Russian Foreign Ministre spokesperspn Maria Zakharova. Photo: Reuters/Maksim Konstantinov

Prominent representatives of President Vladimir Putin’s regime in Russia have pinned the blame for Sunday’s attempted pogrom in the Republic of Dagestan on the Ukrainian government, without producing much in the way of evidence to justify the allegation.

Hundreds of protestors shouting Islamist slogans and waving Palestinian flags descended on Dagestan’s main airport in Makhachkala after rumors spread of the arrival of a flight from Israel on the Telegram social media channel. As the mob tried to coerce airport staff into taking them to “where the Jews are,” clashes broke out, leaving 20 people injured and shops and restaurants badly damaged. According to the Russian authorities, 150 people participated in the mob, resulting in 60 arrests.

On Monday morning, the Russian interior ministry announced that it had launched an investigation into the violence headed by  D. V. Belyaev, the head of Russia’s State Security Service in Dagestan, whose role is to “establish all the circumstances of the crime, its participants and organizers, giving a comprehensive legal assessment of their actions.”

However, several close allies of Putin are already blaming the clashes at the airport on alleged Ukrainian infiltration.

“The riots at the Makhachkala airport were the result of a planned and executed provocation from the outside,” Maria Zakharova — the chief spokesperson for the Russian foreign ministry — said in a statement.

“The key role in this was assigned to the criminal Kyiv regime. Kyiv is maximally interested in destabilizing the situation in Russia and discrediting it on the international stage,” Zakharova claimed.

As evidence, she cited the apparent speed of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s condemnation of the attempted pogrom, arguing that this proved “the coordinated nature of the sabotage of the Ukrainian special services.”

“This is not an isolated incident in Makhachkala, but rather part of Russia’s widespread culture of hatred toward other nations, which is propagated by state television, pundits, and authorities,” Zelensky declared in an earlier post on X/Twitter as images of the attempted pogrom went viral. He went on to observe that the “Russian foreign minister has made a series of antisemitic remarks in the last year. The Russian president also used antisemitic slurs” — an apparent reference to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s notorious claim that Adolf Hitler had “Jewish blood” and President Putin’s depiction of the Ukrainian leader as a Jewish patsy serving neo-Nazis.

Zakharova’s accusation was echoed by other Russian leaders and pro-regime media pundits. “The events at the Makhachkala airport are largely the result of outside interference, including informational influence,” Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov said on Sunday. Sergei Melikov, the head of the Dagestan Republic, asserted that the violence was an “attempt to destabilize the situation,” claiming that the unrest had been triggered by messages spread on “pro-Ukrainian Telegram channels.”

One Russian dissident journalist mocked claims by Ksenia Sobchak, a pro-regime TV personality, that Ilya Ponomaryov, a former Russian MP who is now based in Ukraine, had orchestrated the violence.

“Ksenia Sobchak reported that all this was invented by Ilya Ponomaryov in Kyiv. He will probably die of pride now, because, while sitting in Kyiv, he allegedly organized protests throughout the North Caucasus. He is the most influential person in the world right now,” Ihor Yakovenko quipped in an interview with broadcaster Channel 24.

An analysis of the attempted pogrom by the Institute for the Study of War pointed out that Russia would struggle to convince Jews that “Jewish minorities are safe in Russia despite its efforts to present Russia as a religiously tolerant country.”

The analysis cited the spokesperson for Russia’s Chief Rabbinate in Dagestan, Ovadya Isakov, who stated on Sunday that hundreds of Jewish families in Dagestan should leave Dagestan and Russia altogether. “Russia is no salvation” as “there were pogroms in Russia too,” Isakov said.