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Igor Girkin, a former soldier-spy and critic of President Vladimir Putin’s conduct of the war against Ukraine, was arrested on Friday after the latest in a series of diatribes against the Kremlin chief appeared to go too far.
Girkin, who goes by the nom de guerre Strelkov (“Shooter”), gained notoriety in 2014 when he led a band of irregular troops into Eastern Ukraine and briefly became the breakaway region’s defense minister. He was convicted in absentia of murder by a Dutch court over his role in shooting down a Malaysian Airlines passenger jet, a tragedy that cost 298 lives.
The 52-year-old has since reinvented himself as an ultra-nationalist military commentator and has delivered a series of withering critiques of Russia’s war aims and strategy in Ukraine.
In a statement posted to Girkin’s Telegram channel, his wife Miroslava Reginskaya said that representatives of Russia’s Investigative Committee — an anti-corruption and crime-fighting agency — had taken her husband away. She said she had later found out from friends that he had been charged under the article in the Russian Criminal Code covering extremism.
“I do not know anything about the whereabouts of my husband,” she said. “He has not been in touch.”
In a country where dissent is rarely tolerated, the fact that the former intelligence officer, was able to get away for so long with his caustic, satirical and often blatantly anti-Semitic commentaries without being reined in led to speculation that he enjoyed the protection of parts of the Russian security establishment.
He also engaged repeatedly in verbal duels with Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary army that staged a rebellion last month, getting to within 200 km of Moscow.
“For 23 years, a nonentity was at the head of the country, who managed to ‘throw dust in the eyes’ of a significant part of the population,” Girkin wrote in one such diatribe earlier this week.
“The country will not survive another 6 years in power of this cowardly mediocrity. The only thing he could do usefully ‘before the end’ … is to ensure the transfer of power to someone truly capable and responsible. Too bad it didn’t even cross his mind.”
A separate message posted to Girkin’s channel, signed by his “comrades,” called his arrest a provocation and demanded his release. “Igor Ivanovich is known to the country as a person who does not compromise in matters of protecting the national interests of Russia,” they wrote.
Russian media RBK reported that Girkin was detained on a complaint from an unnamed member of Wagner.
Even though during the Wagner uprising, Prigozhin’s army clashed with the Russian military, bringing several cities to a standstill, Wagner fighters were not punished afterward.
However, several Russian generals who were suspected of aiding Prigozhin were either detained or have disappeared from public view in recent days. One of them, Russian army commander Sergei Surovikin, also known as General Armageddon for his merciless military tactics, has not been seen in public for more than two weeks. Surovikin was known for friendly relations with Prigozhin and the fall 2022 campaign of bombing Ukrainian energy infrastructure.
Russia’s elite is showing increasing anxiety about President Putin’s judgment, especially following the Wagner mutiny, which appeared to catch the Kremlin off guard last month, CIA Director William Burns said Thursday.
In April, Girkin created a nationalistic organization, “Club of Angry Patriots,” famous for criticizing the Russian government for its inability to win war it started against Ukraine.
