Ilya Ponomarev was as soon as a member of the Russian parliament, an unruly liberal tolerated by the management. Today, he’s on a mission to slay Vladimir Putin and his aides.
“They need to be terminated with an aspen stake via their hearts,” he wrote in his memoir, Does Putin Need to Die?: The Story of How Russia Turns into a Democracy after Shedding to Ukraine.
Exiled in Ukraine since 2016, Ponomarev is the political head of the Freedom of Russia Legion, a volunteer militia thought to incorporate about 1,600 Russian dissidents and defectors utilizing pinprick ways to worsen Russian troops with the goal of in the future marching on Moscow.
To some, he cuts a maverick, temptingly believable determine. The 48-year-old compares himself to Charles de Gaulle, the French navy chief who led his nation’s resistance to the Nazis from exile throughout World Battle II and later grew to become president.
Who’s the person who has reportedly been giving Putin, the president who will run once more subsequent yr, nightmares?
Who’s Ponomarev?
A self-confessed “libertarian communist”, Ponomarev hails from an elite background, his mom having as soon as sat in parliament, his grandfather a former Russian ambassador to Poland.
Born in Moscow, the physics graduate began out as a tech entrepreneur, transferring his abilities to the oil and fuel business. In his 20s, he labored with Yukos Oil, then chaired by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oligarch now exiled in London.
As he recounts in his ebook, he later labored with a TV firm, virtually hanging a enterprise take care of CNN that was scuppered by Putin. Such was his frustration that he determined to enter politics.
In 2007, on the age of 32, he entered the Duma, elected on the ticket of Simply Russia, a social-democratic occasion inside the Kremlin-approved “systemic opposition”.
Even so, Ponomarev caught his neck out, invoking the “crooks and thieves” epithet for the ruling occasion that had earlier been popularised by Alexey Navalny, the opposition chief now behind bars.
In 2012, he and fellow occasion member Dmitry Gudkov performed a outstanding function within the “white ribbon” avenue protests in opposition to Putin, decrying the alleged rigging of the 2011 parliamentary and 2012 presidential elections. The next yr, he refused to help a regulation banning “homosexual propaganda”.
Nevertheless, Ponomarev definitively crossed the Rubicon when he voted in opposition to the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
He was captured on digital camera, refusing to face and applaud when Putin referred to “nationwide traitors” – a time period utilized by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf – in a key speech.
That picture was printed on big pro-government avenue banners that additionally featured Navalny; Boris Nemtsov, who would later be assassinated; and different dissidents with the phrases “Aliens amongst us” emblazoned under.
By 2016, he went into exile in Ukraine.
Since Russia’s invasion started in early 2022, he has positioned himself as the general public face of pro-Ukraine Russians, talking not just for the Freedom of Russia Legion (FRL) in Ukraine but in addition the National Republican Army (NRA), a secretive community of partisans allegedly working inside Russia.
Ponomarev additionally arrange a wartime Russian-language opposition TV channel, calling it February Morning, in reference to when the struggle started. He used it as a platform to announce the NRA’s declare of duty for final yr’s assassination of Darya Dugina, the daughter of one in every of Putin’s shut political allies, on the outskirts of Moscow. US intelligence had blamed the automobile bombing on Ukrainian forces.
Nonetheless, inside Russia, he stays comparatively unknown.
“Common Russians don’t know a lot about what Ponomarev is doing proper now as a result of there’s heavy propaganda, and it’s not inside Putin’s pursuits to popularise or promote him,” stated Natia Seskuria, an affiliate fellow on the Royal United Providers Institute, a London-based suppose tank.
What’s the Freedom of Russia Legion?
The FRL is one in every of two Russian teams working inside Ukraine to deliver down Putin’s authorities. The opposite one being the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC). Whereas each share the identical goal, they’re ideologically completely different. The RVC is commanded by a recognized Nazi near the native Azov regiment, an ultra-nationalist volunteer navy unit.
Final Might, the FRL and the RVC shocked the world with their joint cross-border raids on western Russia’s Belgorod area. It was the primary time that partisans had entered Russia through the Ukraine struggle. Footage of the assaults confirmed a Russian officer mendacity face down in a pool of blood subsequent to Russian passports at a border checkpoint within the city of Grayvoron.
Ponomarev stated Ukraine’s navy intelligence is supporting his coup efforts.
This yr, he claimed a task in a drone attack on the Kremlin, saying his group had helped to smuggle the units over the border. He additionally has advised he was concerned within the assassinations of struggle blogger Vladlen Tatarsky and pro-Kremlin novelist Zakhar Prilepin.
However many deal with his claims with scepticism.
“He’s acquired no sort of background in navy or covert operations. He’s totally depending on the Ukrainians. Most likely Ukraine’s fairly comfortable for him to sort of attempt to declare credit score,” stated Roland Oliphant, senior international correspondent with The Telegraph who reported from Moscow for a decade.
The FRL is steered by the Congress of Folks’s Deputies, a shadow parliament of kinds that Ponomarev helped to arrange. Based mostly in Poland with members inside and out of doors Russia, it’s hoping for Putin’s authorities to break down and is engaged on a transition plan and new structure.
Congress leaders embrace Mark Feygin, a former lawmaker and lawyer who represented the Pussy Riot feminist, anti-Putin punk band. However the physique lacks massive names, like Navalny and chess grandmaster-turned-political activist Garry Kasparov, who usually are not eager on the FRL’s violent ways.
Ought to Putin be nervous?
Ponomarev hopes to construct a pressure that may march on Moscow. Might he succeed the place Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin failed?
The late Russian mercenary chief, who led the onslaught on Ukraine however fell out with Russian military leaders, staged a spectacular mutiny in opposition to the Kremlin in June, taking management of Russia’s navy headquarters in Rostov-on-Don. He shortly known as off the revolt, relocating to Belarus earlier than dying in a mysterious aircraft crash two months later.
“The ability of Prigozhin was that he had all these nationalist Russian credentials. He’d led a pressure in Ukraine. He was clearly pro-war. He was clearly not a nationwide traitor. I feel that’s fairly essential to Russians,” Oliphant stated.
Stationed on enemy territory, Ponomarev has a little bit of a PR drawback.
As Oliphant identified, he lacks elite help to mount a coup, notably inside the safety providers.
“Are any of these guys within the FSB [Federal Security Service] and FSO [Federal Protective Service] and an entire string of different companies going to do a coup on behalf of this self-proclaimed liberal who fled to Ukraine?”
In response to Seskuria, the Kremlin has shortly buried recollections of Prigozhin’s coup.
“Quite a lot of issues have modified, and the regime has develop into extra ruthless,” she stated. “The stakes are so excessive that I don’t actually suppose Russians are prepared now to talk out or exit onto the streets and protest.”
Now on Russia’s “terror” checklist, Ponomarev has turned himself right into a extremely seen goal. Nevertheless it doesn’t appear to be he’ll be sticking his “aspen stake” into the regime’s coronary heart any time quickly.
“Possibly he thinks that he’s going to trip into Moscow on the again of an American or Ukrainian tank,” Oliphant stated. “I feel that’s the one means he’d get there to be trustworthy.”