A Moscow court has sentenced one of the most important figures of the Russian ultranationalist sector, Igor Girkin, known as Strelkov – derived in Russian from the word shooter – to four years in prison for his criticism of the Kremlin and the high command in the failed invasion of Ukraine. Former colonel of the Federal Security Service (FSB), one of the paramilitaries who led the Russian incursion that caused the Donbas war in 2014, and recognized White Russian —a fan of tsarism and the Russian Empire—, Strelkov has denounced to the point of insult the stagnation of the front and the poor conditions of the troops. The judges have also prohibited him from publishing anything on the Internet until three years after completing his sentence, which includes the seven months he has already served in preventive detention since his arrest in July last year, just a week after the boss's failed rebellion. of the Wagner mercenary company, Yevgueni Prigozhin, another of the most critical voices of the nationalists. “I serve the country,” he stated upon learning of his sentence.
Strelkov was detained even though he had no chance of escaping the country. A Dutch court handed down a life sentence against the soldier in November 2022 for the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH-17 over Ukraine in August 2014. All 298 people on board were killed by a Buk anti-aircraft missile supplied by Russia to the paramilitaries. Strelkov, who then commanded the separatist forces, stated in an interview in 2020 that he felt “a moral responsibility” for the deaths on the plane, although he never gave an explanation for what happened.
Strelkov's criticism of power has been constant since the failure of the first offensives on Ukraine, although the Kremlin's patience ran out after the Wagner rebellion in June 2023. A month later, the authorities opened a criminal case against Strelkov. for his opinions (on Telegram) about Crimea and the fact that the military personnel of the 105th and 107th airborne regiments do not receive their salaries,” explained his lawyer Gadzhi Aliyev. Among other statements, the paramilitary said that the Black Sea peninsula was poorly defended and the West would not need to negotiate “with the Kremlin's grandfathers.”
Strelkov is free verse in the Russian ultranationalist world. The FSB colonel has not only been very critical of the Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu, and of Putin, for their conduct of the war and his doubts when it comes to mobilizing the country. He also had a bitter exchange of accusations with Wagner's boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin, accusing him of causing a massacre in his own ranks to take Bakhmut. “Your taking of him does not bring me any joy. Taking into account what I know about his losses, the wasted resources, the lost time and the strategic nonsense of this operation,” said Girkin, to whom Putin's Chef in turn proposed that he command one of his battalions in the forehead.
Despite their quarrels, Strelkov was shocked to learn of Prigozhin's violent death just two months after the Kremlin supposedly forgave him for his rebellion. “My biggest fear is that, instead of the usual criminal sentence, they will give me amnesty just like they did with the cook,” Girkin said in a letter from prison to the Baza channel.
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Loved and hated in Russian ultranationalism, Strelkov wanted to compete with Putin in the presidential elections in March of this year. However, the central electoral committee denied his registration as a candidate because his team could not present a document: the signature of Igor Girkin himself, imprisoned until now in the Moscow prison of Lefortovo.
The Kremlin's fuse in the war in eastern Ukraine
Ten years later, it remains unclear whether the Kremlin directly ordered the assault on Donbas when the anti-Maidan protests had died down or simply gave its approval to the plans of its most ultra-nationalist sector. In any case, Strelkov led the group that took the Ukrainian city of Sloviansk by surprise. There he barricaded himself for almost three months and ordered several summary executions. Those were the months of shock for the Ukrainian interim government formed after the flight of President Viktor Yanukovych, between the illegal annexation of Crimea by Russia in February 2014, and the election of President Petro Poroshenko, who launched a military operation in May of that year. against the separatists.
An intimate paramilitary of Strelkov, Yevgeny Skripnik, alias Prapor, stated a few weeks ago that Girkin was already planning the takeover of Ukraine when he was officially a member of the FSB. That is, before the Maidan protests despite the fact that the Kremlin has always argued that Donbas rebelled against an alleged Ukrainian coup d'état.
“As a close friend I can reveal some secrets: Igor (Girkin) is one of the few who carried out the Novorossiya project (tsarist name for the southeastern region of Ukraine). It was before 2014, he had his own network when he was a senior FSB official. He planned the annexation from Novorossiya to Transnistria (Moldova),” Prapor claimed.
One of the Russian volunteers who joined Strelkov's militias in May 2014, Alexander Zhuchkovsky, recounted in his book 85 days of Slaviansk, that the FSB agent initially had the support of the ultranationalist oligarch Konstantín Maloféyev; of the head imposed by the Kremlin in Crimea after its illegal annexation, Sergei Aksionov; and another dark character, the 'political scientist' and today deputy Alexánder Borodái, with whom he shared power in the Donetsk People's Republic in the first months of the war.
Zhuchkovsky assures that Vladimir Putin was aware of these plans. The volunteer, a witness of those first months, considers “unsustainable” the version in which a group of armed paramilitaries moves calmly through Russia and crosses the border when security was maximum after the illegal annexation of Crimea and the protests in Donbas.
The longest sentence for a woman in Russia
The Russian justice system has also sentenced this Thursday to 27 years in prison Daria Trépova, the woman who gave a bomb statuette to the ultranationalist blogger Vladlén Tatarski during an event in a cafe in Saint Petersburg in March of last year. The explosion killed the activist and injured more than fifty people inside the premises, where the author of the attack herself was located.
This is the longest sentence for a woman in Russia. The investigation accused Trépova, 26, of having collaborated with the Ukrainian secret services. The detainee, convicted of terrorism, assured during the trial that she was unaware of the presence of explosives inside her gift. According to the version that Trépova told the Saint Petersburg court, the statuette was given to her by Román Popkov, a journalist and former head of the National Bolshevik Party, declared illegal by the Russian authorities.
After the explosion, Trépova called a friend, Dmitri Kasintsev, for help. The court has sentenced the young man to one year and nine months in prison for hiding Trépova in his house for several days.
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