Three Bulgarians are standing trial in Paris today, accused of stencilling, or helping to stencil, red hands on the Mémorial de la Shoah in the French capital in May 2024. A fourth Bulgarian, who is on the run and the subject of an arrest warrant, will be tried in his absence.
The issues at stake in the three-day trial at the 14th criminal chamber of the Paris court go far beyond the formal charges of aggravated vandalism and criminal conspiracy and the potential maximum sentences faced by the defendants of seven years’ imprisonment and a 75,000-euros fine.
Indeed, at a preliminary hearing on 11th September 2025, the defence lawyers took it in turns to attack what they variously called an “essentially political case” and a “case far more political than legal”. And one cannot wholly blame them for saying so.
Because for the first time since the start of the war in Ukraine, and France’s support for the invaded country, judges here will examine an alleged dirty tricks campaign carried out by Russia. “This is a hate crime and/or a destabilisation operation, which shows the criminal significance of this case,” the Paris prosecutor’s representative told the same September hearing.
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The events in question took place on the night of Monday 13th May 2024, when a security guard at the Holocaust memorial surprised two people putting up stencils; they fled when he arrived. In all, thirty-five red hands were painted over the plaques listing the names of people who saved Jews during World War II. Later, it emerged that hundreds more had been daubed on walls in the city's 4th and 5th arrondissements or districts the night before.
Two weeks earlier, students from Sciences Po university in Paris had displayed red hands at pro-Palestinian demonstrations, a symbol that drew fierce criticism from supporters of the Israeli state, who say it evokes a crowd's lynching with bare hands of two Israeli soldiers in October 2000, at the start of the second Intifada.
Neo-Nazis for peace
With France divided over the war Israel had waged in Gaza since 7th October, the repetition of the same red-hand motif on the Mémorial de la Shoah was highly inflammatory.
But a swift investigation by several police and security bodies - first the Paris branch of the national police force, then the local crime squad and France's domestic intelligence agency the DGSI - concluded that an action with all the hallmarks of anti-Semitism was in fact an act of foreign interference, aimed at stoking tensions within France.
CCTV footage allowed investigators to trace the movements of three men on the night of the offence to a hotel in the 20th arrondissement and then to the coach station at Bercy in the south east of the capital, from where they left for Belgium. The bookings had been made from Bulgaria by a man named Nikolay Ivanov.
A copy of an identity document in the name of Mircho Angelov was found during a hotel search. Hotel CCTV footage shows this man, who is suspected of painting the red hands, with Nazi tattoos on his legs, tattoos that are also visible on his social media posts.
Bus operator Flixbus confirmed that Angelov left France on a coach at 6.35am, a few hours after being chased by the Holocaust memorial guard, in the company of Kiril Milushev and Georgi Filipov. After arriving in Brussels, the three men took a flight to Sofia.
The investigating judge issued warrants for the men. The Bulgarian authorities arrested Milushev and Filipov while Ivanov was arrested in Croatia. The three were handed over to the French authorities. Remanded in custody, they have admitted their involvement in the act but say it was done to promote peace. They deny any anti-Semitic intent, despite evidence that some of them have a fascination with Nazism, and all pin responsibility for the operation on their fugitive accomplice, Mircho Angelov.
Russian spies at work
As far as the DGSI is concerned, the four men were not painting red hands to promote world peace but were in fact “agents provocateurs”; in the world of espionage this means an agent sent into a particular arena to foment trouble. More precisely, they were “proxies”, individuals hired by an intermediary to carry out missions for an intelligence service without exposing the involvement of that service.
As Mediapart has revealed, the DGSI went beyond blaming Bulgarian neo-Nazis and set out to establish the involvement of the Kremlin. A report by officials at the French domestic intelligence agency said that the “Red Hands” operation was “an action to destabilise France that was orchestrated by Russian intelligence services, and was part of a broader strategy to spread false information and to divide or inflame French public opinion”.
On top of the way it was carried out, what also points to the involvement of Vladimir Putin’s Russia was the operation’s second phase, the part that fulfils its true aim. Acts of vandalism alone are not enough. The impact needs to be magnified by manipulating and misleading public opinion. And, as Mediapart also revealed, Viginum, the French unit designed to detect signs of foreign online interference, observed the affair being exploited on X by the Russian influence apparatus RRN through a network of several thousand bogus accounts and by a RRN-created pseudo-French media outlet called Artichoc.
Above all, the conduct of the main perpetrator of the red hand vandalism in the months after the daubing of the memorial supports the theory of Russian involvement.
In early June 2024 Mircho Angelov, aware he was being sought, is said to have been exfiltrated to the Serbian city of Niš. That did not stop him from remotely directing a new team of Bulgarians who, days after sharp Kremlin criticism of the dispatch of French military instructors to Ukraine, left five plaster-filled coffins draped in French flags at the foot of the Eiffel Tower marked “French soldier from Ukraine”.
At the end of 2024 Moldova’s intelligence and security agency, the SIS, told its European partners about training camps in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia where proxies from several eastern European countries were trained to carry out destabilising operations across the continent. The instructors in those camps were all Russian intelligence officers except for one Bulgarian. His name was Mircho Angelov.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter