Europe is in chaos and the Kremlin is loving it. Protests over fuel prices, rents and school funding have spread from France to six other European countries in four weeks, with an official 550,000 marching in France on October 17.
Russia is gleefully following the chaos unfolding acorss the Continent, which only bolsters President Vladimir's narrative of a decadent Europe in decay as opposed to the stability and “family values” he has brought to Russia.
A map published by Rybar, a pro-Kremlin Telegram channel close to the Russian military, logs demonstrations between September 21 and October 17 in France, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Austria, putting turnout at more than 766,000 in France, 30,000 in Belgium and 25,000 in Spain. Albania, where students have fought running battles with riot police in Tirana since October 13, is not on the map. Rybar's figures have not been independently verified and differ from official counts in France, Italy and Belgium.
Protests across Europe, September 21 - October 17, 2026: participants by country as compiled by Rybar, redrawn by IntelliNews. Albania is not in Rybar's tally. Source: Rybar (pro-Kremlin Telegram channel).
The causes are domestic and differ from country to country: diesel above €2 a litre in France, rents and evictions in Spain and Portugal, school budgets in Belgium, a headscarf ban in Austria and a 13-year-old government in Albania. What joins most of them is a squeeze on household budgets that are part of a cost-of-living crisis after Europe ran short of diesel this autumn. The timing is good too: France votes for a new president next spring and Spain goes to a snap election on November 29.
Moscow, which European governments routinely accuse of stoking unrest, has seized on the footage while insisting it has nothing to do with it.
"These are riots that are already bordering on chaos. They have already spread to France's largest cities and to Italy, and they are beginning to spread to other countries. Here, of course, we are seeing a clear manifestation of a crisis. Nevertheless, this is an internal matter for these countries," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on October 19, according to TASS.
France counts the cost
The October 17 national day of action, which drew students, teachers, unions and the revived Yellow Vest fuel-price movement, ended with 2,397 people detained and 997 police and gendarmes injured, seven of them seriously, the Interior Ministry said, CNews reported. The ministry put turnout at 550,000, including 110,000 in Paris, against 800,000 claimed by organisers. Rioters looted shops in several cities and the town hall in Limoges was largely destroyed by fire, Al Jazeera reported.
Rybar's totals for France cover all the protest days since September 21 and are higher than the official count for October 17 alone: 1,484 injured and 9,150 detained.
President Emmanuel Macron blamed "unbridled violence" on "factious groups from the ultra-left" and asked Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu to call in party and union leaders.
Interior Minister Laurent Nunez offered his resignation on October 19 but Macron refused, but limited curfews have been imposed in several locations. Lecornu said on October 20 that "significant forces" would be deployed for further rallies on October 24, TASS reported.
Some action has been taken to reduce prices and ease the cost of living crisis. TotalEnergies (EPA: TTE), which runs 3,300 filling stations in France, caps diesel at €2.25 a litre at its pumps, and the government has released 10mn barrels of emergency diesel in an effort to cut the price by €0.12-0.18 a litre from November 1.
Italy, Belgium and Albania
In Italy, student marches against Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's government began on October 16 and the CGIL, the country's largest trade union confederation, joined them the next day for a "No Meloni Day" over living costs, school funding and arms spending. Milan saw the worst of it: around 60 people were detained, more than half of them minors, and 25 were hurt, Il Fatto Quotidiano reported. Nationally, 141 officers were injured and 197 people taken in for questioning, 28 of them arrested, according to police figures carried by the news agency AGI. "Protesting is a right. Setting our cities ablaze is not," Meloni said, Italpress reported. Rybar's tally of 5,000 participants, 66 injured and 60 detained for Italy is far below these figures.
Belgian police arrested 195 people in Brussels and Liege on October 17, 150 of them in the capital, as school and university students marched against education cuts, TRT World reported, citing police. Five officers suffered minor injuries.
In Albania, a student rally outside the Education Ministry on October 13 has turned into a movement demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Edi Rama, backed by opposition leader Sali Berisha. Police counted 71 officers injured in the first three days, and the central bank has had to reassure depositors after attacks on bank branches. The unrest grew out of the "Flamingo Revolution", more than four months of protests against tourism projects at Zvernec and on Sazan island, the latter backed by Affinity Partners, the investment firm of Jared Kushner, son-in-law of US President Donald Trump.
Rama has blamed "foreign hands that do not wish for Albania to be at peace", Al Jazeera reported, and named Russia and Iran, saying a drone carrying explosives had been neutralised before it could hit his government's offices. He has offered no evidence, Balkan Insight noted. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told Rama not to shift the blame onto Russia or Iran.
Housing in Iberia, headscarves in Vienna
Spain's protests over rents and evictions, set off by the eviction of an 87-year-old in September, have already forced a snap election. Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez called the November 29 vote after Congress voted down his housing decrees on October 2, Euronews reported.
Tens of thousands marched in Lisbon and Porto on October 17 over housing costs, wages and pensions. House prices in Portugal have doubled since 2017, and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Carlos Abreu Amorim said the government "will not yield to shouts from the street".
Austria is the outlier on Rybar's map: about 2,500 people protested in Vienna on three dates against a ban on Islamic headscarves for schoolgirls, with no injuries or arrests recorded.
Moscow watches
The UK has sanctioned Rybar's co-owner Mikhail Zvinchuk and says the network is partly coordinated by the Russian presidential administration and funded by the state defence group Rostec. Montenegro detained Zvinchuk on October 9 in an operation against foreign influence activity.
"It's hard to say whether the crisis is systemic or non-systemic. But it's obvious that this is a major crisis," Peskov said. He dismissed suggestions that Moscow had a hand in the unrest: "No one anywhere takes such absurd accusations seriously anymore. Not even in Europe itself," he said, Kommersant reported.
Zakharova posted a video on her Telegram channel that cuts from Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz warning of a Russian threat to footage of riots in France, Italy and Albania under the caption "Are those Russians?", before answering: "No, it is Europeans who are attacking Europe aka the 'garden'", TASS reported.
Senator Natalia Nikonorova told TASS that "a social explosion was only a matter of time", blaming years of financial support for Ukraine, and Georgia's ruling party has joined in, with Tbilisi Mayor Kakha Kaladze saying Europe now faces the unrest it "caused" in Georgia.
Political analyst Ilya Grashchenkov was more measured. "Various external actors may be trying to exploit the situation to advance their own information agendas. However, having an interest in a political crisis in Europe does not mean being directly involved in orchestrating it," he told TASS.