PSCRP-BESA Reports No 170 (December 9, 2025)
War conflicts and violent clashes in the post-Soviet space and the Eastern Mediterranean, alongside territorial, geopolitical, diplomatic and economic dimensions, also includes the ethnopolitical one. This is also true of two all-out wars in the FSU —Azerbaijan–Armenia in 1992–1994 and 2020–2022/3, and Russia’s war with Ukraine since 2014; and the current war of Israel and its allies with the block of the Jihadist regime of Iranian Ayatollahs with their radical Islamist allies and terrorist proxies in the Middle East. All of them also have a visible Jewish aspect.
“Instrumentalization of antisemitism,” which means using this topic in isolation from real problems for political purposes, primarily to discredit opponents, has been used repeatedly in the post-Soviet space. Thus, since Russia’s succession and appending of the Ukrainian Crimea peninsula and active military and diplomatic involvement on the side of Eastern Ukraine separatists against the Ukrainian pro-European regime in 2014 and till now, both Kyiv and Moscow have viewed the Jewish world as a positive asset for the achievement of their immediate and strategic goals. From the initial state of the conflict, the formation of an enemy image, in which the antisemitic component enjoyed a prominent place, played a key role in mobilizing grassroots support in both Ukraine and Russia, but it was even more important in the areas of foreign diplomacy and propaganda.
Antisemitism in the rhetoric of Russian authorities became the third marker defining the new Kyiv authorities, following only “Fascists” and “Banderites.” Such an image should have become a sufficient “humanitarian” basis for the initial undeclared and, since February 2022, full-scale Russian intervention in the Ukrainian conflict. In response, Ukrainian propaganda has consistently emphasized, both in domestic political discourse and in the international arena, that the Putin regime has set out to restore the “Soviet empire” and is in fact the heir to the antisemitic Soviet regime.
In Russian rhetoric, an increasingly visible place has gradually been occupied by “classical” antisemitic tropes, including in statements by Russian leaders and pro-Kremlin media—both in relation to the ethnic Jew, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky, and other Jews in his entourage, that ironically were simultaneously accused of being both Fascist-anti-Semites and Jewish (RF Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who had defended the “denazification” of the ethnic-Jewish, Zelensky-run Ukraine by saying “some of the worst antisemites are Jews,” was a prominent example of this narrative), as well as toward “hostile Jewry” in general. As could have been expected, this met with understanding—or, at the very least, did not encounter rejection—among a significant segment of Russian society, in whose consciousness latent and at times overt antisemitic clichés continue to circulate.
In Ukraine, a similar phenomenon is represented to a somewhat lesser extent, primarily among marginal circles that, like their national-radical counterparts in Russia, insisted that “Maidan [supposedly] was organized by the Jews.” It also appears in the official and semi-official rhetoric of East Ukrainian pro-Russian separatists in the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics,” established in 2014 and ultimately annexed by the Russian Federation in 2022.
The IDF’s Operation “Swords of Iron” against Hamas in Gaza Strip, which comes in response to the massacre carried out on October 7, 2023, by the terrorist group’s militants in Israeli communities adjacent to the Strip, also occupied a significant place in the ideological and political discourse of the armed conflicts in the post-Soviet space, both in terms of comprehending the realities of this confrontation between Israel and Hamas and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in general and in the context of geopolitical interests and ambitions of specific USSR successor states. The positions of Moscow and Kyiv toward the Jewish state’s war with “Hamastan” are among the most corpulent of the allegoric beasts.
For all the significant diplomatic friction between Kyiv and Jerusalem over the past years, Ukrainian leaders have unequivocally supported Israel and sharply condemned Hamas and its patrons in Tehran. Russia’s position in the new war in the Middle East was radically different. As the fighting in Gaza develops, Russia’s position is becoming increasingly clear. Moscow parted from its traditionally declared role as an “impartial mediator” between all participants in the Middle East conflict and almost openly, although so far mostly at the declarative level, sided with the opponents of the Jewish state.
Supporters of backing Israel in its confrontation with Hamas were and are a clear minority in the Russian establishment. It is dominated by the exact opposite stance, which explains the long list of pro-Hamas demarches by official Moscow, from the official reception held in Moscow for the terrorist group’s leadership and accusations of “war crimes” against Israel to loud anti-Israeli diplomatic steps and Russian economic aid to the Hamastan, as well as the pronounced pro-Palestinian and, accordingly, anti-Israeli policy pursued by the Russian state media. This amounted to a return to the seemingly forgotten anti-Zionist frameworks that once legitimized state antisemitism in Soviet times. Moreover, on this very point they found common ground with those circles in Western countries that only lightly mask their antisemitic views as supposedly “legitimate criticism of Israel”.
