From the time he was a little boy growing up in a village in Siberia, Vladislav Ammosov wanted to do his part to serve his native Russia. “It was my childhood dream to become an officer and defend the country,” he tells me. Over the years, he rose to the rank of captain in Russia’s fearsome military-intelligence unit, the GRU. But now, in late June, we are meeting in Warsaw, Poland, where Ammosov is applying for political asylum.
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The most important thing to understand about Ammosov is that, despite his Russian-sounding name, he is a Sakha, a member of a Turkic people native to Siberia. Sakha is also the name of his native province in northeastern Russia, an expanse of land nearly as vast as India. It is, Ammosov says, wondrously endowed with natural resources — diamonds, gold, silver, uranium, iron ore, coal, and several rare earth elements. Yet its people are destitute, while its riches are siphoned off by those Ammosov has come to see as “Moscow oligarchs” tied to Vladimir Putin. “We are richer than the Arabs,” he says, “but we live in poverty.”
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As fantastic as Ammosov‘s objectives may sound, he is not alone. As peaceful opposition to Putin’s brutal rule has come to be seen as increasingly futile — especially in the wake of the death in February, under the “care” of Russian authorities, of the imprisoned opposition leader Alexey Navalny — the ranks of militant resistance to Russia are growing. Ever since the invasion of Ukraine, a loosely connected and sometimes fractious cohort of Russians, both inside the country and in exile, has come to believe that Russia can be liberated only through violence and sabotage. Some, like Ammosov, want to break up the Russian Federation entirely. Others, namely a band of far-right Russian nationalists, have contempt for nonethnic Russian citizens like the Sakha and aim to remove Putin to establish rule by “real Russians” only. Some are leftist anarchists. Still others are Western-oriented liberals, hopeful of anchoring a post-Putin Russia in the broader European community.
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A reminder of the risk arrived in the early hours of August 1, when a Russian drone strike in Kyiv nearly destroyed the home of Ilya Ponomarev, a political leader of the militant anti-Putin opposition. Ponomarev — who was profiled last year in The Washington Post under the headline “Could this man bring down Putin?” — was bloodied by the attack, but he survived. “This means that we have managed to identify the weak points of the [Putin] regime, and they are doing everything to stop me,” he told me hours after he was struck.
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Before Ammosov agreed to speak with me, he said I needed to talk to his friend and associate who first vetted him for the anti-Putin cause: Denis Sokolov [Free Russia Foundation], the leading recruiter for today’s generation of violent Russian revolutionaries. In 2022, Sokolov founded the Civic Council, a Warsaw-based group that helps recruit, screen, and transport Russians to fight Putin’s troops in Ukraine. A social anthropologist with a specialty in Russia’s restive North Caucasus region, he served as a fellow at the prestigious Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington. He was also an associate of Galina Starovoytova, a dissident who was assassinated in 1998 in a killing organized by a former GRU officer.
Soon after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Sokolov told me, he began to think “there is no future for Russia.” The problem was that entrenched Soviet-era elites, including bureaucrats and ex-KGB officers, were carving out a system of “state capitalism” that was severely impeding the nation’s progress. He came to support independence for any region of Russia, including Ammosov‘s Sakha, with a capacity for “self-rule.”
During our conversation, Sokolov was joined by his close associate Anastasia Sergeeva. From 2009 to 2016, Sergeeva served as the Moscow program director of the International Republican Institute, a nonprofit funded by the US government that aims to foster democracy around the world. Washington, of course, has a long and checkered history of recruiting, funding, and arming insurgents pitted against America’s global adversaries. But when I asked Sokolov and Sergeeva whether the CIA is supporting their revolutionary activities, they both scoffed. “They are afraid,” Sokolov said — scared of riling the Kremlin. Russian businessmen are bankrolling his efforts, he tells me, but he declines to name any individuals.
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In Warsaw, I met with Tatiana Kosinova, the mother of a volunteer now fighting against Russian forces in Ukraine. In Russia, she worked for Memorial, a now disbanded group cofounded by the human-rights activist Yelena Bonner that documented the horrors of the Soviet Gulag. After fleeing the country with her son in 2022, she met Sokolov in Warsaw and began helping him recruit volunteer fighters. Her son, she told me, “wanted to be in the first group of our volunteers,” and “I’m very proud of this.” As for Putin, he is a “usurper, bandit, and fascist,” she said, who “needs to be overthrown, killed, destroyed.”
