The Russian government has claimed that the West, including the Ukrainian government, is behind the antisemitic attempted pogrom at an airport in the Muslim-majority region of Dagestan over the weekend that saw a mob attempt to hunt down Jews who had arrived from Tel Aviv aboard a flight.
The rioting and violence took place at the airport in Makhachkala with a confrontational mob waving Palestinian flags and storming the airport tarmac, leading to the Russian aviation authority shutting down the airport until security forces were able to get the situation under control, which took several hours, the BBC reports.
In one clip posted to X, a young boy in the mob was asked “Why are you here?” and replied, “I came for the Jews,” clarifying that he was there to kill Jews with a knife.
Other videos showed members of the mob hunting for Jews in a nearby hotel as well as the airport terminal, asking where the Jews were located, while shouting “Allahu Akbar.” Another was taken aboard a plane that had landed with the captain of the aircraft stating, “There’s an angry mob outside that doesn’t know where we’ve come from and why [we are here]. It’s possible we’ll also come under attack.”
An Uzbek neurosurgeon suspected of being Jewish was surrounded by an aggressive crowd demanding to see his passport and repeatedly had to convince the mob he was neither Israeli nor Jewish before police finally rescued him from the assailants.
For many, the terrible scenes in Dagestan evoked memories of bloody past pogroms, and were clearly linked to the wave of antisemitism that has swept both the Islamic world and Europe since the Hamas massacres of Israeli Jews on 7th October.
“Suddenly it feels as if a very dark history has returned with a vengeance,” commented Frank Furedi, director of the MCC Brussels think tank: “The words ‘Never Again’ have rarely rung so hollow.”
For Russia’s President Putin and his propagandists, however, the local lynch-mob hunting Jews in a Russian Muslim republic was apparently just further proof of an alleged Western conspiracy to divide and destabilise Russian society during its war in Ukraine
Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry spokesperson and Dmitry Peskov, Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson, both alleged that Western influence was behind the attempted pogrom and went on to claim that the Ukrainian government had a direct role in instigating the incident.
Peskov claimed that the riot was “the result of external intervention, including external information influence.” At the same time, Zakharova alleged that Ukraine played a “direct and key role” in the events that took place, though neither gave any specifics, The Guardian reports.
President Vladimir Putin repeated the claims on Tuesday at a meeting on the incident saying, “Yesterday’s developments in Makhachkala were instigated in particular via social networks, not least from Ukraine’s territory, by agents of Western special services.”
U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby reacted to the Russian allegations by saying, “Classic Russian rhetoric, when something goes bad in your country, you blame somebody else.”
“The West had nothing to do with this. This is just hate, bigotry and intimidation, pure and simple,” he said, adding, “Some people will compare it to the pogroms of the late 19th and early 20th century and I think that’s probably an apt description, given that video that we’ve seen out there.”
U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller also dismissed the Russian allegations saying that they were “absurd” and added, “We call on Russian authorities to publicly condemn these violent protests, to hold anyone involved accountable and to ensure the safety of Israelis and Jews in Russia.”
Dagestan lies on the border of another Muslim-majority region of Russia, Chechnya. President of Chechnya Ramzan Kadyrov claimed that an attempt at instigating a similar riot in his region was thwarted on Monday evening.
“Such attempted provocation was very swiftly thwarted last night in the Chechen Republic. The local mass media and Minister for National Policy, Foreign Ties, Press and Information Akhmed Dudayev spotted fake calls and warned people against reckless actions. The police and National Guard were put on high alert to respond to any provocation,” he said.
The airport riots in Dagestan came after a call from a channel on the encrypted messaging app Telegram called Utro Dagestan, which has over 65,000 subscribers.
