A sharp increase in hostile foreign interference in France, including attacks against diasporas, is a breach of the country's sovereignty, domestic security chief Celine Berthon said on Tuesday.
"In recent years – and particularly since 2022 – we have witnessed a massive, meteoric rise in acts of interference on national territory," Ms Berthon told a panel in Paris, organised by the largest employer federation in France, the Medef.
European officials are increasingly concerned by so-called hybrid attacks that combine cyber warfare, disinformation and strikes against infrastructure.
"The war in Ukraine has obviously provided particularly fertile ground for this, but other conflicts have, too. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has led to actions of this nature," Ms Berthon said. "These attacks occur in physical spaces – you have heard about the Stars of David, the red hands, the pig heads and the vandalism targeting places of worship – but they also take place in cyberspace."
Ms Berthon was speaking alongside other senior French security officials who identified Russia as the main culprit. Incidents linked to Moscow include placing severed pigs' heads outside mosques in Paris last year and tagging red hands on the Shoah Memorial in the city in 2024. France has Europe's largest Muslim and Jewish minorities.
"All of this effectively contributes to the onset of a war. Not a physical or military war, nor one necessarily waged openly on our own soil, yet one that already involves attacks targeting our country," Ms Berthon said.
Divisive issues
Iran is also among countries believed to be behind physical attacks on Iranian critics living in France and other European states. Tehran has been linked to bomb attacks on Israeli and Jewish interests after the US and Israel launched joint attacks against Iran on February 28.
"States pursuing these actions have multiple objectives," Ms Berthon said. "These may include destabilising France by undermining the institutional balance, eroding our independence, and fragmenting our society … by exploiting highly divisive issues to pit members of the national community against one another."
Their objectives also involve "monitoring, or even suppressing, members of diaspora communities on our soil. This amounts to an importation of foreign laws on to our territory, which constitutes a violation of our sovereignty," Ms Berthon added.
She gave the example of a recent incident at Leipzig's international airport in Germany this month, when a drone packed with explosives was found near a parked Ukrainian cargo plane. "We must consider the possibility of more direct, violent hostile actions occurring on our national territory," she added.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on Tuesday that his government would announce who was responsible for the attempted drone attack on Leipzig/Halle airport. "Germany is in the crosshairs of hybrid attackers," he said. "We will find the authors and they will pay for it.”
Investigators have found a third drone carrying explosives since the first discovery on August 4, German media reported. The Ukrainian cargo plane was reportedly carrying military supplies.
