A municipal worker paints over a Star of David daubed on the wall of a building in the 14th arrondissement of Paris. Photo: Reuters/Riccardo Milani

The Moldovan couple arrested by French police in Paris last week for vandalizing Jewish-owned buildings with Star of David tags may have been working for a shadowy businessman with ties to Russia’s disinformation networks in Europe, the French news outlet Le Monde reported on Wednesday.

The unnamed couple — a 33-year-old man and a 29-year-old woman — were apprehended after witnesses spied them painting the symbol of Judaism on the walls of 15 buildings where Jews either reside or which house organizations serving the Jewish community. Since the Hamas pogrom in southern Israel on Oct. 7, acts of vandalism invoking the Star of David have been reported across France as well as Germany and Argentina amid a context of rising antisemitism.

According to Le Monde, the couple were in telephone contact with Anatoli Prizenko, a Moldovan businessman who is allegedly linked to the Doppelgänger network, a Russian disinformation campaign whose activities in France were exposed by the foreign ministry in Paris over the summer. The campaign amounted to “a new illustration of the hybrid strategy that Moscow is implementing to undermine the conditions of a peaceful democratic debate and therefore undermine our democratic institutions,” the ministry said at the time.

The campaign involved the mimicking of French news websites such as Le Figaro and 20 minutes — hence the Doppelgänger name — with fake news articles designed to boost Russian propaganda. Prizenko was also, according to Le Monde, a former parliamentary candidate for the anti-EU and pro-Moscow Party of Socialists of the Republic of Moldova.

In a statement announcing an investigation into the vandalism, Laure Beccuau, the Paris public prosecutor, did not mention Prizenko by name but noted that the arrested Moldovan couple had been in telephone contact with a “third party” based outside of the country.

“At this stage, it is therefore not excluded that the marking of blue David stars in the Paris region was carried out at the express request of a person residing abroad,” Beccau’s statement said.

“It is necessary to continue investigations into the antisemitic nature of the intention of the perpetrators of these degradations, especially in view of the geopolitical context and its impact in France,” she added.