PSCRP-BESA Reports No 139 (July 6, 2025)
On the evening of October 29, 2023, approximately 1,500 young men carried out a pogrom at Makhachkala’s Uytash Airport, where a transit flight from Tel Aviv had landed. Initially, the crowd began inspecting cars leaving the airport and checking the passports of those inside. Soon after, they tore down the fencing, stormed the airport building, and eventually made their way onto the airfield. They entered every room, shouting antisemitic slogans, “searching for Jews,” and demanding the expulsion of Jews from Dagestan. They looted shops and damaged other property.
Twenty people were injured, including civilians and police officers. The police offered no real resistance to the rioters, merely attempting to calm them down.
Immediately after the events, PSCRP-BESA provided a detailed account of what had occurred at the airport, analyzing the factors that led to the pogrom, the actors whose actions and propaganda may have provoked it, and the authorities’ immediate response.
Twenty months have since passed. During this time, more information about the pogrom has come to light, and its consequences have become clearer—for the possible organizers, participants, and authorities, as well as in terms of the risk of further violent antisemitic incidents in the region.
What Happened Immediately After the Pogrom
The very next day, Russian President Vladimir Putin stated that the pogrom—referred to by him as the “events in Makhachkala”—had been “orchestrated, including through social media, not least from the territory of Ukraine, by the hands of agents of Western intelligence services.” He did not use the words “pogrom,” “antisemitism,” or “Jews,” but he did mention the Tats—a term often used to refer to the Mountain Jews of Dagestan, though the two are not entirely synonymous.
Russia’s Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar issued a rather weak statement, calling for every effort to be made to ensure that “there is no place for the propaganda of hatred in our country.” However, he did acknowledge that “something has really changed for the worse” in the Caucasus, and emphasized that the pogrom at the airport—as well as the earlier antisemitic demonstrations in Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachay-Cherkessia, and Khasavyurt in Dagestan—should be recognized as antisemitic rather than merely “anti-Israeli” actions.
A harsher response came from Alexander Boroda, head of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia. He called on “the country’s leadership and law enforcement agencies to identify and severely punish all organizers and participants in the antisemitic actions.” At the same time, Boroda refrained from blaming the Dagestani authorities for their failure to stop the rioters, stating that they could not have “imagined” such an event could happen.
Kremlin-adjacent sources quoted by the opposition outlet Meduza echoed these sentiments, stating that the pogrom came as a complete shock and surprise to the authorities. However, they predicted it would not result in any consequences for the responsible federal or regional officials—and they were right: Putin punishes his subordinates for disloyalty, as a means of intimidation, and occasionally for theft, but almost never for failures in the line of duty.
Calls for severe punishment of the rioters came from federal public figures known for their nationalist and anti-Islamic views, including Kirill Kabanov and Senator Andrey Klishas.
Dagestan’s Head, Sergey Melikov, threatened that “no one will be forgiven,” but already the next day he stated that not everyone present at the airport would be punished: “Those who broke down the gates, those who smashed the displays, those who overturned the police car—they will be held accountable. But those who stood by and watched or simply held a Palestinian flag—they will not be punished.” He was supported by Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov.
Around twenty Dagestani imams recorded a video statement, in which they described the pogrom as “excessive actions,” where “some participants crossed the line of acceptable behavior.” In their view, “there is no need to punish Dagestani youth.” The Dagestan Muftiate was quick to distance itself from that position and even dismissed one of its staff members who, even before the pogrom, had referred to “what is happening in Palestine” as jihad.
The renowned athlete and former UFC champion Khabib Nurmagomedov, adding the note “Allah is Forgiving and loves those who forgive,” reposted on his Instagram Stories a post by fellow Dagestani athlete, wrestler Makhmud Magomedov, in which the latter urged the authorities “not to ruin the lives of young guys.” The Mufti of Tatarstan, Kamil Samigullin, also called for leniency toward the pogrom participants.
All representatives of the authorities, clergy, and official public figures who commented on the pogrom—following Vladimir Putin’s lead and even before the investigation began—emphasized that the unrest was undoubtedly organized from abroad, allegedly by Western and/or Ukrainian intelligence services.
