Bedbugs, Pig Heads, and Chaos: France Under Russian Siege

If you lived in France in late 2023, it was almost impossible to miss the headlines about the supposed bedbug invasion that was going on.

In mid-September, X was crawling with stories about these. Dozens, then hundreds, thousands of accounts reposted alarming claims about the “spread” across towns and cities. Every major news outlet picked it up, and the local press came in support.

And yet. The figures showed no surge compared to previous years. Reported cases remained in line with the usual yearly numbers. True, call-outs did increase but mostly because people panicked and demanded inspections they didn’t really need, messing with the actual numbers. Six schools were shut down nationwide, closures later deemed unnecessary. France typically sees about a million interventions a year, and 2023 only just nudged above that, notably due to the increase of intervention demands by worried people.

This could have been funny (without mocking the people that genuinely experienced a bedbug infestation, which is a miserable thing to live through) were it not so clearly part of the Kremlin’s playbook: disinformation and disruption, deliberately seeded in “unfriendly” countries. France’s Minister for European Affairs at the time, Jean-Noël Barrot, said as much in early 2024 that the bedbug hysteria was a textbook Russian operation.

Storm-1516 is the name French authorities gave to the massive disinformation campaign conducted by Russia in France, which has apparently been active in this form since August 2023. Unable to infest the beds of the French, the bedbugs had invaded their internet, a trial run of for what was to come, just as counter-interference services were beginning to track the operation.

But not all the attacks were virtual. That same autumn, dozens of Stars of David were sprayed on buildings in the Paris suburbs, home to Jewish families, in the tense weeks following Hamas’s terror attack and Israel’s assault on Gaza. Once again, these actions were amplified by countless bots on social networks, spreading the acts of individuals paid, directly or indirectly, by the Russian regime to socially destabilise the country. It would be dishonest to claim that it did not work: tensions flared, at least for a while, before the revelation that this was, yet again, foreign interference. A very similar action happened in May of 2024, where red hands were spotted on the Shoah memorial in Paris. The suspects were later found by the police to be Bulgarian and had just arrived in Paris.

On the 9th of September of this year, pig heads were dumped outside several mosques around Paris, sparking outrage and more online clashes.

The investigation, thankfully, moved quickly, helped by CCTV and witness accounts, allowed investigators to indentify that a Serbian-registered car had entered France, bought the heads from a farmer, dropped them at the mosques, then fled the country via Belgium.

Taken individually, these incidents were already worrying, but placed in the broader context of the Kremlin’s strategy, they take on a far more sinister dimension, that is undermining French citizens’ trust in their institutions and media, playing on identity fractures, and pouring oil on the dumpster fire that is the French political crisis.

General Thierry Burkhard, then Chief of the Defence Staff, said on the 11th of July that Moscow saw France as its “main enemy in Europe” and quoted Vladimir Putin himself to that effect.

Abroad, some shrugged this off as the French giving themselves too much importance yet again. But the point was well made. For years, Paris has been regarded by Kremlin-linked outlets and the Kremlin proper as a pivotal supporter of Ukraine.

The turning point was of course February 2022, when Russia invaded. Until days before, France was still trying to play the diplomacy card, in its long tradition as a “distant friend of Russia.”

In truth, French-Russian interests haven’t been aligned since 1917. Some would argue that they haven’t been since the Crimean War of 1853 considering the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1892 was more about France’s will of revenge on Germany and Russia’s need to balance German power in occupied Poland than outspoken friendship. The Second World War, of course, is another story.

Moscow’s diplomats were fond of cultivating the illusion of a “special relationship,” as it shaped French hesitation and inconsistency about Russia for decades. France still maintained its ground and had parts of its military and diplomatic establishment deeply sceptical of Russia, seeing it as a growing threat, as opposed to the more conservative, older generation that could see them as a “partner” for the future.

For a while though, France’s elites thought they had the hear of the Kremlin. Notably in 2008 when Nicolas Sarkozy’s shuttle diplomacy with Putin, following the invasion of Georgia, effectively froze the conflict, much to Russia’s advantage, cementing the separatist “republics” of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which served as general rehearsals for the future puppet states of Donetsk and Luhansk. This came at a time when Nicolas Sarkozy had actually been bullied by Putin in 2007, with him threatening him and France during their first meeting. Sarkozy famously looked distraught in the press conference shortly after.

The real break came only in 2022, after the assault on Ukraine, even though Putin had been received at Brégançon as recently as 2019, to the not-so-concealed irritation of France’s allies.

By April 2022, France expelled 35 Russian diplomats, suspected of running an espionage network from the Russian embassies and consulates.

France’s intentions not to humiliate Russia after the Soviet collapse came from good intentions and geopolitical goodwill. However, the oligarchs, who had pushed Yeltsin to hand power to Putin after the latter’s clever political manoeuvring, turned that goodwill into a tool for Moscow. The “special relationship” was, in truth, only going one way. Still, one could say, the French national bird is a rooster. And a rooster has claws. Paris’s sudden shift of tone caught Moscow off guard, and hybrid attacks escalated in response.

Now deprived of official diplomatic channels in France, Moscow has changed tactics, moving to the everyday and societal level. Imaginary bedbugs, hateful graffiti, decapitated pigs, bots, and fake media, even replicating sites like Le Monde, Le Figaro, and Le Parisien in 2024, now weave a web of not-so-subtle and pervasive attacks across the country. Networks of fake news online, often linked to far-right groups covertly directed by Russian services, exist globally, according to VIGINUM (the French vigilance and protection service against foreign digital interference).

Opinion manipulation is now one of the most serious threats to the French Republic, attacking its constitutional foundations and order. The very intensity of these attacks, online and offline alike, also betrays something else: Russia is hurting. Sanctions are biting.

France, being one of the keystones of European defence, is thus an enemy Russia seeks to destabilise. There is no need to defeat a country militarily when one can divide its society sufficiently and ensure that its agents thrive within the fractures it created.