How Russia May Be Interfering in the Midterms - Right Now

(Russian caption: “Photo of the goals prior to the start of the operation.” Photo courtesy of the OCCRP)

Last September, severed pig heads suddenly appeared outside mosques and Muslim cultural centers in and around Paris, with the name “Macron” written across them. To anyone following the story, the meaning was clear: France had suffered another terrible act of Islamophobia under the leadership of President Emmanuel Macron.

But according to subsequent criminal convictions and an extraordinary cache of leaked documents, nativist anti-Muslim sentiment had nothing to do with this. In December, the Serbian Higher Court convicted three Serbian men from the town of Velika Plana for their roles in the operations. The court judgments said that they had been directed by Russian intelligence to provoke unrest and religious intolerance.

The group’s organizers, Momčilo Gajić and a second figure known only by the codename “Hunter,” were paid tools of Russian intelligence services, charged with organizing members to carry out staged provocations in France and Germany. The chain of command appears to have worked through layers of Serbian intermediaries. Gajić and “Hunter” sat at the top of the local network, with Gajić delegating recruitment to Bogdan Đinović, who recruited several participants around Velika Plana. Gajić paid operatives between €500 and €1,500 per operation, plus expenses, to inflame religious and ethnic hostility and destabilize the French Republic. In September, Serbian authorities said that Gajić was on the run. Several months later, he surfaced in Moscow.

The pig heads were hardly the only operation the Russians perpetuated in France and Muslims were not the only community targeted. “Green Synagogues” was the internal Russian operational name for the 2025 vandalism of Jewish sites in Paris, which were splattered with green paint because green is the color most closely associated with Islam. This followed a 2023 incident, where 250 Stars of David were stenciled on walls across Paris in the wake of Hamas’ October 7th attack on Israel. A Moldovan businessman claimed responsibility, though evidence points to Russian intelligence running the operation in order to amplify tensions between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian residents.

The “Green Synagogues” operation was a similar effort to create animosity between two communities living side by side in Paris. A user operating under the pseudonym “Edward Bernays” messaged Russian Presidential Administration official Sofia Zakharova that the project’s aim was to make the French government look incapable of stopping what “Bernays” called a wave of “Islamic anti-Semitism” in Paris. The purpose was to damage Macron politically and make it appear as though he could not protect French Jews. “Bernays” boasted that the episode had made international headlines.

Another operation involved hundreds of pro-Armenian stickers placed around a heavily Muslim section of Paris on Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, the purpose of which was to aggravate tensions between the French Armenian community on the one hand and the French Azerbaijani and Turkish communities on the other.

The leaked files also included plans that were never carried out. One proposed vandalizing a monument to former French President Charles de Gaulle and framing Ukrainians. The planners went so far as to specify that the people recruited to commit the act should themselves be deceived about who was directing them by believing that they were acting on behalf of the Ukrainian cause. Another proposal contemplated placing thirty sex dolls in the Seine carrying the message, “Fuck Migrants!”

France was not the only European country the Kremlin targeted in this way. Last summer, the Serbian cell placed five plastic skeletons embedded in concrete-filled buckets near Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, carrying German signs reading, “Still waiting for my pension. Thanks, Merz.” The goal was to drive down German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s popularity by portraying ordinary Germans as literally dying while waiting for retirement benefits.

In December 2024, during the lead-up to the German elections, 276 cars across Germany had their exhaust pipes clogged with construction foam and marked with stickers featuring Green Party chancellor candidate Robert Habeck and the slogan “Be greener!” This was a false-flag effort to pin the vandalism on climate activists and damage the Green Party before Germany’s February election. “Bernays” sent Zakharova a German media story about the vandalism and bragged, ‘Deutsche Welle is writing about us.’”

The point of these operations is not subtle once you see the pattern. It pits Muslim against Jew; immigrant against the native-born; environmentalist against working class motorist; French citizen against Ukrainian refugee; right against left.

These efforts were run directly from the Kremlin, presided over by a member of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. A recent investigation blows open the internal reports, planning documents, and private conversations involving the Russian Social Design Agency and officials in the Russian Presidential Administration.

Among the leaked files is a document titled “Report on Operation Pig’s Head,” which contains photographs of the pig heads before they were deployed, a chronology of the operatives’ arrival and reconnaissance in Paris, and an accounting of the international press attention generated afterward. The operation was not simply designed to offend Muslims. Its success was measured by whether authentic Western news organizations would report on the provocation and thereby magnify it, making it appear as though the French society was on the verge of irretrievable conflict.

Think for a moment about the difference between this and Russia’s election interference leading up to the 2016 election, where the Kremlin worked overtime to tank Hillary Clinton’s campaign and to elect Donald Trump. The French operation was not a troll in St. Petersburg inventing a meme or creating a fake Facebook profile to share a fabricated article. It wasn’t even the Wikileaks hack of internal political party emails.

This was the manufacture of an actual event, designed to be mistaken for authentic social conflict. It involved authentic pig heads, authentic mosques, authentic synagogues, and authentically frightened communities on edge. It featured real journalists covering the event, real influencers amplifying the strife, real politicians reacting in fury, and real citizens becoming irate with one another.

Rather than aiming to alter what Western citizens believe about Russia, the goal is to alter the way Western citizens think about each other. According tot the Russians, they are “delivering consecutive cognitive strikes” against Western audiences. In this, the Kremlin is succeeding beyond its wildest dreams. Russia does not need to invent the fault lines of Western society because we have already supplied them. It needs only to locate the most combustible ones, introduce accelerant, and conceal who struck the match.

The same Russian operation is undoubtedly happening in the United States — right now, during the 2026 election. Some of it is happening in plain sight, if you know where to look.