THE STRANGE RUSSIAN PARTISAN WAR

May 22, 2023 -Durt Fibo

Today’s surprise attacks on towns inside the Russian border have the declared objective of establishing liberated territory, according to the Russian partisans who initiated the fight. The earliest such statements came from Freedom of Russia Legion (Свобода России), which said Kozinka and Gora-Podol (Grayvoron was still in flux) had been taken over as part of a strategy to create a demilitarised zone in the Belgorod Oblast. The group, consisting of Russians, vowed to “liberate” all of Russia.

But, videos later released by the Russian Volunteer Corps (Русский добровольческий корпус) asserted that their fighters had also participated in the action. The RVC has maintained all along that it’s goal was to “fight against Putin’s criminal regime.” Those words came from the RVC’s leader, Denis Nikitin (real name: Kapustin), an unregenerate neo-nazi who despises Ukraine’s President Zelenskiy for being born Jewish. Furthermore, the Freedom League and the RVC -both exclusively Russian groups- have always refused to cooperate on account of “various ideological differences,” as Nikitin has put it.

Almost since Russia attacked, acts of sabotage and serious destruction have been achieved within Belarus, Russia, and occupied places in Ukraine out by small groups opposed to the war. In Belarus we have President-for-Life “Idi” Lukashenko trying to outlive a government-in-exile, his FSB sitters, and some very active anti-war partisans. In Russia we have the Tsar of All Rus trying to survive visits from his own choice entourage and a risible war liable to re-ignite the civilian sentiments of 1917. In Ukraine we have survivors trying to live. All have rogues to deal with.

It is, however, the partisan-style acts inside Russia which are axiomatically the most portentious, since now -as in times before- the world is feeling the blows Russia inflicts on itself. This war is Russia’s war against the Russian people.

Which brings us back to the unseemly collaboration of the groups now claiming to have started a war of liberation within the Russian Federation. The Freedom of Russia Legion is basically a force of Russian military men who defected to the Ukrainian cause. On the other hand, the RVC, is a mirror of the Wagner PMC in miniature; formed by the Russian-born but Ukraine-based Nikitin, it glorifies a great white future Russia floating in a sea of non-Russian blood. As he ingratiated himself with a slew of European underground and extremist right-wingers, by 2019, Nikitin earned himself a 10- year ban from the EU because of his flagrant neo-Nazi agitating. Finally, a third internal Russian group lays claim to the partisan name: The National Republican Army (Natsional’naya respublikanskaya armiya). This last was unheard of before the car-bomb death of Daria Dugina on Mozhayskoye highway in August of 2022 (the bomb was likely meant for her father -Putin’s pea-brained Rasputin, Alexander Dugin), and their existence was revealed by former Russian Duma member Ilya Ponomarev (exiled in Ukraine).

Ponomarev at that time said the NRA had been responsible for a good number of partisan acts in Russia, and read aloud what he presented as their manifesto, which included the statement: “We declare President Putin a usurper of power and a war criminal who amended the Constitution, unleashed a fratricidal war between the Slavic peoples and sent Russian soldiers to certain and senseless death. Poverty and coffins for some, palaces for others – the essence of his policy. We believe that disenfranchised people have the right to rebel against tyrants. Putin will be deposed and destroyed by us!”

Laudable, but perhaps implausible. Few authorities, investigative journalists or colleagues have found much evidence that the NRA exists -or existed before Ponomarev stepped forward as their interlocutor. In Russia’s State Duma, he had cast the sole vote against the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and became a Ukrainian citizen in 2019, where he has his own media presence. In addition to acting as the umbilicus to the NRA, Ponomarev publicized a confusing -or disturbing- flash of information, sometimes called the Irpin Declaration, which purports to be an August 31, 2022 agreement of cooperation between the three Russian anti-Putin groups I’ve described above: the RVC, the Freedom League, and the NRA.

Despite the League’s aversion to ethno-religious chauvinism, as seen against Nitikin’s genuine embrace of nazism as a Russified solution, Ponomarev’s version of the Declaration has all three allegedly joining in the common “task to liberate Russia from Putin’s tyranny, to stop the terror of the Kremlin security forces against citizens of their own and other countries and to end the aggressive war against Ukraine as soon as possible. […] Our goal is a free democratic Russia built on the principles of self-government of citizens and social justice, without oligarchy and corruption, without police violence and arbitrariness of officials, without wars and annexations, without colonies and occupied territories, where every people living in the country chooses its own path.” Its signatories exhorted all Russian opposition and citizens of the Russian Federation “to cast aside all doubts and disagreements and join the fight.”

And, after today’s actions, the League told the Ukrainian public broadcaster Suspilne that “The situation is complicated, the Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps are creating a demilitarised zone on the border with the Russian Federation, so that [regular Russian forces] cannot attack Ukraine from that territory. Moving forward, we aim to liberate all of Russia from Putin’s dictatorship and to put an end to the criminal war.”

As I publish this, Russians are still battling Russia in Belgorod, attacking the headquarters of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the FSB.