Three men sat side by side in the dock. One was short, athletic and blond; the second was dark-haired, tattooed and had a slighlty absent look; and the third was young, with a short beard. The three Bulgarian nationals, none of whom spoke a word of French, appeared at the Paris judicial court on Thursday, September 11, for a procedural hearing ahead of their trial scheduled for late October.

They are accused of having spray-painted red handprints – a symbol that can refer to the lynching of Israeli soldiers in Ramallah, West Bank, in 2000 – on the Wall of the Righteous at the Shoah Memorial in Paris during the night of May 13, 2024. All three insisted they had "no antisemitic intent." Two of them requested release from custody, but the court denied the request and upheld the arrest warrant for a fourth Bulgarian individual who remains at large.

The three men embody what are likely Russian-directed interference operations regularly targeting France. From Stars of David spray-painted on Paris walls to pig heads left outside mosques in the Paris region, these physical destabilization campaigns have multiplied since 2023. (Cyber-operations, meanwhile, have been commonplace for over a decade.) Their aim is to deepen the rifts within French society, especially those exacerbated by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the wake of the terrorist attack carried out by Hamas on October 7, 2023, in Israel.

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