It is difficult to completely dismiss the version involving a “Ukrainian trace.” The pogrom was, in a literal sense, organized by the Telegram channel Utro Dagestan, which, immediately after the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, launched a focused campaign of aggressive antisemitic statements and threats. Throughout the day leading up to the pogrom, the channel posted instructions for participants in the unrest, including directives to block the airport, inspect cars, and so on. These materials were rapidly disseminated across other Dagestani public channels.
Utro Dagestan has been linked to former State Duma deputy Ilya Ponomarev, who relocated to Ukraine and obtained Ukrainian citizenship even before the full-scale war began. He is the head of the anti-Kremlin media project Utro Fevralya. The day after the pogrom, Ponomarev stated that he had not been involved with Utro Dagestan since 2022. However, this is untrue: as recently as August 2023, Ponomarev referred to Utro Dagestan as “our channel,” and in May of the same year, claimed to be an investor in it—while adding that he does not influence its editorial policy.
The direct operator of the Utro Dagestan Telegram channel is believed to be Abakar Abakarov, a former co-founder of the “Russian Congress of the Peoples of the Caucasus,” according to both investigators and independent media sources. He left Russia for Ukraine in 2016, where within three years he opened two kindergartens and a school operating under Sharia norms. As of November 2023, according to unconfirmed reports, Abakarov was residing in Turkey.
Telegram founder Pavel Durov announced, the day after the pogrom, that the Utro Dagestan channel, along with several other radical Islamist groups, had been blocked.
To be fair, the promotion of antisemitic hysteria was not limited to Utro Dagestan. Other information sources—including those loyal to the Russian authorities—also played a role. As noted multiple times by researchers at PSCRP-BESA and other independent analysts, the channel’s publications cannot be considered the sole cause of the pogrom. Calls for unrest were spreading horizontally and found fertile ground in the widespread popularity of antisemitic and Islamist ideas, as well as among disaffected youth looking for someone to blame for their hardships—such as Jews.
“The Airport Case”
The Airport Case became the largest criminal case involving mass unrest in modern Russian history—and the only major case tied to actual mass riots rather than protest actions. A total of 1,200 people faced administrative charges, while 142 individuals were charged criminally. For comparison, in the Baymak Case—a crackdown on participants of a public gathering protesting the sentence of Bashkir eco-activist Fail Alsynov—between 80 and 100 people have been subjected to criminal prosecution.
According to the Investigative Committee, of the 142 defendants in the criminal case, 135 have been arrested, and seven have been declared wanted, including three alleged organizers: Ilya Ponomarev, Abakar Abakarov, and radical Islamic preacher Israil Akhmednabiev, also known as Abu Umar Sasitlinsky.
At the prosecution’s request, all trials related to the Airport Case are being held in courts in the Stavropol and Krasnodar regions. In December of last year, the Russian Supreme Court upheld the change of jurisdiction, dismissing an appeal by State Duma deputy Saygidpasha Umakhanov, who had asked for the cases to be returned to Dagestan.
As of late June, verdicts have been delivered for 118 defendants, sentencing them to prison terms ranging from 4.5 to 10.5 years—most commonly around 8 years. The majority were convicted under Part 2 of Article 212 of the Russian Criminal Code (participation in mass riots involving violence and destruction) and Part 3 of Article 263.1 (failure to comply with transport security requirements at transportation infrastructure facilities). Some were also charged under Part 1 of Article 318 (use of non-lethal force against a public official in connection with the performance of their duties).
Notably, although only 9 of the 20 people injured during the pogrom were police officers (a figure later revised by the prosecution to 23 in sentencing reports), violence against at least 11 injured civilians appears to be absent from any of the official verdicts.
It is difficult to assess whether the sentences handed down to the rioters are “lenient” or “harsh” due to the extreme inconsistency in how punitive measures are applied in Russia. On the one hand, compared to the draconian punishments imposed on anti-war activists and regime opponents, the sentences seem relatively moderate. On the other hand, under Russian criminal law, one can receive as little as six years for murder and just three years for rape.
The minimum penalties prescribed by law for the mentioned parts of the articles—mass riots, transport security violations, and violence against a police officer—are, respectively: three years in a penal colony, compulsory labor, and a fine. The maximum penalties are eight, seven, and five years of imprisonment. When multiple charges are brought, Russian criminal law applies the principle of partial cumulative sentencing; in this case, the maximum possible sentence is 12 years, and the minimum is three. Accordingly, the sentences handed down to the rioters roughly correspond to what would be expected under the specific charges brought against them.
