Allegedly leaked documents from a claimed Russian psychological warfare outfit are said to reveal how meticulously “cognitive strikes” are planned against Western countries to sow demoralisation, including a mass distribution of pig parts to Parisian mosques in 2025.
Russian intelligence-directed agent provocateurs take advantage of the destabilising effect of mass migration to Western countries as a weak point to further drive distrust, a series of reports on recent protests and acts of vandalism claim. France24 reports on a tranche of leaked documents it says came from the Social Design Agency (SDA), a supposed Russian digital marketing company which is claimed to actually serve as a disinformation unit sowing division on behalf of Moscow. According to the report, their operations are said to include anti-Muslim, anti-Jewish, anti-migration, and anti-fossil fuel psyops.
Assuming the documents themselves are not an act of disinformation — as the alleged work of the SDA is — they are said to underline the fine detail in which such operations are planned and reported on to the Kremlin. One of these documents includes a never-before-seen image of a table full of pigs’ heads, all daubed with the name of the French President in blue paint, “MACRON”, before one of the SDA’s activities. Nine of the ten heads were left on the steps of Paris-area mosques in 2025, an event which was widely reported at the time.
The document is reported to make clear that the purpose of leaving the pig heads around is to exacerbate tensions, and in the post-action assessment, it was noted that it had “benefited from extensive international media coverage”.
Other so-called cognitive strikes against nations, including France, Germany, and Armenia, were an unexecuted plan to dump dozens of inflatable sex dolls into the River Seine in Paris, each daubed with the words “fuck migrants” and clearly intended to discredit anti-mass-migration activists with a bad taste stunt. Another operation, this time apparently intending to undermine public support for Ukraine, was to daub anti-Russia graffiti on a statue of Free French leader, President, and creator of the French constitution Charles De Gaulle.
Other operations that were undertaken and are already known and suspected to be the work of the same group included disabling SUVs in Germany and daubing them with Green Party slogans, and spray painting Synagogues and a Holocaust memorial.
France24 states three Serbians have previously been convicted in relation to the SDA group and were found to have worked for the “intelligence services of the Russian Federation”. A further three have been arrested in France and are suspected of “serving a foreign power”.
European governments have for years been preoccupied with what they have come to call Russian hybrid warfare; acts of sabotage and espionage that are meant to disable or destabilise but which fall well short of actual acts of open war. Yet Russia is not the great power it once was, and these operations are no longer carried out by expensive traditional intelligence services and agents, but rather by freelancers paid on a per-job basis, and in at least some cases, unaware of whom they work.
The flip-side to this catch-all bogeyman of Russian intelligence cut-outs is the ease with which Moscow can be blamed for all ills, and allegations of Russian influence or dark money have become a common claim in Western political discourse, whether evidence exists or not.
As previously reported on this now long-running phenomenon:
There were several such incidents across the continent in April, including the arrest of a Polish national in his home country, accused of conducting hostile reconnaissance against the airport used by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky when he flies abroad.
Because Ukraine is covered by a no-fly zone, when politicians enter and leave the country they travel first by VIP train across the Polish border and then to Rzeszów-Jasionka Airport, where flights can then take them worldwide. The Polish Prosecutor said of the allegations against the man: “The findings of the investigation show that the suspect’s tasks included collecting information that would be helpful in planning a possible assassination attempt on the life of the President of Ukraine by the Russian services… the detainee was charged with reporting readiness to act for foreign intelligence against the Republic of Poland… The act is punishable by up to 8 years in prison.”
In the same month two German-Russian dual citizens were arrested in Germany over alleged hostile reconnaissance of a U.S. Army base in Bavaria used to train Ukrainian soldiers. The pair were said to be planning to “commit explosives and arson attacks, especially on military infrastructure and industrial sites in Germany”. One of the suspects in the case, Dieter S., was accused of: “conspiring to cause an explosive explosion and arson, acting as an agent for sabotage purposes… membership in a foreign terrorist organization and preparing a serious act of violence that endangers the state.”
Again in April five people in the United Kingdom were facing charges over an arson attack that burnt out a Ukrainian-owned business in London. At least one of the group was charged with hostile activity intended to “assist a foreign intelligence service carrying out activities in the UK”. In February of this year Estonia arrested ten alleged saboteurs, who were accused of working to spread fear as part of a “hybrid operation”, the neologism now in currency for war by other means.
A remarkable case in December 2023 saw 14 ‘spies’, who among their number were Ukrainian refugees, sentenced by a court for a plot to gather information and launch a variety of actions and attacks. The court heard how the group were in communication with Russian intelligence and had been promised payments in cryptocurrency payments in return for their work.
The bounties on offer from Moscow were said to have included $5 for putting up a poster disseminating pro-Russian or anti-Ukrainian propaganda, or $400 for installing a wireless surveillance camera watching a port, airport, or railyard where military equipment transited from Europe to Ukraine. $10,000 in crypto was apparently offered in return for derailing a military train carrying equipment to Ukraine.
While derailing a train may seem fanciful, such tactics are already in widespread use in the Ukraine war itself and beyond, with pro-Kyiv saboteurs working overtime behind Russian lines to prevent ammunition and resupply trains reaching the front line, frequently blowing lines, burning equipment, and derailing trains. In some cases the Ukrainian partisans have gone further, planting car bombs on the personal vehicles of targets within Russia.
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