Ooh la la! About the scandal with the Frenchman Nicolas, his anti-migrant rally in Lviv, and Russia

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Ooh la la! About the scandal with the Frenchman Nicolas, his rally against migrants in Lviv, and Russia

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Француз Ніколя Амбер з російським прапором на фоні у 2017 році та з українським у 2026-му (згенерована ШІ), якого звинувачують у російських наративах щодо трудових мігрантів в Україні

27 May, 19:20

After the so-called "Pakistani theme" appeared in Ukrainian social media, which is linked to Russian information operations, Frenchman Nicolas Humber, who lives in Ukraine, came into focus. He, along with his wife, organized an anti-labor migration rally in Lviv, although official data does not confirm claims of a massive influx of migrants. His photo with the Russian flag from 2017 is also being discussed online, which he explains as a study trip and being a victim of Russian propaganda.

Specialists from the Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security have recorded an increase in Ukrainian social media of the so-called "Pakistani" theme. The department notes that this narrative is part of the Russian Federation's information operation aimed at inciting anti-migrant sentiments and manipulating issues related to mobilization in Ukraine.

Disinformation counteraction expert Oksana Moroz also stated that similar information campaigns have Russian origins and use the migrant issue to incite social conflicts.

"The Russians decided to drop a few AI videos and saw that they resonated with the receptive, uninformed Ukrainian society. We saw that there were supposedly so many Indians that they were washing their clothes en masse somewhere in a river in Ivano-Frankivsk, and people suddenly started seeing people in their workplaces and on the streets who were neither Ukrainian nor European. Russia amplified all this with a few videos, like the one where a message from Uzbekistan to its citizens, urging them to go to Uzbekistan, was simply re-dubbed, adding an epic moment that there are 'good boys and girls' here."

Rally against migrants and Frenchman Nicolas

Against this backdrop, people on the internet also began discussing Nicolas Humber – a 30-year-old Frenchman already quite well-known among Ukrainians, who learned the Ukrainian language and currently lives in Ukraine. In Lviv, he, along with his wife, 27-year-old Ukrainian Yuliia Chubarieva, organized a rally against migrants, which took place on May 24, further intensifying discussions and fitting into the broader context of the migration topic.

Акція проти трудової міграції у Львові / Фото: Суспільне

Before that, Nicolas had posted several "warnings" from a Frenchman about the arrival of labor migrants to Ukraine from Pakistan and Bangladesh, although previously he mostly wrote about language.

"This person claims to have learned Ukrainian quite quickly, but is silent about already knowing Russian. Likes to speculate on sensitive topics (language, religion, migrants, homophobia), while presenting himself as a 'proper Christian' and a person of high moral principles", – wrote olha_k.r on Threads in response to a post by Yevhen Pavlovskyi about Nicolas allegedly inquiring about various ways to legalize himself in Ukraine and obtain a residence permit.

Journalist Maryna Danyliuk-Yermolaieva drew attention to figures from demography specialist Ella Libanova: in 2024, six thousand work permits for foreign citizens were issued in Ukraine, and in 2025 – nine thousand. But in 2021, there were 22 thousand such permits.

"A certain Frenchman, Nicolas, is organizing rallies against migration in Lviv. At one time, he gained popularity on our TV channels by learning Ukrainian and changing into embroidered shirts. So, in a situation where local experts on authenticity are on the front lines, this man has become an expert. I predict that for similar actions in France, one could be suspected of xenophobia. Therefore, the man is not criticizing the migrant policy at home in a Le Pen constituency, but has moved to holy Galicia." – wrote Danyliuk-Yermolaieva.

How the couple explains the organization of the rally

Nicolas himself stated that he decided to support the rally in order to "warn Ukrainians against the mistakes made by European countries, including his own."

"Why do I care so much about Ukraine? Because it is the country of my wife, my family, my future children. And when I see what has happened to my country, I simply do not want the same to happen to Ukraine. In France, they said: it will be temporary, it will not be massive. And then we realize that we are not solving the problem of the demographic crisis from within the country. These people, of course, stay, and we do nothing to assimilate them." – Nicolas commented to"Suspilne".".

Yuliia Chubarieva, for her part, added that they gathered for the rally to "express opposition to the import of labor from Southeast Asia to Ukraine".

