At the end of last January, the Western press assured that Vladimir Putin had made use of an organization known as the Russian Imperial Movement (MIR) to send the letter-bombs against Pedro Sánchez, the Ukrainian embassy and four other targets. The arrest of a retiree from Miranda de Ebro as the alleged perpetrator of the attacks disrupted the theory, but this did not prevent the name of Stanislav Shevchuk, a Russian whom American intelligence attributes a clandestine life vaguely linked to Spain. I don’t know for certain that, as hinted, he is a fugitive. Stanislav Shevchuk He has been living and working in Barcelona for ten years now. Its existence, however, is surrounded by mysteries. Shevchuk denies his relationship with the MIR and its paramilitary wing, but his own trace left over the years and that he tried to delete without success suggest otherwise. However, the United States considers him the representative in Europe of an ultranationalist, racist, anti-Semitic and openly involved in financing the aggression against Ukraine y in training and sending volunteers.
At the end of November 2019, a European congress was organized in Madrid attended by, among others, the leaders of the French, English and Italian extreme right. The international conference was named “Spain, focus of the revolt”an explicit reference to what those present called “the independence cancer“, in direct allusion in Catalonia. Among those gathered in the capital of Spain, there was a Russian who stood out for his height and who took advantage of his speech in perfect Spanish to talk about Carles Puigdemont and the now deceased Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who was speculated that it had supposedly given covert support to the process through an army of bots created and maintained by the Kremlin.
The Russian in question was Stanislav Shevchuk, who spent his ten minute speech speculating and rambling about the possibility that the president Carlos Puigdemont He would end up working as a teacher in Russia if, as he suspected, he took refuge in Moscow to escape Spanish justice. The Slav also flaunted a Cainite hatred for the party of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, whose number resounded in Madrid at that time as an alleged intermediary of the conversations held between the Generalitat and Putin. In Shevchuk’s opinion, Spain and his country faced the same problem: “The separatist scourge. In both countries, having come to power (in Spain, in 1978, and in Russia, in 1917), the communists had created artificial pseudo-national entities and potentially separatists. Catalonia and the Basque Country, in Spain, as well as Ukraine, in the southwest of the Russian Empire”.
Shevchuk, invited as a representative of the MIR
The hosts of the congress were the leaders of National Democracy, a formation created in January 1995 by former members of Juntas Españolas, Acción Radical and the extinct CEDADE, a neo-Nazi group founded in Barcelona in the shadow of a Belgian Waffen SS general, Leon Degrelle. The tall boy who stood a head above the rest of the leaders officially took part in the event as envoy, member and representative of the Russian Imperial Movement (MIR) and that is how it was described in those days by Democracia Nacional. Little was known about this organization until, five months later, the US Secretary of State, Michael R. Pompeo, designated the group as a “global terrorist” and three of its leaders – Stanislav Vorobyev, Denis Gariyev and Nikolay Trushchalov. In June of last year, Stanislav Shevchuk himself was also included in the list of global terrorists by the US Treasury Department along with a Swedish neo-Nazi from the Nordic Resistance Movement who had been trained by the MIR in St. Petersburg. Canada later followed suit but the sanctions, for the moment, do not affect its activities in Europe.
What were they accused of? to toast paramilitary-style training on white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Europe and actively work to bring these types of groups together in a common front against their perceived enemies. In fact, the MIR does not hide that it has two military training facilities in St. Petersburg. Vorobyev is its founder and leader, and Gariyev is the head of the paramilitary arm. What they have never admitted is that their centers have provided paramilitary training to white supremacists from Germany, Poland, Sweden and Finland. The two Swedes who attended the course later committed a series of bomb attacks in Gothenburg (Sweden) against a center for refugees, a space for asylum seekers and a cafeteria, crimes for which they were convicted in their country.
MIR: absolutists and racists
Theoretically, neither the MIR nor its paramilitary wing, the Imperial Legion, are Nazis. They usually parade with the flag of the Romanovs and the ensign of New Russia (the cross of Saint Andrew on a red rag). They say of themselves that they are absolutist monarchists who advocate the restoration of the dynasty of the tsars and the recovery of the orthodox Christian values of old Russia. Nevertheless, his speech is clearly anti-semitic, anti-immigration and openly racist. Before the invasion of Ukraine, they invested the bulk of their energies in creating an international front against Islam. On their visit to Sweden, they were not out of place with their neo-Nazi hosts from the Swedish Resistance Movement. Its icons have also made a good occasional couple with those of The Phalanx, Golden Dawnlos American white supremacistshe national front or any of the colleagues with whom they created an entente.
