Russian far-right fighter claims border st
The Moscow-born far-right militia leader who led a raid out of Ukraine into Russia has claimed he aimed to expose the country’s weak defences and inspire more compatriots to rise up against Vladimir Putin.
Denis Nikitin, a notorious extremist who heads the Russian Volunteer Corps, told the Financial Times that his Ukraine-based fighters had proved they could breach some of Russia’s most heavily guarded border areas. The incident, which lasted just a few hours on Thursday before the group retreated, prompted Russia’s president to cancel a planned trip and convene his security council.
Many details of the brazen stunt, mounted by extremists who claim to have the tacit support of Ukraine, remain unclear and unverified. Ukraine has denied directly supporting the group, while Russia has used the incident to bolster its claim that Nato is running a proxy war through far-right “terrorists”.
Nikitin, 38, a polyglot who also goes by the name Denis Kapustin and the nom de guerre Rex after his white nationalist clothing brand, White Rex, is a former mixed martial arts fighter with ties to neo-Nazis and white nationalists across the western world.
Russian authorities claimed that the raid left two civilians dead and a child injured. Nikitin, in his first interview since the incursion, said that a shootout occurred in one of the two villages his men had raided but was unaware of the casualties.
“The main thing was to remind Russians that you don’t have to live in shackles, put up with and participate in someone else’s war carrying out someone else’s will,” Nikitin said on Friday. “You can and must take up arms. We will support everyone who wants to remove these Kremlin usurpers from power.”
In the year since Putin ordered the full-scale invasion, Ukraine has repeatedly demonstrated its capacity to strike deep behind enemy lines with drone attacks and daring sabotage operations.
But the Russian Volunteer Corps’ attack appeared to confirm that Russian guerrillas were prepared to take up Kyiv’s cause. Nikitin said many of the 45 men involved in Thursday’s attack were part of a partisan underground network based inside the country.
The attack has also exposed what Nikitin said was the “very poor state” of Russia’s defences in the heavily forested Bryansk region, which is subject to enhanced security measures.
“It’s a classic partisan attack in a classic place where it was really hard both for the Germans and [the USSR] to catch partisans in the Bryansk forests,” said Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, a Moscow defence think-tank. “Closing down the border there is very difficult.”
unt exposes Putin’s weaknessIn a ceremony to honour local border units, Bryansk’s governor Alexander Bogomaz last month praised them for stopping “fighters from nationalist groups” and said local families treasured the guards’ green caps “like holy relics”.