"We are here now to state that we do not want this to be massive. Instead, we want to create conditions for those 10 million Ukrainians who left during the full-scale invasion to return."

She proposed providing guaranteed mobilization booking for those who left the country before 2022 and are willing to return to Ukraine to work in critical sectors. Additionally, to introduce a "strict filter for foreigners": establish a mandatory exam in Ukrainian language and history, provide for the cancellation of permits for disrespecting national values or violating laws, and set time limits for migrants' stay in Ukraine.

On May 11, Chubarieva also registered a petition to the Cabinet of Ministers titled "Protection of the National Labor Market: Priority Mobilization Booking for Ukrainians Instead of Migration," which gathered over 25,000 votes in 10 days.

Is Ukraine truly threatened by a large number of migrants?

Recently, mayors of several cities, including Andriy Sadovyi, commenting "Your City" on the issue of migrants, said that he supports investments in Lviv's economy by large global companies, but considers the involvement of labor migrants, for example from Africa or Asia, "wrong" because, according to him, Ukrainians should receive jobs first.

Vasyl Baryliuk, Director of the Lviv Regional Employment Center, stated that foreigners are already workingin the Lviv region, including from India, Bangladesh, and Colombia.

"On average, we issue 10-12 work permits per day in the Lviv region, particularly for construction specialties. They receive a salary of 35-40 thousand UAH per month and work quite well."

At the same time, official data from the State Migration Service indicate the following: after the start of the full-scale war, the number of new immigration permits to Ukraine sharply decreased and continues to fall.

While in 2015–2019 Ukraine issued 14–16 thousand immigration permits annually, in 2025 – only about 2.8 thousand. According to Texty.org.ua, even before the war, the share of foreigners in Ukraine remained insignificant – about 0.75% of the population.

The authors of the material note that a significant portion of foreigners came to Ukraine for studies, and after completing their studies, they tried to move further west.

Thus, information campaigns aimed at intensifying anti-migrant sentiments and fears are intensifying in the Ukrainian segment of social networks and changing their form according to current contexts. According to monitoring data from the Center for Strategic Communications, in the period from May 1 to May 10, 2026, a new wave of such rhetoric was recorded in the information space. In total, over 21.6 thousand publications were detected, spread across almost 14 thousand resources.

Nicolas with a Russian flag and posts about migrants

Some users had questions specifically about the figure of Nicolas Amber, who is originally from France and has been studying Ukrainian, according to him, since 2022. Interestingly, the couple organized the rally virtually simultaneously with the manifestations of Russian fakes.

The part that angered most Ukrainians the most was a photo of Nicolas Amber with a Russian flag, which, according to him, he took in 2017 while in Russia.

"It turns out that in 2015 he began studying Russian language and culture in France. At the same time, he is not a historian or a philologist, but a political scientist. This means he purposefully prepared to work concerning Russia and therefore, by his own admission, immersed himself in Russian culture. He immersed himself so successfully that in 2017, under some program, he went to Russia, where he took a photo with the Russian flag, lived for two months, after which his eyes were opened to the fact that Russia is a corrupt state. At the same time, he (I remind you, a political science student) did not pay attention to the fact that Russia had already been carrying out military aggression for three years by then and generally did not think much about the existence of any Ukraine at all." – writes Oleksandr Burlaka, a Candidate of Technical Sciences, who publishes in popular science magazines and popularizes science in Ukrainian..

Burlaka adds that since the start of the full-scale war, Amber has been coming to Ukraine and returning to France.

"He learned the language, started taking photos in an embroidered shirt, married a Ukrainian woman who had fled the war to Switzerland but returned with him to Ukraine. Earlier in winter, there was an incident with Nicolas where he accused an editor of the Priamyi TV channel of speaking Russian, said he was disappointed in Kyiv and supposedly left for Lviv..

Moreover, he entered Ukraine and started learning Ukrainian in December, when Russian troops had already begun to maneuver near the borders. And where would a political scientist who knows that Russia is bad, that tanks are near the border, and that the Moscow church is riddled with FSB agents, go in Kyiv? Correctly, to the UOC-MP monastery. Moreover, he didn't just go there, but stayed overnight, and the locals did not refuse him, after which an interesting incident happened to him. According to him, at night a local archimandrite came to him and started jerking off his penis. Nicolas got scared, fled, filed a police report for rape, but it all ended in nothing."

