Russian far-right fighter claims border stunt exposes Putin’s weakness

by Max Seddon, Christopher Miller, and Anastasia Stognei, Financial Times, 3 March 2023

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 the raid left two civilians dead and a child injured. Nikitin, in his first interview since the incursion, said 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.”

In 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”.

“They have felt how defenceless they are,” Nikitin said. “We were running around and working in a border zone that should be under the strictest protection.”

Russian authorities have struggled to formulate a coherent response to the attack. In a video address on Thursday, Putin said “terrorists” were behind it and claimed the partisans had fired on a civilian Lada Niva car.

But Russia did not release any footage from the incident until a day later, allowing Nikitin’s group to dominate social media as they posed triumphantly in spotless combat fatigues next to a village post office and first aid station.

When Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) did finally release a video on Friday, it showed a Lada VAZ 2107 riddled with bullets but a Niva untouched — apparently contradicting Putin’s statements.

The attack was one of the most daring that pro-Ukrainian militias have carried out since the car bombing that killed the TV talking head Darya Dugina, whose father Alexander Dugin is a prominent far-right philosopher, in August last year.

Putin likened the attack in Bryansk region to Dugina’s murder, even scribbling her name by hand on the stack of notes for his speech.

Ukraine has not claimed responsibility for the attack on Dugina and also attempted to distance itself from Thursday’s incident.

Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser in president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s administration, called it “a classic provocation” from Russia.

But Nikitin said Ukrainian authorities had signed off on the operation. “Yes, of course, this action was agreed, otherwise it couldn’t have happened,” he said.

“How do you imagine that I passed through the dark of night there? There are mined bridges, there are cameras, heat-seeking drones, there are hidden open observation points,” he added. “If I did not co-ordinate it with anyone [in Ukraine’s military] . . . I think we would simply be destroyed,” he said.

Born in Russia, Nikitin lived in Germany as a teenager and moved to Ukraine in 2017. In Kyiv he organised fight clubs for Russians, Ukrainians, and western neo-Nazis.

Those far-right activities earned him a 10-year ban from the Schengen zone in 2019, but he has remained active in Europe nonetheless.

“He’s still been active in far-right activity in Germany, France, Bulgaria and others, even though he himself he isn’t going to these countries,” Michael Colborne, a journalist and researcher at Bellingcat focused on the global far-right, told the FT.

Some Russian hardliners such as Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman leader of Chechnya, called on Putin to increase security measures and declare martial law in border regions. Putin told his security council on Friday to find ways to protect security installations from “terrorists”.

The Russian president on Friday signed a decree mentioning martial law in Russia for the first time since the invasion. Though the decree only covers hypothetical measures for arms production in case martial law is declared, it indicates Putin might soon stop reassuring people that his “special operation” in Ukraine does not affect them.

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Citation: Max Seddon, Christopher Miller, and Anastasia Stognei, "Russian far-right fighter claims border stunt exposes Putin’s weakness," Financial Times, 3 March 2023.

America Is In Over Its Head 

By Thomas Meaney, New York Times, March 2, 2023.

The greatest blunder President Vladimir Putin may have made so far in Ukraine is giving the West the impression that Russia could lose the war. The early Russian strike on Kyiv stumbled and failed. The Russian behemoth seemed not nearly as formidable as it had been made out to be. The war suddenly appeared as a face-off between a mass of disenchanted Russian incompetents and supercharged, savvy Ukrainian patriots. 

Such expectations naturally ratcheted up Ukrainian war aims. President Volodymyr Zelensky was once a member of the peace-deal camp in Ukraine. “Security guarantees and neutrality, non-nuclear status of our state. We are ready to go for it,” he declared one month into the conflict. Now he calls for complete victory: the reconquering of every inch of Russian-occupied territory, including Crimea. 

Polls indicate that Ukrainians will settle for nothing less. As battles rage across Donetsk and Luhansk, Ukraine’s leaders and some of their Western backers are already dreaming of Nuremberg-style trials of Mr. Putin and his inner circle in Moscow. The trouble is that Ukraine has only one surefire way of accomplishing this feat in the near term: direct NATO involvement in the war. 

Only the full, Desert Storm style of deployment of NATO and U.S. troops and weaponry could bring about a comprehensive Ukrainian victory in a short period of time. (Never mind that such a deployment would most likely shorten the odds of one of the grimmer prospects of the war: The more Russia loses, the more it is likely to resort to nuclear weapons.) 