There was a before and after the designation of Stanislav Shevchuk as a “terrorist” in June 2022. The US secret services placed him on their criminal files somewhere in Belarus and Spain, a country he supposedly visited frequently and where, eventually, they believed that he spent seasons leading a furtive existence. American intelligence made several very egregious mistakes. Indeed, there was a reason why the Russian spoke perfect Spanish without an accent, but contrary to what they suggested, he did not lead a dark, wandering and clandestine life, nor did he reside at 8 Asalanieva Street in Minsk, the capital of Minsk. Belarus. Actually, Shevchuk has been living and working in Barcelona for ten years, a point that he himself confirmed to us two weeks ago in a brief telephone conversation. According to him, he said, he neither hides nor has anything to do with Belarus, nor does he have Ukrainian nationality.
Erasing the digital trail
From the moment Washington and Canada put him under the radar, Stanislav Shevchuk I try to eliminate most of the digital trail that I had left on the Internett, and that included Facebook and other social media accounts. In the information that he had recorded about himself in his destroyed profiles (of which we keep old screenshots from 2019) He identified himself as a “Russian lawyer in Barcelona”. His profile placed him on trafalgar street and specified the following: “Legal services in Barcelona for Russians. Specialization: civil law, real estate, mortgage, urban planning.”
In his VK account — the Russian Facebook — he used to post photos with his partner on Lloret de Mar or other corners of the Costa Brava, which he also removed. Correcting what the Americans say in their erroneous reports, Shevchuk records his birth on July 14 (probably 1974) in Penza, capital of the oblast of the same number, located in central Russia, on the banks of the Sura River. He first studied at the Faculty of Foreign Languages at the university in his hometown. Once in Eepaña, starting in the summer of 2012, he reported that he had studied Interpretation and Foreign Languages at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). On Facebook, she included studies at the Pompeu Fabra University School of Business Management and UNED in her academic curriculum. At least one of the closest relatives that she has connected with, lives or has lived in Lviv (Ukraine).
Accusations from ‘The New York Times’
None of these profiles exist today and what he retains in VK places his residence in Moscow, despite the fact that, as he himself admitted, he is living in Catalonia. Even Democracia Nacional removed allusions to Shevchuk and the photos of his speech at the conference from its digital portal. When did things get ugly for the Russian and why did he unsuccessfully try to erase his telematic traces and his presence in Barcelona? It was after the aforementioned inclusion of him in the list of terrorists, but in a very particular way, as a result of what happened on January 22, when the American newspaper The New York Times published information stating that Kremlin intelligence agents had used the Russian Imperial Movement in Spain to send package bombs against the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, the Ukrainian embassy in Madrid and four other targets. Three days later, the Police silenced the rumors by arresting the retiree from Burgos, Pompeyo González, as the alleged author of the shipments. But until the misunderstanding was clarified, the insinuations and falsehoods reported by the North American newspaper were indirectly merciless against the only known member of the MIR in the Spanish state, who was none other than Stanislav Shevchuk. That it had nothing to do with the attack is a proven fact, according to the police.
What do the Americans blame him for?
Shevchuk, in the conversation we had by phone, denied being the representative of the Russian Imperial Movement, despite the fact that even the MIR had presented him as such on dozens of occasions. The Russian himself has portrayed himself on numerous occasions as a member of that tsarist formation on one of the trips he has made to meet with other white supremacists on the planet. What do the Americans blame him for? In Shevchuk, he is specifically accused of being the representative in Europe of an ultranationalist, racist, anti-Semitic and openly involved in financing aggression in Ukraine y in training and sending volunteers. Since 2014, the MIR and the Imperial Legion have not only trained ultras in the Reserve’s Partizan course, but have sent hundreds of fighters to fight, first, in the Donbass, and since last year, throughout Ukraine. Nor has Washington ever forgiven Shevchuk for traveling to the United States in 2017 to meet neo-Nazi Matthew Heimbach, founder of the Traditionalist Workers Party. Both were photographed under a southern statue with the Romanov and Confederate flag, identical to that of New Russia, except for the stars on the St. Andrew’s cross.
For now, the global terrorist designation by Canada and the United States it only implies United States sanctions. That he dissociated himself from the Russian Imperial Movement after the invasion of Ukraine despite all the incriminating documents and photos, could be explained in the context of a second very notorious fact: the political and military leaders of his party, Stanlislav Vorobyev and Denis Galayev, already they have been included in the inventory of Russians whose assets could be frozen by European countries. Stalisnav Shevchuk could be next.
