“Ukraine supporting Israel is not surprising. It’s actually spot on with their fascist agenda. Russians have been telling you for years.”
This tweet belongs to Alexandra Jost, a half-American, half-Russian who describes herself as a “travel blogger” exploring Russia in and out.
She enjoys a following of 58,000 on X (formerly Twitter), and hundreds of thousands on Instagram and TikTok. While most of her content focuses on the export of Russia’s cultural products – landmarks, ballet, churches – she also recurrently throws in geopolitical opinions of sorts.
Most of Jost’s content centers around the West’s “responsibility” for Russia’s ongoing war of aggression in Ukraine, Ukraine being a “Nazi” or “fascist” state, and attempts to whitewash Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime and its failure to provide tangible assistance to its ally Iran, which is at war with the US and Israel.
Jost is unlikely to be improvising.
In 2025, she was identified in a report by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project as part of the Kremlin’s influencer ecosystem – a network tasked with exporting Russian narratives under the guise of lifestyle content. She has also been spotted taking pictures with Russia’s foreign minister spokeswoman Maria Zakharova and Putin’s top ideologue Alexander Dugin.
Though a small fish compared to overtly pro-Russian, anti-Ukraine, and antisemitic commentators like Jackson Hinkle and Tucker Carlson, who have millions of followers worldwide across major platforms, she is indicative of Russia’s ever-expanding propagandistic agenda.
While Russia’s antisemitism is well recorded – it is, after all, the place where the fabricated conspiracy “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” originated and a long-time hub of obscene anti-Zionist propaganda – it has become especially rampant since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion in 2022 under the guise of fighting “Nazism in Ukraine.”
High-profile figures such as Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov even argued that President Volodymyr Zelensky, of Jewish ancestry, could still be viewed as a Nazi leader because, according to him, “Hitler had Jewish blood.”
It has been a slippery slope since then.
In 2023, “concerned Dagestani citizens” organized a Jew hunt at airports in Dagestan, while in 2024, Dugin stated that “Jerusalem will be a Russian city, or it won’t exist at all.”
Meanwhile, Putin called Israel “practically a Russian-speaking country” (despite only around 13% of Israelis being fluent in Russian, many of them from Ukraine or Soviet Ukraine). In what appeared to be an anti-Semitic remark in September 2023, Putin mocked former Russian official Anatoly Chubais, who had left Russia for Israel following the full-scale invasion, referring to him as “Moishe Izraelivich” – a term which Putin claimed Chubais had adopted for himself.
At times, you’d also hear Head of the State Duma’s Budget Committee Andrei Makarov claiming that Cheburashka, a Soviet cartoon character, is Jewish because he arrived in a crate of oranges which, according to him, were imported to the USSR exclusively from Israel (despite Morocco and Spain also exporting them). Or Russia’s chief epidemiologist Nikolay Bryko casually blaming Jews for the spread of measles.
On other occasions, you’d be presented with Russian “romantic comedies” like “The Good Neighbors,” which features a casual explanation that Lenin’s Mausoleum is a “zhydo-Bolshevik” project – using a slur for Jews – and that Lenin’s corpse is a “teraphim” made from the dried heads of murdered infants.
In exceptional instances you’d see long-time pro-Ukraine Russian Jews who fled to Israel, like rockstar Andrei Makarevich being presented by Russia’s ally Iran as “a captured Israeli pilot.”
Yet time and again, all roads would still lead to Kyiv.
Psy-op campaigns
Between 2023–2024, Facebook users widely reported a psychological operation (psy-op) campaign in which thousands of accounts – posing as Ukrainian and beyond – pushed sponsored content with defeatist messaging regarding the fall of Bakhmut and Ukraine’s inability to fight a Russian nuclear superpower.
It also involved clear antisemitic themes.
Spread by anonymous accounts, these posts featured images of Zelensky climbing piles of cash and emphasizing what they portrayed as “Jewish features,” including caricatured facial traits.
That psy-op, now largely shelved, has been replaced with more subtle messaging from allegedly pro-Ukraine patriotic handles that incorporate typical Russian bot characteristics: fake profile pictures, high-volume content critical of Ukraine’s leadership, and unusually large followings for obscure accounts.
One of them, Valsotayps Avokdip, shared a picture of Zelensky with former Commander-in-Chief Valery Zaluzhny, one of the key figures in Ukraine’s resistance. The caption read:
“putler [slang for Putin intended to compare him with Hitler] brought war into our home, but it was zelensky and zaluzhny who opened the door to him,” accompanied by a Menorah (a sacred, multi-branched candelabra central to Judaism, symbolizing light, wisdom, and divine presence).
This peculiar mix of antisemitism, coupled with a bizarre attempt to compare Zelensky and Zaluzhny with Putin – including through the use of the Latin letter Z used by Russian invaders – is followed by a suggestion that two Jews are fighting for power in Ukraine, described as “a corporation.”
Other examples include obscure handles praising the “good old Yanukovych times” – referring to ousted former President Viktor Yanukovych, who fled Ukraine after mass protests over his decision to abandon the EU Association Agreement – while attacking the Ukrainian government and spreading fabricated antisemitic quotes such as “Wars are Jewish harvests,” falsely attributed to German economist Werner Sombart.
With Russia’s war in Ukraine having no end in sight, the Iran war still unresolved, and the Kremlin’s propaganda machine in full swing, there is every reason to believe that more is yet to come.