Leaked Kremlin documents uncover sham protest effort across Europe

KYIV -- Leaked Kremlin documents have revealed Moscow's efforts to stage sham protests across Europe in an effort to sow discord among NATO countries.

Several European news outlets, including Germany's largest daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and French newspaper Le Monde, reported on the leaks May 7.

The documents were leaked to the Dossier Centre, a research organisation run by the Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

The staged demonstrations were meant "to create anti-Ukraine sentiment or to make Sweden's NATO accession more difficult", Deutsche Welle and other media reported.

Sweden, unlike Finland, was unable to join NATO this year because Türkiye objected, and some observers are saying Russian influence operations might have tipped the balance in Ankara against letting Sweden into the alliance.

NATO accession is possible only with unanimous acceptance by existing NATO members.

The plot

Apparently drawn up inside the Kremlin with the involvement of intelligence officials, the documents call for small groups of Russian agents to hold fake protests in major European cities.

Earlier this year, Russian authorities sought to take advantage of Islamophobia in Europe to pit Türkiye against European countries and in particular against Sweden.

The scheme might have worked.

In January, Ankara denounced two protests in Sweden against Turkish policies and cancelled a planned visit by the Swedish defence minister to Turkey. The cancellation occurred at a critical time for Sweden's NATO hopes.

It turned out that a pro-Russian journalist had paid the demonstration fee for the fringe Danish activist who burned a Qur'an outside the Turkish embassy in Stockholm in January.

The documents viewed by the Dossier Centre proposed filming anti-Türkiye videos showing masked "protesters" in the Netherlands wiping their feet on a Turkish flag and burning a portrait of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Another potential operation involved carrying banners bearing insults to Erdoğan throughout Europe, including in Paris, The Hague, Brussels and Frankfurt.

One of the documents detailed a staged protest held March 5 in Paris in which several imposters pretending to be Ukrainians raised their arms in a Nazi salute, holding a banner that read in poor English, "Erdogan, quake is a big payback for Russian tourists."

The phony message referred to the devastating February 6 quake in Türkiye and Syria.

Obvious Russian hybrid warfare

"Holding any kind of protest, or attempting to dispatch one's own activists, instigators or any sort of demonstrators is unequivocally a tactic of hybrid warfare ... Russia practices it," Serhii Bykov, a Kyiv-based political consultant, told Caravanserai.

The term refers to tactics that include not only traditional combined arms but modern information tools as well -- namely, cyberattacks and propaganda.

"If you want to polarise society, you need to stoke its internal protests and conflicts. The Russians are actively making use of this," Bykov said.

"This includes staging these fake protests, when instigators who will promote the necessary messages are dispatched," he said.

In the case of the manufactured protest against Erdoğan in Paris, the objective of Russian intelligence was first and foremost to cast the Ukrainians as enemies of the Turks, he said.

The Russian agents drew the Ukrainian flag on the banner "so that even someone who's deaf and mute will get the impression that the Ukrainians are responsible," Bykov said.

"The truth is that the Ukrainians sent a unit from their State Emergency Service to Türkiye that actually helped clear rubble and save [survivors] ... but the Russians want to portray the Ukrainians in a negative light," Bykov said, referring to the aftermath of the February 6 earthquake.

The documents also revealed that since December 2022, the Kremlin has staged 10 anti-Ukraine demonstrations in Paris, Brussels, The Hague and Madrid, Le Monde reported.

Russian agents hijacked protests on other topics to generate propaganda for social media platforms.

Such rallies were linked to individuals closely tied to Russia, according to the Dossier Centre.

"This is one of the standard methods of Russian intelligence ... operating through mass demonstrations," Dmytro Levus, a political analyst and expert at the think tank United Ukraine, told Caravanserai.

"They don't just infiltrate them but also concoct reasons for them, conduct them and organise them using a network ... made up of citizens of those countries," Levus said.

Moles and dupes

Russian intelligence personnel, besides being "moles" who masquerade as local citizens, suborn actual locals who "are working unwittingly for Russian intelligence".

It is easy to spot Russia's fingerprints on such operations, said Levus.

"For example, when there are demonstrations or protests about environmental issues and out of nowhere you see signs that have nothing to do with the topic of the demonstration -- something like 'Stop funding the war in Ukraine'," he said.

"And this is depicted as some anti-globalism or environmental topic, but it's totally unrelated to what's happening. In situations like that you immediately spot the hand of Russian intelligence."

"They're also making use of separatist protests in Europe," said Levus.

"The Russians are very actively infiltrating protests in Catalonia [in Spain] ... they're trying to draw parallels between Catalonia and the so-called Donetsk People's Republic and Luhansk People's Republic," he said, referring to sham statelets in Ukraine that Russian troops created by force in 2014.

The Kremlin does not spare any expense on its agents across Europe, who fall into two categories, according to Levus.

The first comprises Russian agents and instigators who engage in "tainted" picketing like the Paris protest in March.

"They pay the participants and organisers. This may often be covert money so its origins can't be identified. The instigators, namely, the people with their own signs, are paid too, of course," Levus said.

The second category is the "official" component of Russian influence, which includes Russia's embassies and consulates abroad, the Russkiy Mir Foundation, and most important, Rossotrudnichestvo, an organisation that officially devotes itself to humanitarian projects in 81 countries across the globe.

Rossotrudnichestvo, also known as Russian House, is one of Moscow's main vehicles for educational, cultural and humanitarian initiatives in Central Asia.

"Of course, activists working in these official institutions are all on the [government] budget. They receive salaries," Levus said.

Using a more benign exterior, those official actors propagandise Russian interests in the guise of advancing education.

A Soviet legacy

Russia and its predecessor, the Soviet Union, have long used sham protests to exert influence abroad.

In the wake of World War II, Moscow built a powerful network of agents in Western Europe, according to Pavlo Sadokha, who is based in Portugal and serves as the regional vice president for Western Europe of the Ukrainian World Congress.

"They expanded efficiently, especially in southern Europe: Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece -- the Russians had potent influence through their networks of agents there. Incidentally, one of the biggest Soviet embassies was in Portugal," Sadokha told Caravanserai.

Later, Russia started creating civic groups in Europe with the help of communist and leftist movements. Russian intelligence always co-ordinated these efforts, according to Sadokha.

"To this day it's very easy to identify these organisations because their names generally contain words like 'friendship', 'peace', 'Slavs' and so on," Sadokha said.

Such organisations "put out the narrative that there's no Ukraine, that the Russian world is everywhere there -- in short, they said everything that Russian propaganda is saying now."

"They changed the facts of our history and the facts of what is happening in reality," he said.

"Right now, the main goal for us and other civic groups in Europe is to get the activities of Russkiy Mir and Rossotrudnichestvo banned -- it's through them that all these 'demonstrations' are funded," said Sadokha.

"In my experience, if you cut off the funding, the Russians won't be able to organise all of this... We need to turn off the money streams."