist network that advocates collapse through violence, in Castellón in December 2025, arresting three people on charges of terrorist membership, recruitment, training and illegal weapons. The network's founder, the US-born Rinaldo Nazzaro, is based in Russia and described the detainees as "political prisoners", GNET wrote. Denmark's Centre for Documentation and Counter Extremism reported in September 2025 that Active Clubs, a far-right network that combines combat sports with extremist ideology, "hide in plain sight" as sports clubs in several major Danish cities, and named Denis Kapustin, a German-Russian neo-Nazi, as a co-launcher of its podcast in 2021, the centre wrote. The European Commission listed the report as a learning resource in March 2026, the Commission shows.
Criminal intermediaries
Europol's 2025 threat assessment named "hostile state-actors such as Russia and Belarus" and said organised crime had "de facto turned into a private military company of hybrid warfare", Euronews reported. RUSI wrote in August 2026 that Russia recruits "disposable agents" online, often paying them in cryptocurrency, because they are "cheap, replaceable and often already able to move freely within Europe", and cited a count of 151 publicly known cases between February 2022 and February 2026, RUSI wrote.
Dylan Earl contacted the Wagner Group on Telegram in 2023 and recruited others to set fire to two Ukrainian-owned business units in Leyton, east London, on 20 March 2024, Counter Terrorism Policing said. Fire destroyed about 1,400 shops and service outlets at the Marywilska 44 shopping centre in Warsaw on 12 May 2024, and Poland's justice and interior ministers said that "the fire was the result of arson instructed by the Russian secret services", the Polish government said. Lithuanian prosecutors charged six people from Spain, Colombia, Cuba, Russia and Belarus with terrorism in January 2026, saying coordinators in Russia linked to the GRU had paid them €5,000 to €10,000 each for arson attempts in four EU countries, Al Jazeera reported.
Fire damaged a Starlink ground station at Wola Krobowska, south of Warsaw, on 23 September 2026, and Poland's interior minister, Tomasz Siemoniak, said after German police detained two Turkish nationals on 12 October: "We have no doubt that Russian services are behind this act of sabotage", Al Jazeera reported. Der Spiegel reported that the suspects likely belonged to or worked for the Turkish gang known as the Daltons, whose leader Beratcan Gökdemir has stayed in Russia since his arrest there in 2024, Meduza reported.
Migration as an instrument of pressure and propaganda
Russia moved about 7,000 third-country nationals towards Norway and Finland in 2015 and 2016, and Belarus used state-linked travel agencies and criminal networks in 2021 to move people towards Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, RUSI wrote. The EU sanctioned Belavia, Belarus's state airline, with tour operators and hotels in December 2021 for helping "incite and organise illegal border crossings through Belarus to the EU", the Council said. Mark Galeotti wrote for the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime in January 2026 that the aim in the Russian and Belarusian cases was pressure "by generating division, disruption and costs", that all of them "proved problematic" and that Minsk and Moscow might still judge migration a "viable tool", GI-TOC published.
Finland's government said in January 2025 that "instrumentalised migration has ceased for now", the Finnish government said. Poland's interior minister, Marcin Kierwiński, said on 27 April 2026 that "the number of people who crossed the border from Belarus illegally in the first quarter is zero", the Polish government said, and attempted crossings in the first half of 2026 fell below 250 from about 15,500 a year earlier, in what the ministry described as "illegal migration organised by the Belarusian regime with the support of the Kremlin", Notes from Poland reported. Latvia recorded 232 attempts on 1 July 2026, its highest single-day figure in 1,024 days, and about 7,017 since January, Charter97 reported, and Lithuania's interior minister, Vladislav Kondratovič, said in January that "the scale of hybrid threats is growing", Reform.news reported.
