Russia’s ruthless missile attacks – with their famous hypersonic missiles Dagger, which are one of his superweapons – they “carried” one word: retribution. Vladimir Putin wanted to respond to a terrorist attack in the Russian Bryansk region, five kilometers from the border with Ukraine, that occurred in early March of this year.

The governor of the Bryansk region, Oleksandr Bogomaz, said Ukrainians had shot dead two people and wounded a girl, while TASS reported that Ukrainians infiltrated two villages, taking local residents hostage in one of them. The RIA agency also reported that several people were taken hostage in a store in Lyubetsanya, less than a kilometer from Russia’s border with Ukraine.

Responsibility for the attack was claimed by the Russian Volunteer Corps, a nationalist group that has been fighting for Ukraine since the beginning of the war to remove Putin from power. The same paramilitary group is said to be behind the recent assassination attempt on Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, which was reportedly thwarted at the last minute by the Russian intelligence service and successor to the KGB, the FSB. In fact, the leader of the organization, named Denis Nikitin – or, according to his real name, Denis Kapustin, using the pseudonym Rex – claimed responsibility and, in an interview with the London Times, promised to storm the Kremlin with a German tank.

Neo-Nazi, bully and street fighter

Denis Nikitin, 38, was a former football hooligan while living with his family in Cologne, and when he returned – alone – to Moscow, he has the marks of a martial arts and ultimate fighting fighter, he is associated with neo-Nazis and other far-right figures around the world. According to Novaya Gazeta, the North Rhine-Westphalia Ministry of the Interior called him “one of the most important” neo-Nazi activists in Germany and noted that he professionalized the country’s far-right subculture by holding matches without rules.

He, according to the Times, denied accusations that he was a neo-Nazi – however, he was banned from entering the Schengen zone for 10 years – but did not hide his “skinhead past”. However, he rejected Putin’s false claim that Ukraine was ruled by a Nazi regime. Nevertheless, as stated in the same report, he admitted to his admiration for the ritual elements of Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. “The Nazis at least had style,” he said. “They paid a lot of attention to appearance. There is nothing like it in today’s Russia.”

Nikitin has been linked to violent clashes with England fans in Marseille during Euro 2016 which resulted in around 20 hospitalizations. He himself denies any involvement in inciting violence, but laughingly said: “What a day was too …”.

“I don’t like football, I like fighting. I can’t name a single player, I don’t know the history of the club [σ.σ. της ΤΣΣΚΑ Μόσχας]I had a hard time finding the stadium. I love adrenaline, running around the city, across the fields, action,” Nikitin said in a long interview with the Ukrainian hooligan site TroubleMakers in 2017, which was “demolished” almost immediately.

The Guardian in a 2018 report on the rise of Russian neo-Nazi hooligans reports on Nikitin: The day Denis Nikitin, a Russian neo-Nazi who claims he once had a photograph of Joseph Goebbels in his room, took part in the first street fight his mother cooked him food and packed it for him. Over the past 12 years, the Moscow-based mixed martial artist has become a rising star on the far right, rising through the ranks of one of Russia’s leading hooligan gangs. However, on that day, as Nikitin himself says, he was like a student on his first excursion. His mother, who thought her 22-year-old son was going to watch a football match, filled his backpack with food and warm clothes.

In Ukraine, where he has been since 2017, he has organized many mixed martial arts competitions only for the “white race”, and is also a businessman from Kiev who sells clothes under the “White Rex” brand and the emblem of the sun. which refers to the well-known symbol of the German Nazis. According to the Telegraph, the brand’s name suggests “white heterosexual reactive xenophobe”. The clothes he sells are emblazoned with slogans like “SS for sweet and sexy” and “zero tolerance” over images of Scandinavian runes – the old alphabet – and iron fists.

At the same time, he took on the role of “ambassador” for the Order of Azov to far-right organizations across Europe. According to Russian independent Meduza, in 2018, for example, Yelena Semenyaka, secretary of the international branch of Azov, credited Nikitin with helping her network with far-right activists across Europe, thanks in part to his fluency in German and English.