The Armenian model of reacting to the current outbreak of the Middle Eastern conflict represented a variant of classical everyday antisemitism—formally not encouraged, yet not met with serious resistance from the authorities either. According to an analysis by Dr. Nati Kantorovich, head of the research department of Nativ, the Liaison Bureau with Jews in Eastern Europe under the Office of the Prime Minister of Israel, Armenian social media—reflecting antisemitic terminology that has spread in the country over the past three years—displayed an enthusiastic reaction to the Hamas attack. They began massively disseminating visual propaganda of Palestinian terrorists, expressing joy over the supposedly “well-deserved punishment of Israel,” issuing explicit calls to support Hamas, and promoting incendiary comparisons of Israel and its close strategic partner, Azerbaijan, with Nazi Germany.
A similar phenomenon—although in a significantly more limited form—can be found among the radical Islamist circles in Azerbaijan that oppose the country’s secular leadership and are openly supported by Iran.
Conspiracies of “new Khazaria”
To a large extent—and in a number of cases, to a determinative degree—the anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish narratives were promoted from the outside, through the propaganda and influence of Israel’s enemies and geostrategic rivals, Turkey and Iran, whose messaging at a certain point moved far beyond “anti-Zionist” rhetoric and incorporated explicit antisemitic themes. (In particular, Iranian Jewish Studies Center has published over 1,000 pieces of antisemitic content). A marginal yet highly illustrative motif within this propaganda was the narrative of “Jewish settlement colonialism” – likely intended as a counterweight to the increasingly popular narrative of “settler-colonialism by Palestinian Arabs”.
Suffice it to mention, for example, a report by Iran’s Fars News Agency, affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), designated a terrorist organization in most democratic countries. According to the agency’s claims, in recent years the presence and settlement of Jews in Azerbaijan has been “rapidly growing,” with new residential areas being created in various cities where “Jewish families are placed in an organized manner,” allegedly resembling the “formation of a ‘second Israel’ on Iran’s very doorstep.” Consequently, the increased presence of Jews in the Republic of Azerbaijan and the (supposedly) imposed silence surrounding it, the agency concludes, “is a sign of an organized project promoted through soft cultural and propaganda power… [and] external forces and internal lobbies do not want the truth to reach the people of Iran and the religious authorities”.
Turkey, too, periodically contributes to this narrative through its informational and intellectual circles—clearly in the spirit of the “neo-Ottomanism” concept, i.e., the extension of Ankara’s direct or behind-the-scenes influence over the countries and regions of the Near East and Eastern Mediterranean that once formed part of the Ottoman Empire. One example of this can be found in what appears at first glance to be a purely academic article on the history of Jews in Cyprus, written by Izzet Derkan, a faculty member at one of Turkey’s universities. While correctly noting that modern Jews’ connection to Cyprus stems from their longstanding presence on the island, the author concludes the article with a purely propagandistic passage: “Jews … supported each other and they wanted to have all Cyprus one day. When we look today… the richest people and the elite people in the world are Jews. After 1980s Jews bought a lot of lands in Northern Cyprus. Their dreams on Cyprus are performed with the money”.
In Russia, this idea found its real-world expression on 28 October 2023, when an aggressive crowd in the city of Khasavyurt (Republic of Dagestan, RF) arrived at the Flamingo Hotel, where, according to rumors, “refugees from Israel” were allegedly staying. The following day, rioters carrying Palestinian flags stormed the airport in Makhachkala. In both cases, the trigger for the outbreaks of violence was a rumor that Israelis were arriving in the republic intending to settle there and subsequently seize the territory, similar to “what they did in Palestine”. However, this particular trend did not prove useful in the eyes of the Russian leadership and was quickly suppressed.
Far more widespread in certain Russian circles were the relatively popular conspiracy theories of the “new Khazaria”: the idea that Jews had planned or were planning to move to “our” territories in order to create their own state there. In particular, since the first Kyiv Maidan (2004), a conspiratorial antisemitic theory about the “revival of Khazaria” had been circulating in the Russian information space, and in this way “migrated” onto the territory of Ukraine.
In his work, historian Konstantin Mogarichev cites a number of illustrative manifestations of the myth of “Jewish domination” in Ukraine, such as the periodically reproduced fake (2018–2021) about the Knesset allegedly allocating 84 billion dollars for the purchase of Ukrainian land, or the claim published in April 2022 by the well-known antisemitic politician Sergey Glazyev that “Zelensky’s strategy, in carrying out the will of the Rothschilds, consists in destroying Ukraine’s male population with Russian weapons in order to create on the banks of the Dnipro a new Promised Land for the chosen (i.e., Jewish) people”.
It is difficult to doubt that the “Khazar myth,” like other similar conspiracy theories—despite their absurdity from the standpoint of conventional logic—may, under certain circumstances, when overlaid on latent or overt antisemitism in a “not sufficiently modernized” or “postmodern” public consciousness, become a trigger for both domestic and international conflicts. All the more so if they are in demand or encouraged by the authorities.