But given the stalemate that has developed in Ukraine — bluntly described last week by Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, Kyiv’s commander in chief, in an essay in the Economist — unconventional ideas such as Ponomarev’s will get attention. Ukraine and its allies are searching for ways to break out of the bloody deadlock without a negotiated deal that would concede territory to Russia.
Ponomarev is deadly serious about his military plot: He described himself in an interview as the political head of a group called the Freedom of Russia Legion, which he claims has an army of four exile battalions — usually numbering about 1,600 people — based in Ukraine, as well as between 5,000 and 10,000 followers in Russia.
He helps run a Congress of People’s Deputies, a shadow parliament based in Poland with about 100 members, 40 of them in Russia, he says, that oversees the legion. That group is developing new laws and a new constitution for a post-Putin Russia. It plans a large gathering in Warsaw this month to develop a transition to free elections in Russia.
Ponomarev described operations inside Russia: a drone attack on the Kremlin in May by an urban guerrilla group loosely affiliated with Ponomarev and the Congress of People’s Deputies; the legion’s raids on Belograd and Shebekino just inside the Russian border in June; and what he claims are daily sabotage attacks on railway lines inside Russia. He said the group is building toward a decisive march on Moscow.
The Russian exile leader also linked his group to the August 2022 assassination of Darya Dugina, the daughter of a prominent Russian nationalist writer. U.S. intelligence officials had blamed that attack on Ukrainian intelligence and said they opposed it, according to an October 2022 account in the New York Times. Ponomarev said his group works closely with Ukrainian intelligence.
Ponomarev also claimed unspecified roles in two attacks this year on pro-Kremlin figures: the April assassination of a pro-war blogger named Vladlen Tatarsky and the May attempted killing of pro-Kremlin writer Zakhar Prilepin.
“The rationale for these personal attacks is simple,” explained Ponomarev. “We want to send a message to all supporters of the government. If you have a relationship to the war, you are not safe.”
As Ponomarev calmly laid out his coup plans in a Washington living room, he didn’t sound like a fanatic revolutionary, but like the parliamentarian and business executive he was before he embraced émigré politics. He said that after voting in the Duma against Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, he started an oil and gas business in Kyiv called Trident Acquisitions that’s now listed on Nasdaq. He likened himself to Charles de Gaulle, who organized a tiny French force to fight against the Nazi-backed French government in World War II.
“In a crisis, a small, disciplined force can play a decisive role,” he said. And that’s precisely his aim. By recruiting Russian volunteers (he says he gets 1,000 applications a month, which he vets down to 40 reliable recruits), he hopes he can build a force that will march on Moscow, in the way Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s militia’s did in June. Prigozhin halted his march and later died in a mysterious plane crash. But Ponomarev says he won’t stop.
He argues that toppling Putin is the only way to stop the grinding war of attrition in Ukraine. “What’s the light at the end of the tunnel? Regime change. It’s the cheaper alternative,” he insisted.
Ponomarev said he has support for his coup-plotting from Ukraine’s military intelligence service — and strong opposition from the United States. The message he has received from U.S. officials, he says, is: “We don’t want to be part of it.”
Right now, Ponomarev’s campaign seems more a series of modest trial runs than a full-fledged operation. Take the May 3 drone attack on the Kremlin. Ponomarev said the group smuggled several Ukrainian drones into Russia. Members fired one toward the Kremlin from east of the city and a second from southwest. They were carrying just one kilogram of explosives and didn’t do much damage, Ponomarev admitted, but they were meant to demonstrate the ability to hit a precise target.
Ponomarev considered it a triumph, of sorts, when Putin scaled back the planned Victory Day celebration of World War II triumphs in May — perhaps because the drone attack had worried the public. He said his followers have “several” more drones on ice for future attacks.
Russian history is a long story of coup plots and conspiracies, real and imagined. Regime change, he told me, requires three elements: a credible military force; domestic elites who are losing hope in the status quo; and an alternative government. Ponomarev said he is working on all three.
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