At the same time, the Airport Case is being conducted with extreme opacity. Verdicts are reported by the Investigative Committee or the Prosecutor’s Office, but such reports never specify what actions each convicted person actually committed. According to a lawyer familiar with the case, speaking to Kavkaz.Realii, this information is also absent from the indictments themselves —as he puts it, “that kind of work was simply never done.” This is likely due to the broad use of the legal principle of prejudicial effect in Russian courts: once it is established that mass unrest and transportation security violations occurred, it is deemed sufficient to prove that a particular individual was present at a certain location at a certain time. If this assumption is correct, then the variation in sentencing is probably determined not by each defendant’s role in the pogrom, but rather by personal circumstances treated as aggravating or mitigating factors—such as having young children, prior convictions, and so on.
But if that is the case, it becomes even less clear why some participants in the pogrom were charged administratively, while others are facing criminal prosecution.
The defense has also raised claims of rights violations and pressure on the defendants. Several individuals stated that they were at the airport for unrelated reasons: some were meeting or seeing off passengers, others were working as taxi drivers. One defendant insisted that he had been elsewhere at the time and claimed he had been forced to confess under torture; he was sentenced to a prison term between 8 and 10 years (the exact verdict remains unknown). In at least two trials, victims and witnesses were unable to identify any of the defendants.
Against the backdrop of widespread antisemitic and anti-Israeli sentiment in Dagestan, the public tends to perceive the verdicts as unjust and the convicted individuals as victims—at best of arbitrary repression, and at worst of the “Jewish lobby.”
Local civic activists who were not involved in the pogrom but either sympathize with its participants or express pro-Palestinian views have been subjected to pressure and intimidation—this can be seen as a second layer of the authorities’ response. Less than a month after the pogrom, journalist and activist Idris Yusupov was labeled a “foreign agent.” In October 2023—prior to the pogrom—Yusupov had held daily solo pickets “in support of Palestine.” While he condemned the pogrom itself, he blamed the authorities for refusing to authorize pro-Palestinian rallies that could have allowed people to “let off steam.”
A year later, popular Dagestani sports commentator Ramazan Rabadonov, who had been voluntarily helping to defend the accused in the Airport Case, was detained. He was charged with illegal possession of weapons—his defense claimed the evidence was fabricated and planted. Unconfirmed reports also suggested that authorities intended to charge him over correspondence with administrators of the Utro Dagestan channel. During his arrest, the 63-year-old Rabadonov suffered injuries to his cervical vertebrae. After two months in pretrial detention, he was released under house arrest.
One thing must be made clear: the scale—and if not the cruelty, then the severity—of the crackdown on the pogrom participants is not due to the state’s intolerance of antisemitism. On the contrary, every official who commented on the events at the airport, from Putin to Melikov, either openly or implicitly expressed understanding of the rioters’ motivations. The real reasons lie elsewhere: first, in the authorities’ deep fear of any mass mobilization outside their control; and second, in their desire to at least mask—or “compensate for”—the glaring failure and professional inadequacy of law enforcement and security agencies, which first overlooked a very public buildup to the pogrom, and then failed for hours to bring the chaos under control.
From Pogrom to Terror Attack
The lesson of the Airport Case appears to have been delivered and absorbed: there have been no further large-scale antisemitic demonstrations in the North Caucasus—at least, not until the terror attack on June 23, 2024, when a group of armed men attacked Orthodox churches and synagogues in Makhachkala and Derbent. According to some reports, they had also planned an assault on a Shiite mosque. Seventeen police officers and five civilians were killed (not including the five gunmen who were shot), among them an Orthodox priest. No Jews or Israelis were among the victims, but during the attacks on the synagogues, several police officers and possibly civilian guards were killed. Both synagogues were set on fire; the historic synagogue in Derbent, built in 1914, was completely destroyed. On its wall, the attackers left graffiti quoting Quranic verses hostile to Jews and Christians, calling to “fight against them.”
