Thread by @michaeldweiss

New at @4freerussia_org, with @pierrevaux. A deep dive into the fascistic, Chekist and cultish elements involved in Russia's two invasions of Ukraine. A report almost a decade in the making. 4freerussia.org/vile-bodies/

In the dying days of the USSR, the KGB infiltrated and controlled a number of ideologically extremist far-right movements such as Pamyat -- movements that birthed a ragtag collection of Russian spooks seemingly at odds with the regime they served.

In particular, we profile three key figures in the 2014/2015 war, all of whom cut their teeth in the early 90s opposition to Yeltsin during the Russian constitutional crisis.

These were Aleksandr Borodai, the "prime minister" of the "People's Republic of Donetsk;" Igor Girkin, the FSB officer turned "defense minister" of the DNR, now convicted in absentia in the Netherlands for downing MH17; and Olga Kulygina, almost certainly a member of the GRU.

They all knew each other back then; they participated in the Transnistrian war together and contributed to Zavtra (Tomorrow), a publication run by Aleksandr Prokhanov, a hardcore Russian nationalist and militarist.

Borodai, Girkin and Kulygina first pop up in Crimea after the Russian takeover in 2014; then wind up seminal players in the occupation regime in Donbas, Kulygina posing in Sloviansk as an "academic expert on management theory" (yes).

Kulygina was captured by HUR, Ukrainian military intelligence. Its then-director Valery Kondratyuk told me he spent as much time interrogating her as he did moving her around detention facilities in Ukraine to hide her from Russian moles in the SBU looking to spring her.

Before she could crack, the Poroshenko administration traded Kulygina for three Ukrainian Spetsnaz commandos and 20 Ukrainian service members -- quite a high value expert on management theory indeed!

Borodai's own ties to the FSB are well-known; he himself has boasted of his relationship with "Kontora"(“the Office”). Interestingly, his replacement as "prime minister" of the DNR was the former Transnistrian KGB chief Vladimir Antyufeyev.

Just before the siege of Sloviansk, members of a KGB-spawned cult called Concept of Public Security or “Konceptsiya Obshchestvennoy
Bezopasnosti” (KOB) took over city’s TV center.

The group broadcast lectures recorded in the 90s by the late Russian Maj. Gen. Konstantin Petrov, who was full of antisemitic conspiracy theories and mind-numbing management jargon.

KOB was the brainchild of Filipp Bobkov, head of
the KGB’s 5th Directorate, also the architect of Zhirik's LDPR. KOB combined a veneration of Stalin with neo-paganism. After the collapse of the USSR, it too courses through the bloodstream of the Russian elites:

KOB is espouse by Duma deputies parliament, academics and FSB officers over the course of the 90s
and early 2000s, then peters out in Russia in the late aughts only to return in... Ukraine.

From 2013 and 2022, KOB adherents appear at protests and rallies in Donbas, organizing militias and “communes,” often in concert with other esoteric fringe movements.

One KOB devotee was Kiril Stremousov, the "deputy governor" of occupied Kherson following the full-scale invasion. Stremousov died last November, reportedly in a car accident. He was also a psychopath; here he is swinging his own infant around like a rag doll.

Next we examine the rise of Rusich, a nakedly Nazi paramilitary fighting in Ukraine, with a lot of cod-Norse iconography. It is led by a former Russian paratrooper named Aleksei Milchakov. He says:

Rusich first gained attention after its ambush a Ukrainian convoy near the Luhansk village of Metallist in September 2014. Here's a photo of them taken by separatist blogger Gennadiy Dubovoy.

Rusich members are on video interrogating an injured Ivan Issyk, a Ukrainian service member, into whose cheek they carved a kolovrat, a Slavic variation on the swastika.

Five days after the ambush, Graham Phillips, a British sex tourist turned pro-Russian propagandist (since sanctioned by the UK but recently returned to Elon Musk's Twitter), filmed an “interview” with the Ukrainian POW, who was unrecognizably burned from head to toe.

Rusich had doused Izzyk with fuel and set him
alight after taking him prisoner.

