MOSCOW – Vladimir Putin has a message for Europe’s governments: stop looking east for the cause of the unrest in your own streets. The Russian president said on Sunday that accusing Moscow of inciting the mass protests and riots in French and Italian cities is “clearly going too far,” a claim he said ordinary Europeans can see through for themselves.
Putin made the remarks to Russian state television journalist Pavel Zarubin. “My first reaction upon seeing this was surprise,” he said. “To suggest that we are provoking mass protests in major European cities, well, that is clearly going too far, it’s something that, in my view, is obvious to the ordinary citizens of European countries.”
He then turned the charge back on those making it. Putin said the accusations speak to “the weakness and inability of certain leaders in European countries to take responsibility for what is happening.”
The Russian leader also said he was surprised that the United States was blamed first. Putin said he “did not expect European leaders to lash out like that at their primary ally, their protector, so to speak, in the military sense, across the ocean,” and that they “quickly came to their senses and reverted to their customary accusations against the Russian Federation.” He did not name the leaders or the statements he had in mind. Euronews reported on October 21 that French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot told an OECD-hosted conference that the French student protests were exploited by hostile narratives from “Russia, China, Iran, and the MAGA community.”
Whether anyone has shown that Russia started the unrest is a separate question, and so far the evidence says no. French President Emmanuel Macron, who had already called the protesters’ demands legitimate, said there was “no evidence of foreign interference in the events that took place,” while adding that there had been “foreign manipulation of information in the aftermath,” Euronews reported. The EU executive says there is insufficient evidence to justify a formal investigation, according to the same report.
Others have gone further. Italian Defence Minister Guido Crosetto called the riots in Milan, where a march over prices and war ended in fire, the result of a “hybrid war” waged through TikTok, social media and YouTube, Euronews reported.
What the evidence does support is narrower. Euronews reported that Russia-linked disinformation networks, including those behind Operation Overload and Doppelgänger, seized on the violence to amplify their campaigns, but that the protests appear to have been exploited by foreign actors rather than driven by them. A report by the group Alliance4Europe, published on October 22, reached a similar conclusion about France: it found no evidence that a foreign actor was behind the origin of the protests, but said foreign actors worked to amplify public anger.
Putin’s denial follows the Kremlin’s earlier line. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on October 19 that “nobody anywhere takes such absurd accusations seriously anymore,” Anadolu reported. In the same period he described the disturbances in France’s largest cities as “verging on chaos” and “a major crisis.”
Three days before Sunday’s remarks, Putin used a Thursday interview with Zarubin to call Europe’s talk of a Russian threat “political schizophrenia” and to say that Russia is “not preparing for any kind of war against Europe,” according to the Kremlin’s transcript.
In the excerpts reviewed by Eastern Herald, Putin offered no evidence for his position beyond saying it is obvious to ordinary Europeans, and he did not address the amplification campaigns that Euronews and Alliance4Europe describe. Eastern Herald has not seen the full broadcast, and the French and Italian inquiries into the online activity are still open.
