Andrey X’s Pro-Hamas Stance Isn’t Accidental

As a rule, you do not repatriate to a country you plan to work against or acquire its citizenship. Yet this is exactly what Andrey Khrzhanovskiy Jr., the son and grandson of influential Russian filmmakers Ilya Khrzhanovskiy and Andrey Khrzhanovskiy, did.

It admittedly caught my attention — though for reasons largely unflattering.

As a Ukrainian, I seldom trust Russian “anti-war activists” unless they have a genuine, years-long history of opposing Putin’s regime, the annexation of Crimea, and the invasion of eastern Ukraine. Most fail that test — even if they, like Khrzhanovskiy Jr., condemned Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

I cannot know with full certainty what Khrzhanovskiy Jr. thought of Crimea’s annexation in 2014, when he was just a teen, or in the years that followed. But I can ask questions regarding his conduct as an adult in Israel, which profoundly flabbergasted me.

In his own interview for Newsru.co.il, he says that he was visiting his grandmother in Israel when Russia launched a full-scale war in Ukraine and that he applied for citizenship hastily, allegedly “not knowing much about Israel.”

But even after he “found out,” instead of leaving the country or canceling his passport, he not only stayed but began openly working against his own state.

What’s more, he did so right after Hamas launched an incursion into Israel on Putin’s birthday, October 7, by launching a publication dubbed Kompas Media. Here is what it says regarding Hamas’s actions after October 7: “Hamas is the embodiment of an ideology that is a direct result of the Israeli leadership’s refusal to withdraw from the occupied territories through a peace process. Ideology cannot be eradicated with machine guns.”

Which peace process exactly, and which ideology? The last time I checked, Hamas’s ideology was the eradication of the State of Israel per se, which appears to be a perennial cause for most Palestinians.

Putting aside this nonsense disguised as virtue, there are other eyebrow-raising aspects of his conduct.

One example is his attack on Andrey Makarevich — one of the few genuinely pro-Ukrainian Russians living in Israel, with a Kyiv-born wife, Einat Klein, and himself the target of multiple Russian propaganda campaigns — in which Khrzhanovskiy Jr. calls on the public to boycott their wine-making business located in the West Bank.

Still, what truly matters is not his publicity stunts, including his multiple attempts to enter Gaza with his peculiar friends, or his collaboration with the highly pro-Russian The Grayzone’s writer Jeremy Loffredo, who reportedly collected data on Iran’s strikes on Israel’s air bases — but, surprisingly, his academic record.

In his bio, Khrzhanovskiy Jr. states that he studied anthropology at University College London, focusing on “the political anthropology of the post-Soviet space.”

“For my dissertation, I went to Transnistria to study the formation of national identity in an unrecognised state,” Khrzhanovskiy Jr. writes in his bio.

Wait a second: Which national identity? Which unrecognised state?

Because Transnistria is neither.

It is an artificial entity created in the early 1990s by so-called separatists who fought for their “independence” from “Moldovan Nazis,” “genociders,” and “oppressors.”

Rings a bell? It should — because this is precisely the formula Russia later used to invade Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, just as it did in Transnistria in 1991 — a territory which the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in 2022 designated as occupied by Russia.

In Ukraine in particular, Russia claimed that “Nazi Ukrainians” were committing a “genocide” against the people of Donbas — the very same people who, just two years earlier, hosted Beyoncé and Rihanna at the Donbas Arena as part of Euro 2012. What could be more genocidal than that?

Khrzhanovskiy Jr. is not a simpleton. There is little chance that he does not know Transnistria’s history, which makes it difficult to interpret his actions as anything other than an attempt to legitimise a fake national identity in a fake state through academic research. I would, of course, dig further into the matter, but I was unable to find a dissertation on Transnistria by Khrzhanovskiy Jr. via University College London — which admittedly begs the question of whether that dissertation exists at all.

Regardless, it is clear that Khrzhanovskiy Jr.’s actions overall are far from benevolent —  nor is his overt pro-Hamas stance out of character. And when he answers the question of why he is not fighting the dictatorship in Russia by saying that “if I were doing this in Russia, I would have been in jail long ago,” while simultaneously describing Israel (where he can apparently “fight” freely) as “a fascist dictatorship — by ethnicity, by blood definition” and refusing to surrender his Israeli passport, you understand that you are dealing with someone incredibly nasty.