Nikitin, according to The Washington Post, has described himself as a “Russian nationalist all his life,” but he believes that “Russian nationalism has gone the wrong way,” as he said during a YouTube interview last November with Russian journalist Oleg Kashin. who lives in London.

In April, according to the same report, Nikitin released a video urging white nationalists from the US, UK, Germany and elsewhere to fight Putin because Russia has become a police state. He spoke negatively about Zelensky because he is Jewish and promotes “the worst liberal values,” but said that Putin is worse.

However, back in 2019, a senior German intelligence officer told Spiegel that Nikitin was “possibly closer to the Russian authorities than we can prove at this point,” a position disputed by other analysts.

Russian Volunteer Corps

Last August, he created the Russian Volunteer Corps, which he says operates on orders from the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, and joined the International Legion of Defenders of Ukraine, a move Kiev officially denies. Andriy Yusov, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s Central Intelligence Agency, said according to the Washington Post that the group is independent and that “they are citizens of the Russian Federation who have the right to defend and liberate their territory.” from a tyrant and a dictator.”

Denis Nikitin, however, claims that he would not have been able to invade and attack the Russian Bryansk region if he had not been assisted by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, as well as Russian agents, who in fact belong to the FSB and the Russian army. “Russia is a vast territory and we have a lot of followers there, including the military and state security officials,” he told the Times. “How else do you think such a huge group of well-armed people could make their way 5 kilometers deep into Russian territory for so long without being caught?”

The terrorist attack in Bryansk was regarded by Moscow as a terrorist attack, and Kiev declared its non-involvement in this event, saying that this was another provocation by Vladimir Putin, as, however, according to the Ukrainian side, it happened with the terrorist attack on the bridge. Crimea in October last year. But Nikitin, according to the Washington Post, insisted: “We did not come here as a sabotage group. We are a liberation army that has come to our land. Unlike Putin’s army, executioners and rapists, we are not at war with civilians. We have come here to free you. We urge you to take up arms and fight the damn Putin regime.”

In addition, The Financial Times reports that the attack by the Russian Volunteer Corps appears to confirm that Russian rebels are ready to storm Kyiv. Nikitin told a British newspaper that many of the 45 people involved in the attack in the Bryansk region were members of an underground dissident network based in Russia.

“Declaration of Irpen”

At the end of August last year, after the formation of the Russian Volunteer Corps, Denis Nikitin, Ilya Ponomarev from the National Republican Army and the Free Russia Legion signed the famous Irpin Declaration, a political alliance of Russians fighting on the side of Ukraine. and they seek to overthrow Vladimir Putin.

According to the declaration, according to the Russian media, the Free Russia Legion, the Russian Volunteer Corps and the National Republican Army confirm that they have taken up arms to fight exclusively against the usurpers of power in Russia, warmongers and organizers of the war, their lackeys and financiers. Russia, deceived by Putin’s propaganda, is not our enemy – it will be defended and rid of the illegal and discredited government by the Free Russia Legion, the Russian Volunteer Corps and the National Republican Army. Our goal is a free democratic Russia, built on the principles of civil self-organization and social justice, without oligarchy and corruption, without police arbitrariness and arbitrariness of officials, without wars and annexations.”

Ilya Ponomarev, a Muscovite and former State Duma deputy from the Russian Communist Party, the A Just Russia social democratic party and the Greens, is seen as the leader of a political alliance that Nikitin refuses to acknowledge. According to reports, Ponomarev, who was granted Ukrainian citizenship by Petro Poroshenko in 2019, was the only one who did not vote for a law that conflicts with LGBTI+ rights, while he voted against the annexation of Crimea. Ilya Ponomarev’s National Republican Army, which according to Newsweek is made up of Russian activists, military personnel, politicians who “are now fighters and rebels”, is also allegedly involved in the murder of the daughter of Russian intellectual nationalist and mentor Putin, Alexander Dugin, Daria.

“With a German tank in Moscow”

No matter what they say about him, Denis Nikitin lives by his own vision, which he described in The Times: “One day you will see me riding a white [γερμανικό] Tank Leopard 2 in Moscow. When I plant the flag of the Russian militia in the Kremlin, we will begin to restore [της χώρας]”.