Macron has since been cracking down on word warfare, Hénin says. “One of the first things Macron did in office was to set up a disinformation unit that eventually became Viginum, the one that functions today,” he explains. 

“Because of this, France’s ability to attribute disinformation campaigns to Russia has increased, hence why French officials have been willing to come out and pin the bed-bug scare on the Kremlin.” 

Yet France has still struggled to shake its bed-bug problem. “This is what disinformation does when it’s successful, it makes life difficult,” says Cormac. “The French government is keen to pin all this on Russia, but when there are inevitably bed bugs that crop up in Paris, they’re put in a lose-lose position.”

And there is one other way in which the bed-bug story has furthered Moscow’s agenda. Thanks to work such as The Bedbug, a famous play by the Soviet poet and playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky, where a character is frozen in time and transported to a communist utopia some 50 years in the future – with a friendly bed bug as his companion, the insect occupies a certain place in the Russian cultural imagination.

In Russia, these insects are “usually seen in a humorous dimension”, says Hutchings, who has written extensively about Russian literature.

The bugs “are very common in Russia, as I know at my own expense. The Russians see them as a part of everyday life, and really as no big deal, rather than as unpleasant or threatening as they are here and in France. It is a good story in the way that this problem can be used as a sort of mockery.”

Hutchings points to Russia’s own state media coverage of the bed bug scare, which he described as “disinterested and even sober”. One report by state-owned news agency RIA Novosti pointed to the “psychosis” of Europe in blaming Russia for even its bed bug problem. 

“This is a win for Russia on one level because it makes us in the West look a bit ridiculous, as we’re getting into such a tiz about something that to them is so banal and trivial,” Hutchings says. 

“On another level, it offers confirmation to a much bigger narrative, that the Western world is infested with Russophobia and that we are constantly blaming them for our most basic problems.” 

“However you cut it,” the professor concludes, “this bed bug panic really does play into Putin’s hands.”