How does one become politically relevant in the Putin state? It is a question of staggering proportions. Because when Igor Girkin was arrested in Moscow before the weekend, accused of extremism, the warrior-president Vladimir Putin finally attacked the extreme right wing of Russian politics. Or perhaps more precisely, he attacked the most ideologically confused wing of the Russian public.
He has supported Vladmir Putin for a long time, but now the well-known ultra-nationalist and war blogger Igor Girkin has been arrested. Video: NTB, AP. Reporter: Håvard TL Knutsen. view more
It was likely three reasons why Putin campaigned against Igor Girkin. One is that Girkin more and more openly criticized Putin’s warfare in Ukraine. It was not aggressive enough, the mobilization in Russia was not sufficiently extensive. The second is that Girkin expressed that he had political ambitions, he challenged Putin. And the third is that Putin, after Yevgeny Prigozhin’s attempted coup against the defense leadership, decided that he had to try to tame the far-right forces he had long given free rein to.
Igor Greek (52) is foremost among equals among the extreme Russian nationalist military bloggers. He dares others to remain silent, and is a very special flower in the Russian political fauna. Both as a warrior and as a sort of ideologue, Girkin is not quite like others. Girkin has taken the warrior name Strelkov, meaning the shooter, so let’s call him that. Because he has shot. A lot.
Lost against the court
Strelkov is an officer in the Russian intelligence agency FSB. He has participated in the wars he could to promote “Russian values” and defend Orthodox believers in a number of countries. He participated in both Chechen wars in the 1990s. He was involved in Transnistria, when the ethnic Russians seceded from Moldova and created their own “republic” in 1992. From there he went to Bosnia where he participated on the Serbian side in the war against the Muslims. He is linked to torture and massacres of Bosnian men, and mass rapes of Bosnian women in the city of Visegrad, during the Serbian ethnic cleansing in Ex-Yugoslavia.
But it was Ukraine which made Strelkov important. He was central when Putin took control of the Crimean peninsula in the winter of 2014, in an intelligence operation in which armed “green men” without military identification took over control. In the spring, pro-Russian armed gangs began the takeover of cities in Donetsk and Luhansk counties, in the far east of Ukraine. In reality, it was local pro-Russian mobs that got weapons, and were under the leadership of people connected to Russian intelligence.
Strelkov var den most aggressive, and initially the most successful, of them. He became “defense minister” for the Russian-occupied areas of Donetsk, and he has been convicted in a Dutch court for having participated in shooting down the Malaysian airliner with 298 people on board, over Donetsk in June 2014. And he led, among other things, the occupation of the city of Slovjansk, where he imposed a reign of terror, revealing much of his ideological confusion.
Putin’s war on food
For while active participation in wars is one side of Strelkov, his ideological orientation, and connection to parts of Russian / Soviet history, is another side of him. Strelkov is a man who cultivates mysticism, and presents himself as a Christian knight who will save Russians and Orthodox Slavs from unbelief and destruction.
In the city of Slovjansk the warrior and the ideologue became one. In the short months he ruled the city of more than 110,000 inhabitants, he introduced, among other things, Stalin’s exceptional laws from World War II. One person who noticed it was Alexey Pichko. He stole two shirts and a pair of trousers that were hanging to dry in a window when the town’s citizens went to the cellars during a bomb attack, and was sentenced to death and shot. The legal basis pompously pointed to was Stalin’s exceptional laws, documents found when the Ukrainians liberated the city in August 2014 showed.
Strelkov combiner monarchism with Stalinism, Soviet nostalgia with Christian Orthodox fanaticism, and extreme violence and militarism with a message of love for Russian Orthodox. And over it all hangs a cloud of militarism. Strelkov’s hobby is arranging replicas of historical military battles.
But now Strelkov has overplayed their cards. He did so when he directly challenged Putin this spring and summer. In May, he started the Club of Angry Patriots, with a stated desire for political power to save Russia from what he said was chaos due to the defeats in Ukraine. And on July 18, he sent out a message with both an attack on and an appeal to Putin. There he asked the president to give power to someone who can manage it and is responsible.
– The country will not survive six more years with this cowardly mediocrity in power, he wrote. The banning bull may well have been his political death sentence, at least for the time being.
To summarize. This is how you become politically relevant in the Putin state.
2023-07-24 20:03:15
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