Russia blames Ukraine for antisemitic riot at
airport in Dagestan
Foreign ministry says Kyiv played ‘direct and key
role’ after mob stormed planes in search of Israeli passengers
Pjotr Sauer
and Andrew Roth
Mon 30 Oct
2023 17.51 GMT
Russia has
blamed Ukraine for the antisemitic riot in the mostly Muslim region of Dagestan
on Sunday in which an angry mob stormed the airport in Makhachkala in search of
Jewish passengers arriving from Israel.
Maria
Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry spokesperson, said on Monday that the
riot was the result of a “provocation” orchestrated from outside Russia, with
Ukraine playing a “direct and key role”.
Earlier in
the day, Dmitry Peskov, Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson, claimed the unrest was
“the result of external intervention, including external information
influence”.
Neither
Zakharova or Peskov provided evidence to support their claims of outside
interference.
Peskov also
told reporters that Putin would hold a meeting with his top officials on Monday
evening to discuss “western attempts to use events in the Middle East to split
Russian society”.
Video
posted to social media on Sunday showed hundreds of young men, some carrying
Palestinian flags or placards denouncing Israel, storming on to the airport and
climbing on to idling planes, attempting to break through the windows.
One Israeli
passenger described how an angry mob interrogated him after landing at the
airport.
“They
entered our bus and asked each of us whether we were Muslim or Jewish … I
answered that I was Muslim … Luckily, they believed me. If they had given me a
serious interrogation, they would have realised that I was Israeli,” the
passenger told the Meduza news website.
Russia’s
interior ministry said on Monday that 60 people had been arrested after the
riots.
Russian
officials and state-affiliated media criticised Telegram channels –
specifically one called Utro Dagestan, which has more than 65,000 subscribers –
for their role in organising the rioters on Sunday. In doing so, many sought to
argue that the riots were inspired by foreign “enemies” and were not an
expression of homegrown antisemitism in Dagestan.
RT, a
state-funded news agency that coordinates its coverage with Kremlin officials,
released a report on Utro Dagestan on Monday, claiming that the channel’s
anonymous administrator, who it said had been detained in Makhachkala, was
linked to Ilya Ponomarev, a Kyiv-based former Russian official who opposes the
Kremlin. Ponomarev said on Sunday that he had had no control over the channel
for more than a year.
Late on
Monday, Telegram said it had decided to ban Utro Dagestan for “inciting
violence”.
Russia has
blocked a number of popular social networks, including Facebook and Instagram,
but has not cracked down on Telegram, which remains a popular messaging app and
has channels that allow businesses, popular figures, and protest movements to
broadcast messages to the public.
Thousands
of users in southern Russia reported outages on Telegram on Sunday, in
particular in regions neighbouring the North Caucasus such as Krasnodar and
Rostov.
Oleg
Matveychev, the deputy head of a parliamentary committee on information policy
and IT, pushed back against reports of a broad ban on Telegram, but said it was
possible that law enforcement would specifically target channels promoting the
riots.
Several
other demonstrations in support of the Palestinians and against Jewish people
have also taken place in cities across the Caucasus in recent days despite
strict laws that limit public protests.
On Monday,
a group of women in the mountainous region of Karachay-Cherkessia said they
were protesting because “they did not want to live alongside Jews”.
The
anti-Jewish demonstrations come against the backdrop of Putin taking a
pro-Palestinian stance in Israel’s war in Gaza, a position that aligns the
Kremlin with its ally Iran in what analysts have described as a growing global
divide between east and west.
Last week,
a senior Hamas delegation travelled to Moscow to meet Russian officials in the
organisation’s first high-profile international visit since it launched a raid
in southern Israel on 7 October. Israel criticised the visit, saying inviting
Hamas “sends a message legitimising terrorism”.
Hosting
Hamas in Moscow but not condemning the group’s killings of civilians in Israel,
Putin “might have given the green light to some elements in the Caucasus that
the hunting season [against Jews] is on”, said Pinchas Goldschmidt, who served
as the chief rabbi of Moscow for nearly 30 years until he left the country last
year because of his opposition to the war in Ukraine.
“In a
country where everything is tightly controlled by the government, it is
inconceivable that these riots were not instigated or directed by governmental
structure,” Goldschmidt said.
Goldschmidt,
who has previously urged Jews to leave Russia while they still can, added that
as Israeli-Russian ties deteriorate, “the situation for Jews will get worse in
Russia”.
“We may see
similar riots in other places in the country,” he said.
While the
Russian empire and its Soviet successor had an extensive history of
state-sponsored antisemitism, Putin has promoted himself as a friend of the
Jewish people and cultivated Russian-Israeli relations.
However,
the decline in the relationship between Moscow and Tel Aviv over the past year
and a half has raised fears over a new rise in antisemitism inside Russia.
“For a long
time, any form of antisemitism was prohibited in the political and media
spheres,” said Ilya Yablokov, a lecturer at the University of Sheffield, who
has written about antisemitism in Russia. “But since the war in Ukraine, we
have seen some of those taboos disappear. The war in Gaza has only accelerated
this trend.”
Yablokov
pointed to a string of recent statements by senior Russian officials that were
widely considered offensive to Jews. In one of them, the country’s foreign
minister, Sergei Lavrov, recycled an antisemitic conspiracy theory that claimed
that Adolf Hitler “had Jewish blood.”
In
Makhachkala on Sunday night, Yablokov said, pre-existing anti-Jewish sentiments
appeared to have been stoked by growing anti-Israeli sentiments aired on state
media.
“Previously,
people thought that protesting against Israel would go against the mainstream,
but now many feel the Kremlin will be more permissive,” he said.
Alexander
Verkhovsky, director of the Sova Centre, a Moscow-based non-governmental group
that monitors extremism, said Sunday’s antisemitic riot “changed our
understanding of antisemitism in Russia”.
“Attacks
against Jewish people and material objects – schools, synagogues, cemeteries –
were extremely rare in Russia,” he said. “The question now is whether
antisemitic protests spread beyond the Muslim-majority Caucasus.”
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