Russia tightens security and targets ‘foreign interference’ after anti-Jewish riot

Russia said it was taking steps to stop alleged foreign meddling in its affairs after blaming the West and Ukraine for anti-Jewish mob violence in the mostly Muslim region of Dagestan, as two Russian soldiers were detained in occupied Ukraine on suspicion of murdering nine members of the one family.

At least 20 people were hurt on Sunday when hundreds of men stormed Dagestan’s main airport in the regional capital Makhachkala, rampaged through the terminal looking for Jews and surrounded a plane on the tarmac that had landed from Tel Aviv in Israel. A smaller mob went looking for Jews in a hotel in the Dagestani city of Khasavyurt, amid anger over Palestinian casualties in Israel’s war against Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip.

Russian president Vladimir Putin told a televised meeting of his senior officials on Monday night that western states sought to sow “chaos” and destabilise adversaries by using “a variety of means, as we can see – lies, provocations and sophisticated technologies of psychological and information aggression”.

“The events in Makhachkala last night were inspired also through social networks, not least from the territory of Ukraine, by the hands of agents of western special services,” he added. Mr Putin offered no evidence for his claims, which the US dismissed as “absurd”.

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Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Tuesday that the non-televised part of the meeting focused on “strengthening measures to counter this same outside interference, including external information manipulation and so on, which can provoke the situation in our country, exploiting ... these same events in the Middle East”.

Several Russian regions and airports said they were tightening security to prevent any repeat of the chaotic scenes in Dagestan, a poor republic in the Caucasus mountains where federal forces faced frequent gun and bomb attacks during an Islamist insurgency in the 1990s and 2000s.

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In neighbouring Chechnya, Kremlin-backed leader Ramzan Kadyrov ordered his security forces to be ready to kill protesters who failed to heed warnings.

“If we have even one person who goes out for unauthorised riots, detain and imprison him. Or fire three warning shots in the air and after that, if the person does not obey the law, put the fourth shot in his forehead. They won’t go out anymore. This is my order,” Russian state media quoted him as saying.

The Dagestan riot came four months after units of the Wagner mercenary group staged a one-day mutiny, turning their backs on the war in Ukraine and threatening to march on Moscow. Both events apparently caught the Kremlin and FSB security service off-guard.

“This is a national emergency. It’s a failure of everyone: the domestic policy supervisors in the Kremlin, the special services and the local authorities,” an unnamed Kremlin official who formerly worked in the security services told the Moscow Times.

“I can acknowledge that everyone is afraid to be alarmist and warn the president of problems in advance… The situation has been escalating every week since the beginning of the conflict between Israel and Hamas. Everyone in the Kremlin, the FSB and the interior ministry knew about it. But we couldn’t prevent it.”

Heavy fighting continued in eastern Ukraine, where Russian investigators said they had detained two Russian soldiers on suspicion of murdering nine members of one Ukrainian family in their beds, including two young children, in the occupied town of Volnovakha.

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