Absent NATO involvement, the Ukrainian Army can hold the line and regain ground, as it has done in Kharkiv and Kherson, but complete victory is very nearly impossible. If Russia can hardly advance a few hundred yards a day in Bakhmut at a cost of 50 to 70 men, since the Ukrainians are so well entrenched, would Ukrainians be able to advance any better against equally well-entrenched Russians in the whole area between Russia and the eastern side of the Dnipro delta, including the Azov Sea coastline and the isthmus leading to Crimea? 

What has been a meat grinder in one direction is likely to be a meat grinder in the other. Moreover, Russia has nearly switched its state onto a war economy setting, while the United States has yet to meet the war production needs of its foreign partners. The war has already used up 13 years’ worth of Stinger antiaircraft missile production and five years’ worth of Javelin missiles, while the United States has a $19 billion backlog of arms delivery to Taiwan. 

Western news reports have focused on the Russian men avoiding Mr. Putin’s draft orders, but the Kremlin still has plenty of troops to drawn (sic) on, even after its call-up of 300,000 soldiers last September. 

The debate about sending heavy war materials to Ukraine — which has consumed the German press in particular — is, in this sense beside the point. It is not clear when all of the Leopard 1 and 2 and M1 Abrams tanks promised by NATO will be operational. Ukraine has requested 300 to 500 tanks, and NATO has promised only about 200.

That Mr. Zelensky has staked so much of his diplomacy on these armament shipments makes sense: He needs to communicate to the Kremlin that Ukraine is prepared for a long, slogging conflict. But in terms of battle-ready material for the next six months, very little of the promised bounty will be deployable. If Mr. Zelensky wants to complete his self-image as Winston Churchill sooner rather than later, he will want to hasten the day when he can toast NATO’s — which is to say, America’s — entry into the conflict. 

The problem for Kyiv is that — public assurances aside — Washington has no interest in directly entering the war. Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has already voiced his view that total victory for either Russia or Ukraine is unachievable in the near term. President Biden and his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, have been adamant about keeping the United States from directly entering the conflict. The American public has shown no appetite for direct involvement, either. 

The United States may even have an interest in keeping the fighting going as the war reduces Russia’s ability to operate elsewhere in the world, increases the value of American energy exports and serves as a convenient dress rehearsal for the rallying of allies and coordination of economic warfare against Beijing. 

Less noticed is that the Kremlin’s war aims may have — out of necessity — been scaled back. Apparently reconciled to its inability to effect regime change in Kyiv and capture much more of Ukraine’s territory, Moscow now seems mostly focused on maintaining its positions in Luhansk and Donetsk and securing a land bridge to Crimea. 

These are territories that even in the best of circumstances would be difficult for Ukraine to reincorporate. As it stands today, Ukraine’s economic future appears viable even without the territories currently occupied by Russia. Ukraine has not been turned into a landlocked country and it remains in control of seven of the eight oblasts with highest G.D.P. per capita. Ukraine would risk jeopardizing this position in a counteroffensive. 

Paradoxically, continued fighting also serves some Russian interests: It allows Moscow more chances to pummel Ukraine into a de facto buffer state, making it an ever less attractive candidate for NATO and European Union membership. The historian Stephen Kotkin recently argued that Ukrainians may be better off defining victory as accession to the European Union rather than a complete recapture of all Ukrainian territory. 

And yet, except for countries that were neutral during the Cold War, each historical case of E.U. accession has been preceded by membership in NATO, which since the 1990s has acted as a ratings agency in Europe, guaranteeing countries as safe for investment.

This fact is hardly lost on the Ukrainian population: Polls (which have mostly excluded Luhansk and Donetsk since 2014) show that interest in the country’s joining NATO appears to have jumped since the start of the conflict. Only Washington ultimately has the power to decide how much of Ukraine it wants to bring under its umbrella.

The actual official reluctance to include Ukraine in NATO has rarely been clearer, while the public embrace of Kyiv has never been more florid. In the meantime, European leaders may soon find themselves in the unenviable position of convincing Ukrainians that access to the common market and a European Marshall Fund is a reasonable exchange for “complete victory.” 

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Thomas Meaney is a fellow at the Max Planck Society in Göttingen, Germany. He writes about U.S. foreign policy and international affairs in The London Review of Books, The Guardian and elsewhere.

Citation: Thomas Meaney, "America Is In Over Its Head," New York Times, 02 March 2023.