Rusich's paramilitary commander Aleksandr
Bednov (callsign "Batman") was killed in a shoot-out in southern Luhansk in January 2015. The culprits were later identified as belonging to an as-yet unknown organization. It was called "Wagner."

Despite such a rough-and-tumble introduction, Rusich would later work closely with Wagner, not just in Ukraine but also abroad.

Finally, we look at Russkoye Imperskoye Dvizheniye (RID), the Russian Imperial Movement, another fascist paramilitary which was sanctioned by the U.S. State Department in 2020 for its extensive ties to European neo-Nazis groups such as...

the Nordic Resistance Movement in Scandinavia and the Traditionalist Workers’ Party in the U.S.A.

RID was founded by Stanislav Vorobyev, a St. Petersburg native, who served as secretary to the nationalist Derzhava party, founded by Russia’s former vice president, Aleksandr Rutskoy.

In 2008, RID formed a paramilitary wing, the Imperial Legion, headed by Denis Gariev, who also runs their infamous Partizan Center training facility in St. Petersburg.

This center is nominally run by Gariev's registered militia, Reserv Druzhina (Reserve Militia). Until local media noticed, it was listed as a legal partner of the St. Petersburg city administration, with the insignia of the Imperial Legion displayed alongside it. Whoops!

The Partizan Center has hosted several foreign terrorists including Anton Thulin and Viktor Melin, two Swedish members of the Nordic Resistance Movement.

Between November 2016 and January 2017, Thulin and Melin, along with Jimmy Jonasson, another Nordic Resistance member, planted three bombs in or near Gothenburg, the second-largest city in Sweden.

One targeted a café and bookstore frequented by left-wing activists; another, a campground housing migrants; and another, a refugee center. That last bomb,
which exploded on Jan. 5, seriously injured a member of staff.

Gothenburg prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist has claimed Melin and Thulin learned how to construct explosive devices during their Partizan training course in St. Petersburg.

RID fighters participated in the crucial Battle of Debaltseve in 2015, where Wagner also debuted as a major fighting force. RID has since joined Wagner abroad, too, including in Libya where both have backed Khalifa Haftar's Libyan National Army.

Unsurprisingly, neo-Nazi graffiti was found in areas recaptured by forces allied to the U.N.-backed Government of National Accord. "I see mosques on Russian soil, but I’d rather see them in hellfire! 14/88."

The "14/88" below the message refers to the white supremacist slogan, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children,” coined by the late American neo-Nazi David Lane.

Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, RID has fought mainly in Kharkiv. It's lost a number of militants to Ukraine's successful counteroffensive there as well as its own base at Krasny Oskil holiday camp east of Izyum, pictured here. Now it's said to be HQed near Bakhmut.

Rusich fighters, including Milchakov, have also turned up in Syria. Here they are having a fun time at the Hayan Petroleum Company’s Jihar Gas Plant.

In spite of its self-declared extremism, Rusich has no difficulty now being celebrated by Russian state media otherwise at 24/7 war with "Nazis" in Ukraine. Rusich is also guilty of some of the most grievous war crimes.

In March 2023, Rusich posted a statement condemning Russian fighters for not "finishing off the enemy” and leaving a “significant quantity of pro-Ukrainian population in conquered territory."

Borodai and Girkin, meanwhile, have fallen out with each other. Borodai is now a Duma deputy attached to Putin's United Russia and the founder of the Donbas Union of Volunteers, sort of a veterans' group for insurgents. Pictured below with Milchakov and Vladislav Surkov.

Borodai has in fact worked closely with Rusich via a training camp the Donbass Union of Volunteers set up in Belgorod.

Girkin is currently the head of the Angry Club of Patriots and acts as a permanent gadfly of the "special military operation," and railing daily on video against the incompetence of the Russian army and the stupidity of the war planners.

As for Kulygina, she's now a "paramedic from Moscow" serving with the Grom Battalion in Ukraine. The battalion was formed by members of Borodai's Union of Donbass Volunteers. Below from Gazeta Metro. Caption: "Although Olga looks menacing,
she only helps people in the war." /END