RUSSIAN GUERRILLAS ARE TRYING TO VIOLENTLY OVERTHROW PUTIN

**VIK LEWA** · 05-13-2023, 01:31 AM

Russian guerrillas are trying to violently overthrow Putin, and the Russian president faces a growing threat from his own citizens, at least according to Foreign Policy (or rather Anchal Vohra, a columnist at Foreign Policy).

Roman Popkov dabbled in Russia’s far-left and far-right political scenes before devoting himself to the armed overthrow of Russian President Vladimir Putin in the name of democracy. In 2011, he moved to Kyiv after getting imprisoned in Russia for taking part in anti-Putin protests. His greatest success may have come last month, on April 2, when a noted Russian propagandist, Vladlen Tatarsky, was killed in a St. Petersburg cafe. Popkov is rumored to have recruited the assassin on behalf of Ukraine’s intelligence service and to have helped plan the killing. In a lengthy chat with Foreign Policy via encrypted messaging, Popkov remembered Darya Trepova, the alleged recruit, as one of the “best people” he had ever known and described her as a “hero” for opposing Russia’s Ukraine invasion. He neither confirmed nor denied that he had personally played a role in the attack but admitted that the rebel network he works for, Rospartizan, was involved in the “liquidation of Putin’s propagandist and war criminal Vladlen Tatarsky.” He added that other Russian partisan groups collaborated as well. National Republican Army (NRA), another partisan group represented by former Duma deputy, Ilya Ponomarev, has also claimed to have carried out the attack. It is hard to verify Popkov’s claims, but his commitment and self-righteousness were impossible to deny. Popkov expressed his conviction that a Russian-led guerrilla movement will be the only way to dispose of Putin, dismissing the nonviolent protestations of Russian exiles in Europe as ineffective, short-sighted, and even immoral. He did little to dispel the notion that the Russian opposition has deep strategic divides. “We in Ukraine live under rocket attacks. Our comrades in Russia are risking their lives and freedom in the fight against tyranny. And the Russian political emigration in Europe sits in cafes and talks,” he said. Popkov added he wanted the West to “recognize the right of free Russians to fight evil. And treat it with respect.”

Since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, mysterious attacks have occurred across Russia. Explosives have derailed trains, blown up power lines, and damaged a bridge connecting Crimea to Russia. Arsonists have also thrown Molotov cocktails at military enlistment centers. Russian opposition groups later claimed credit for these attacks as part of a larger armed rebellion. But who are these groups? How strong are they, and do they receive Ukrainian and Western support, as Russia has claimed? “Ukrainian special forces and their Western curators have launched an aggressive ideological indoctrination and recruitment of our citizens,” Alexander Bortnikov, the chief of the notorious Federal Security Bureau (FSB), or Russia’s interior intelligence agency, said last month. The United States has rejected accusations of involvement and said it had no previous knowledge of any of the attacks that took place inside the Russian Federation, with intelligence officials whispering to reporters that their ally, Ukraine, may have kept them in the dark. Ukraine has neither confirmed nor denied its involvement, securing plausible deniability yet allowing rumors of a Mossad-style competence to linger.