The arrest figures released in France, Italy and Belgium undermine the migrant-uprising narrative. Darmanin and the Paris and Marseille prosecutors described adults known and unknown to police, looters and some ultra-left suspects; the Milan Questura's figures for 17 October listed seven Italian adults, five foreign nationals and five minors among 17 people arrested, Tuttonotizie reported, and Il Post found that those involved included both second-generation Italians and Italians of Italian origin, Il Post reported. The documented use of migration as a weapon is the movement of people towards EU borders by the Belarusian and Russian states, and the Voice of Europe propaganda that the EU found targeting asylum seekers. Sánchez named networks linked to Russia and Israel as spreading disinformation after the Ceuta crossing of July 2026, which Maldita traced to misread Facebook posts in Arabic.
Who benefits from Europe's instability?
The Social Design Agency counted a stronger Rassemblement National and a larger share of French people unwilling to make sacrifices for Ukraine as successes, its "International Conflict Incitement" project aimed to "escalate internal tensions" in Germany and France and its 2023 strategy treated protests in NATO countries as a "supporting measure". RIA Novosti's headline of 3 October presented the French riots as "Macron's payback for Ukraine", Zakharova set school budgets against "guns and shells" for Ukraine and Dmitriev blamed "short-sighted Russophobic policy". France had become the second most targeted country in the EU's count of foreign information manipulation incidents for 2025, behind only Ukraine.
Iran's government entered the French story in a diplomatic quarrel: Baghaei condemned French police on 2 October, Tehran summoned France's ambassador on 6 October and France summoned Iran's on 7 October over the foreign ministry's false posts. Rama's government in Albania, which has accused Iran of a hybrid war over the resort protests since June, named Iran again in October without releasing evidence.
Israel's diaspora minister has cultivated the Rassemblement National, Vox, the Sweden Democrats, Fidesz and Robinson, parties and figures who have campaigned on the reframing of Europe's protests as a migrant and Muslim uprising. The Israel-origin network Meta removed ran that frame in France, likely for several clients Meta did not name, before the municipal elections, and Rokh Solis targeted La France Insoumise, the party the French government blamed for the school blockades, in a campaign whose sponsor Viginum could not identify.
Trump's and Vance's posts on France ran alongside the US midterm campaign, and Vance's ended: "This is the future congressional Democrats seek for your country." European far-right accounts used the riots to argue for "remigration", the removal of people of migrant descent, which the EDMO assessment linked to the reframing of the protests as ethnic conflict. The Africa-based accounts that recycled French footage and the TikTok profiles posting AI-generated marches were, by NewsGuard's, TjekDet's and Maldita's findings, chasing advertising revenue and followers that could be turned into income. The communist organisations that mobilised marchers set out their own aims: a general strike, "a Communist International" and "victory against the fascist-leaning bourgeoisie".
Coordination, convergence or opportunism?
Visegrád 24 supplied posts that Musk, RT and Zero Hedge carried, and Mario Nawfal's posts drew Dmitriev's reply on Paris and Musk's repost on Brazil. RT embedded Visegrád 24's false migrant-gang post in its Milan report; Benny Johnson, one of the commentators on the Tenet Media platform that RT employees secretly funded, shared out-of-context footage of the French unrest; Le Monde found Dmitriev's message and Trump's "so similar in substance and form"; and the World Anti-Imperialist Platform, which the PRCF and SOVINTERN both signed, republished the PRCF's, URC's and OCF's calls for 17 October while SOVINTERN's Moscow hub posted about the protests.
Matryoshka produced fabricated stories within days of the French protests turning violent, Russian officials and state media adopted a consistent line that tied the unrest to Ukraine and SOVINTERN commented in several languages; the leaked files show that Russian services and the Social Design Agency have staged incidents in Paris, including one timed alongside a French protest date in September 2025, and set out the aim of organising protests in NATO countries. The evidence of planning in those files stops in 2026 with projects such as an AI news operation and an opinion tracker aimed at France. Israel-origin operators ran fake local brands, Islamisation content and smears against La France Insoumise in the first half of 2026, and Sánchez named Russia- and Israel-linked networks together after Ceuta, but the records reviewed document no shared infrastructure, accounts or payments between the Russian and Israel-linked operations. The available evidence establishes foreign amplification and precedents for covert interference, but not control, financing or direction of the October 2026 protests or violence.
