Who are the Fighters of the Male State: they would have claimed bomb scares on flights

The Russian group Muzhskoye Gosudarstvo proclaims an ideology it describes as "national patriarchy." Misogynistic, racist and homophobic, the movement was born in 2016 on VKontakte, a kind of Russian Facebook, on the initiative of bodybuilder Vladislav Pozdnyakov. One of his first “official” acts was to fight against the introduction of a new law on domestic violence.

The members of the movement target especially Russian women who have relationships with foreign men, particularly non-white men. It is based on these reasons that, in 2021, the Russian court in Nizhny Novgorod declared the movement an extremist organization, banning its activities throughout the country. Despite the sentence, the group remained active on Telegram and private forums.

The leading figure of the group still remains its founder Pozdnyakov, born in 1991, blogger and personal trainer with a bodybuilder's physique constantly displayed on social media. In his past there is a conviction, which arrived in 2018, for inciting hatred against women. Two years ago the news of Pozdnyakov's death spread in Komodo, Indonesia, but he himself later admitted that it was all staged to give followers a dopamine rush. “You demand wars, attacks, shocks, and I will give them to you,” he boasted.

Overall, Male State fits into the galaxy of the "manosphere", a network of influencers and online communities that promote male supremacy and far-right ideologies. Pozdnyakov has been nicknamed "Russia's Andrew Tate", after the Anglo-American influencer convicted of human trafficking, who has amassed billions of views with theses about male dominance and female submission.

From another perspective, the fighters of the male state have repeatedly expressed themselves in favor of the war in Ukraine. An investigation by the Bellingcat website highlighted anti-Semitic posts and calls to execute Ukrainian leaders present in the group's channels. It was Pozdnyakov who first released the video of the beheading of a Ukrainian prisoner.

Now we need to understand whether the authors of the wave of false bomb alerts that caused chaos in European skies are really connected in some way to the Russian movement, or have just borrowed its name. The email with which they claimed responsibility for what they did is now being examined by the police: the investigation files will be opened shortly. At the moment, a connection with the false alarms of recent days which affected both flights in various countries and, in Italy, around 280 schools, causing disruption and evacuations of the institutes, cannot be ruled out.

In our country the alert concerned two direct flights to Rome and four to or from Milan Malpensa: it was triggered in the early hours of the morning of November 5, when an email was received with a generic "threat report" as the subject. "The explosion will occur in 60 minutes. Today your sky will be red" was the threat.

A Ryanair Pescara-Charleroi was also targeted by false alarms after the "bomb" sign was found in the bathrooms. A list to which are added at least 12 jumbos on other European routes: from France to Belgium, from Austria to Denmark, from Portugal to Greece. And then again the Czech Republic and Bulgaria, where Mig-29 fighters took off to escort three flights while four landed and inspected at Madrid airport. The hypothesis is that there is coordination at a European level and for this reason international cooperation channels have been activated to identify the servers from which the emails announcing the bombs passed and the IP addresses to trace who sent them. Europol also says it is ready to support the national authorities, upon request.