There is no direct operational link between the airport pogrom and this terror attack. The assaults on churches and synagogues were carried out by a group of radicalized “golden youth”—relatives of regional officials, two of whom had recently returned from Turkey. The Institute for the Study of War suggests that the attack may have been connected to Vilayat Kavkaz, a Caucasus-based cell of the Islamic State, though no terrorist organization has claimed responsibility. Russian politicians, true to form, promptly blamed Ukraine and NATO, but this version was not even mentioned during the formal investigation. Finally, whereas the pogrom was a purely antisemitic act, the terror attack targeted both Jews and Christians, and its message was explicitly jihadist.
However, as noted in earlier publications by PSCRP-BESA, the underlying causes in both cases are the same: widespread antisemitic sentiment in the North Caucasus and the growing spread of Islamist fundamentalism. These factors have not gone away—on the contrary, attacks by Islamists on security forces have increased over the past year or two in Dagestan, as well as in neighboring Chechnya and Ingushetia. The renewed activity of the Islamist underground means that further jihadist terror attacks, including those targeting Jews, cannot be ruled out.
What’s Happening Now
There is currently no precise data on the size of the Jewish diaspora in Dagestan. At the time of the airport pogrom, the Israeli outlet Vesti, citing an unnamed employee of the Makhachkala synagogue, estimated the number at 3,000 people, while the rabbi of Derbent, Ovadia Isakov, spoke of 300–400 families. This is an order of magnitude smaller than during the postwar Soviet period. It is almost certain that the pogrom—and the subsequent terror attack—forced at least some of the last remaining Jews in Dagestan to leave the republic. Thus, gradually, quietly, and seemingly “naturally,” it is becoming judenfrei.
Against this backdrop, alongside efforts to restore the burned historic synagogue, authorities have announced plans to build a spiritual complex in Derbent called the “Caucasian Jerusalem”—an interfaith center intended to unite a mosque, a church, and a synagogue on one site. The project is funded by Dagestani oligarch Suleyman Kerimov. In April, a “time capsule” was laid in the foundation of the construction site during a highly publicized ceremony attended by regional leaders and representatives of official religious bodies, including Russia’s Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar. The event triggered a new wave of antisemitic comments in local social media channels, though it did not escalate beyond words.
The plan to open a synagogue might seem like a cruel joke amid the disappearance of Dagestan’s Jewish community. More likely, however, it reflects a more mundane goal: simulating efforts to preserve interfaith and interethnic harmony.
No one has been held accountable for the failures of the civil administration and law enforcement agencies that enabled both the airport pogrom and the terror attacks in Makhachkala and Derbent.
On June 24, Vladimir Putin signed a law increasing penalties for extremism. According to unconfirmed reports, the legislation was drafted at Putin’s own instruction, given during a meeting the day after the pogrom. However, since it was submitted to the State Duma only in February of this year, the actual causal link remains unclear. It is worth noting that Russia’s anti-extremism legislation is routinely used to target not only opposition figures but also loyalist “ultra-patriots” whom the FSB deems to have crossed the line of acceptable discourse.
Interestingly, the recent hostilities between Israel and Iran did not result in a notable spike in antisemitic sentiment in Dagestan, nor in any antisemitic incidents beyond isolated comments online. For instance, on June 17, the pro-security-state news outlet Mash published an obviously fake report claiming that both Israelis and Iranians were “flooding” into Russia. Unlike the viral rumors that preceded the Makhachkala airport pogrom—about an alleged arrival of “refugees from Israel”—this piece of disinformation failed to gain traction. The relatively muted reaction was likely due to a combination of factors:
- Iranian Muslims are Shiites, while Dagestani Muslims are Sunnis. To the radical preachers who influence Dagestani youth, Shiites are just as much enemies as “infidels.”
- After the removal of the Utro Dagestan Telegram channel, no comparably large and influential Islamist platforms remain.
- Censored local media in Dagestan covered the conflict very sparingly and cautiously, merely repeating key statements from central Russian news agencies.
- Global antisemitic propaganda failed to produce compelling imagery of mass suffering—particularly of children—among civilians in Iran that could be blamed on Jews, unlike the situation in Gaza.
All of this suggests that with sufficient political will and competence, it is possible to keep not necessarily antisemitic attitudes themselves, but at least their violent public expressions, under control.
PSCRP team