Greek students said "now it's our turn", Luxembourg's student union backed the French movement, Italian organisers cited France and Spain and a youth group called "Gen Z Revolution" set Europe-wide dates on TikTok and Discord, while Belgian student leaders said nobody was behind their mobilisations. Italian investigators and intelligence services were monitoring the Gen Z Revolution calls on 18 October with findings yet to be published.
What the evidence establishes
Teachers, pupils, students, workers and pensioners began the protests in France, Belgium, Italy, Albania and elsewhere over school staffing, budgets, prices, wages, housing and corruption. In France, unions, student unions, Gilets jaunes and five communist organisations called people out for 17 October; the government blamed ultra-left groups for organising part of the violence and has arrested an ultra-left suspect in the Limoges fire, while prosecutors in Paris and Marseille describe most of those held as adults, many of them looters. Mediapart's report that intelligence officers were told to blame La France Insoumise, which the government denies, has not been resolved.
Matryoshka produced fabricated news about the French riots within days, impersonating Le Monde, DW, Bellingcat and research institutes; Russian state media and officials presented the riots as payback for France's support for Ukraine; Putin's special envoy aligned his message with the US vice-president's; and a channel run by a sanctioned former party co-chairman forwarded calls to kill French police. Russian services have, in earlier cases, paid people to paint Stars of David and red hands in Paris and to leave pig heads at mosques, staged fake anti-Ukraine protests inside genuine ones, trained Moldovans in drones and incendiary devices in Bosnia and Serbia and hired criminals for arson from London to Warsaw. The Social Design Agency's own files propose organising mass protests in NATO countries through people living abroad, and the British government says the agency tried to incite protests in half a dozen European countries in 2024.
The PRCF, the URC and the OCF have political, ideological and media ties to Russian parliamentary parties, a pro-Russian international platform and a party official in occupied Donetsk; the PCF's ties to Moscow are mainly Soviet-era and its leadership condemns the invasion; and the MJCF's documented contact is one round table in 2021. SOVINTERN, created by a Duma party under a Duma deputy chairman charged in the United States, commented on the French protests and is linked through its participants to recruitment for Russia's war.
Belarus and Russia have moved migrants to the borders of Finland, Norway, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia since 2015, and Latvia recorded its highest daily figure in almost three years in July 2026. Iran's foreign ministry spread false content about the French protests and was summoned for it. An Israel-origin influence-for-hire network pushed claims about the Islamisation of France before the March 2026 municipal elections until Meta removed it, and French authorities examined whether BlackCore, a firm described as Israeli, ran the Rokh Solis smears against La France Insoumise, a campaign whose sponsor Viginum could not identify. Israel's diaspora minister has courted Bardella, Vox, the Sweden Democrats, Fidesz and Robinson, and Spain's prime minister named Israel-linked networks alongside Russian ones in the Ceuta crisis. China appears in the French foreign minister's list and in 6 per cent of the EU's incident count for 2025, although an operation tied to the October protests remains undocumented. Chikli wrote that civil war had begun in France and told Belgium and Britain to "get ready", and accounts on X posted more than 1,300 claims in three days that Jews or Israel were behind the riots. Trump, Vance and Musk spread claims that French schools were a front for Islam, that liberals had "imported the third world" and that migrants had set a firefighter alight, which ZDFheute found was false, and commercial accounts recycled footage from 2017, 2022 and 2023 for revenue. Musk's posts accounted for more than half of 115 million views of posts on the Belfast unrest by the Center for Countering Digital Hate's count, the European Commission fined X €120 million under the Digital Services Act, and fact-checkers found false Trump's claim about fentanyl from Canada and Inevitable West's claim of a stolen Canadian election.
France has recorded 2,397 arrests from 17 October, Milan took more than 270 people to the Questura on a single day and Tirana's police detained hundreds. Macron ordered transparency over the failures in planning and intelligence on 19 October, Lecornu promised to provide the evidence behind his account of an ultra-left insurrectionary scheme, the Polish and German investigations into the Starlink fire are open and Italian intelligence services are monitoring the calls for protests across Europe on 20 November.
