Girkin brought to Moscow's Meshchansky District Court for pre-trial hearing Photo: Alexander Zemlyanichenko/AFP stepped up crackdown on dissent following last month's Wagner mutiny.
On Friday morning, staff The Russian Investigative Committee arrested Igor “Strelkov” Girkin, an extremist militia leader turned blogger, in his Moscow apartment.
At a court hearing later in the day, he was detained for two months on charges of extremism.
His wife Mirslava Reginskaya said in a statement published on his Telegram channel that he was detained at their home around 11.30 am when she was out.
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“I don’t know anything about my husband’s whereabouts, he didn’t get in touch,” Reginskaya said.
Girkin, pictured here in 2014, was heavily involved in a previous invasion of eastern Ukraine. Photo: Dmitry Lovetsky/AP Photo
At a court hearing in the afternoon, the prosecutor's office of the Federal Security Service (FSB) demanded that he be kept in custody on charges of incitement to extremism. The maximum penalty for the charge is five years in prison.
During the hearing, Girkin stood motionless in a glass cage with his arms crossed over his chest.
Girkin, a former FSB officer, participated in the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and played a key role in the first Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine that year.
He later fell out with the Kremlin over Vladimir Putin's refusal to start a full-scale war at the time and became a far-right critic of the government.
He was arrested a month after Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenaries, raised no a long rebellion, during which his people captured Rostov and moved to Moscow.
Girkin had a public feud with Prigozhin, whom he previously accused of preparing a coup d'etat, and there is no evidence of his involvement in this plot.
Rather, his arrest suggests more widespread persecution of «angry nationalists» whose venomous criticism of the war had previously endured.
“Strelkov has long crossed all conceivable boundaries, arousing the desire of the security forces – from the FSB to military commanders – to arrest him, help him,” said Tatyana Stanovaya, an expert on the Russian elite.
“[His] arrest undoubtedly serves the interests of the Ministry of Defense. This is a direct consequence of the Prigozhin rebellion: the army command now has greater political leverage to suppress their opponents in the public sphere.
“Pull the trigger” in the Donbas
Igor Girkin fought as a foreign volunteer in the Transnistrian and Bosnian wars in the 1990s before joining the FSB. He is accused of involvement in the disappearance of several Chechens during the second Chechen war. His pseudonym Strelkov means «shooter» or «shooter».
In 2014, he claimed to have «pulled the trigger» in the war in Donbass when he and a group of other Russian volunteers captured the city of Slovyansk and proclaimed himself the «defense minister» of the breakaway Donetsk People's Republic.
Last November, a Dutch court sentenced him to life imprisonment for killing 298 people. a man aboard MH17, a Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777, downed by a Russian Buk missile over eastern Ukraine in July 2014. that Girkin and three others were responsible for the downing of MH17. , where he founded a short-lived right-wing political movement aimed at overthrowing Vladimir Putin before taking up blogging.
The authorities sidelined him by banning him from state-run media but allowing him to remain at large, possibly due to his FSB connections and his clandestine ties to the hardline pro-military community.
He initially welcomed the February 2022 invasion, but was banned from fighting there, and soon became a vocal critic of what he saw as half-measures in Russia's military effort, often broadcasting predictions of defeat to his 875 000 subscribers in Telegram.
He has personally insulted nearly every prominent figure in the Russian war, including Putin, Sergei Shoigu, Defense Minister and now-exiled Yevgeny Prigozhin, who he correctly predicted would attempt an armed uprising. In April, he founded another movement, the Club of Angry Patriots, to unite war supporters who believe the Kremlin has failed the war.
In a July 18 post, he urged Putin to transfer power to «someone really capable and responsible.»
The Russian newspaper RBC reported that a former employee of the Wagner mercenary group filed a complaint against Girkin, which led to his arrest.
«Pasha is arrested!» < p>Later on Friday, Pavel Gubarev, a Ukrainian-born separatist who worked with Girkin in Donbas in 2014 and co-founded the Angry Patriots Club, was also arrested.
“Pasha has been arrested!” His wife Katerina Gubareva wrote about this in her Telegram channel. She said that she was going to the Meshchansky District Court of Moscow, where Girkin had appeared the day before, and called on «all patriots of Russia» to join her.
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