"A Frenchman who incites hatred towards migrants among Ukrainians. Another Kremlin project", - stated in Threads Bohdan Demyanenko.

Nicolas is also called a representative of far-right ideas:

"It is very regrettable that in Ukraine, some people fall for his populism and racist rhetoric. Problems in France, as in any European country, undoubtedly exist, but the way he presents and uses them is too radical and manipulative. He also speculates on the inferiority complex of some Ukrainians: seeing a foreigner who has learned Ukrainian, people often automatically give him more trust and authority." - wrote a Threads user under a post with a photo of a Frenchman near a Russian flag.

At the same time, there are those who defend Nicolas:

"The Frenchman knows perfectly well what France has turned into due to the EU's migration policy, and warns about the danger", - writes Yevheniy Obolon in Threads.

"Oh, leave Nicolas alone, he has always been super pro-Ukrainian. Super, I've seen him from the beginning, how he tried to teach French to Ukrainian refugees - for free, how he lived with my acquaintances and what he said. Just leave Nicolas alone. He said the right things because he knows what a disaster France is because it accepted those emigrants who absolutely do not want to integrate into French society." - wrote juli_koste_mua.

It should be noted that Nicolas Amber's new Facebook page appeared on April 27 this year. It has about 50 posts, half of which are about migrants.

Before that, on his Instagram, he mostly posted lifestyle content about Ukrainian and French languages, identity, faith, etc. He also has his own online French school.

Shortly after the creation of the new Facebook page, the focus of his posts changed: more and more content appeared such as "love strangers, forget your own," "while Ukrainians are fighting and dying for their state, the authorities are preparing for the mass import of labor migrants," and so on.

He and his wife and like-minded people also created a movement, and later a website "Future of the Ukrainian people," as Amber calls it, for open discussion of migration issues in Ukraine with the participation of citizens.

"They want to discredit my pro-Ukrainian stance"

Frenchman Nicolas responded to users' criticism regarding this by publishing a poststating that he has been subjected to a "slander campaign" by anonymous bots for several months.

"This photo with the Muscovite flag, because of which I am being accused of being a Kremlin agent, was published several months ago by an FSB agent on the social network Threads to discredit my pro-Ukrainian stance", he stated.

Amber explains that he never hid the fact that before writing his doctoral dissertation on Ukraine in 2021, he was a victim of Russian propaganda, and explains in more detail about the photo with the Russian flag:

"During my studies at Sciences Po Aix, which I started in 2015, we were taught Russian (not Ukrainian - sorry, but France knew nothing about Ukraine then!), we were told about 'great Russian culture' (not about Shevchenko -” apologies!). Our institute sent us to Moscow for three months (in September 2017). This photo was taken on our first day there with other French and foreign students on a boat in September 2017. I spoke Russian very poorly then and knew nothing about Rashka, except for Dostoevsky. That's all. No more, no less.

Instead, 2 months later, in December 2017, when I exposed corruption, I received death threats and was forced to return to France urgently. It was thanks to me that our French institute ceased cooperation with that university. In 2019-2020, I was the first Frenchman to write about the crimes committed by the Russian Federation through the Moscow Patriarchate. I am also the first in France to reveal the Prague archives, which confirm that Patriarch Kirill of Moscow was a KGB agent. In 2020.

Despite the Frenchman's explanations, Valeriy Pekar, a lecturer at the Kyiv-Mohyla Business School and Lviv Business School of UCU, believes that Nicolas's narratives "reek of swampy odor".

"One of the characters behind the anti-immigrant hysteria. I had the opportunity to hear him live. He learned the language well, we all wish we could. But what he says really reeks of swampy odor", -” wrote Valeriy Pekar.

In the Center for Strategic Communications they add that the information wave of spreading anti-immigrant sentiments and fears has turned into a coordinated strategy to divide society:

"The use of deepfakes, manipulation of figures, appeals to emotions, involvement of anonymous and propaganda resources and bot farms – all this works to destabilize the Ukrainian rear, disrupt mobilization, and destroy trust in the state."

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