For some, resorting to armed rebellion is the culmination of a lifetime of disillusionment with the Kremlin. On a video call from Kyiv, a fighter who goes by Itil told me he is a Crimean Tatar who was born in Moscow in 1979. He grew up in the circus, the family business, and performed as an acrobat all over the Soviet Union. His father, he said, was a “badass” who hated the USSR. Over shortwave radio, the family listened to the Voice of America. Itil says he served as a high-ranking clerk in a military command center tasked with planning Russia’s response to a nuclear attack by a hostile power. Inspired by his idol, the charismatic liberal politician Boris Nemtsov, Itil became active in anti-Putin demonstrations. But when a buddy was arrested and jailed, for pushing a police officer at a street protest, Itil fled to Ukraine to avoid a similar fate. (Nemtsov was assassinated on a bridge near the Kremlin in 2015.) For him, Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion was the tipping point. “I see children killed,” he recalled. “I am going mad.” He signed up to fight against Russian soldiers. These days, he works mainly behind the front lines, tending to wounded volunteers in Kyiv hospitals. In the event that Russian armed forces overrun Ukraine, he plans to evacuate his Ukrainian wife and her daughter, who’s from a previous relationship. As for himself, “I will not run again. My fear is over.”
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In practice, the system has proved far from smooth. Initially, Sokolov recruited Russians for an existing brigade, known as the Russian Volunteer Corps. But the RDK turned out to be made up largely of what Sokolov calls “far-right” types, including Nazis, who refused to accept the basic principles of liberty and freedom of thought as proclaimed by the European Convention on Human Rights. They insisted, for example, on “clear blood criteria” for determining who is a Russian. Sokolov also believes the brigade had been “infiltrated” by the FSB.
Last year, Sokolov cut ties with the RDK. With his Ukrainian contacts, he established a new brigade, the Siberian Battalion, with Ammosov as a leader. But Ukrainian military intelligence, Sokolov says, kept the unit on too tight a leash, rendering it ineffective in the field. Now he’s standing up another brigade, one that will operate directly under the aegis of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. As yet unnamed, the new unit will be trained and advised by military veterans from America, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, and Australia. The goal, Sokolov says, is to “execute complex operations,” as opposed to mere hit-and-run raids. The unit’s Russian participants will be true soldiers — and once their reputation for professionalism and bravery is established, he is confident, the new brigade will become a magnet for fresh batches of volunteers.
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“I do not think that the road to the victory of democracy lies through one group of Russians shooting at other Russians,” says Boris Akunin, a popular Russian writer and a founder of True Russia, an anti-Putin group of exiles. “This would never be understood and supported by the Russian people. I believe that the road to victory lies through motivating the mobilized Russian soldiers to revolt against the dictatorship. That’s how revolutions happen.” It’s a form of insurgency that was employed by the Bolsheviks: Win over the tsar’s soldiers, and the tsar will fall.
Revolutions also have a way of fracturing from within, as their leaders jockey for positions to exercise command once the despised regime is overthrown. One Russian revolutionary, in fact, is already claiming the mantle of leadership in a post-Putin Russia. Ilya Ponomarev, the 49-year-old dissident who was nearly killed by a Russian drone strike in August, is a former tech entrepreneur who served in the Russian parliament. Today, he’s the political head of the Freedom of Russia Legion, another anti-Putin volunteer brigade in Ukraine. And perhaps more importantly, he has cultivated a vibrant profile in Washington, where he has become a fixture of the Russian exile community.
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One day in March, I met in Washington with Ponomarev and several figures in his retinue. We started with late-afternoon drinks at a hotel before shifting to more drinks, and pizza, at Ponomarev’s ski-chalet-like home in Northern Virginia. As he drew on a flavored-tobacco water pipe and sipped from a bottle of Bold Rock Imperial Cider, Ponomarev extolled the prospects for a violent revolution in Russia, precipitated by the volunteer fighters in Ukraine. “We are supported by the Russian people,” he told me. “We already have enough force to hold a certain ground” inside Russia. On my departure, he handed me an inscribed copy of his 2002 [2022] book, “Does Putin Have to Die?“
Yet unlike Trotsky, Mao, and Castro, Ponomarev is not hunkered down on the front lines with his fellow insurgents. Instead, he spends part of his time in Kyiv, punctuated by frequent visits to various European capitals and his home outside Washington. A Russian fighter in the Freedom of Russia Legion stressed to me that Ponomarev does not speak for those actively involved in battle.
He also claims leadership of a political group, the Congress of People’s Deputies, that advocates for violent resistance to the Kremlin. During our meeting in Washington, Ponomarev introduced me to Alexei Sobchenko, a former State Department translator who now serves as a “foreign agent” for the congress. Sobchenko’s registration papers, filed with the Justice Department in October, cite an address in Warsaw for the congress. But the group has no actual office there, as I discovered on my trip to Poland; the address led me to a residence in a leafy suburb on the outskirts of the city.
Ponomarev told me the home in Warsaw is just the group’s “legal address.” And it’s true that the congress has organized several high-profile events in Warsaw, including a March forum that was attended by Michał Kamiński, the deputy speaker of the Polish Senate. Ponomarev told participants at the forum that the congress is “formulating alternative governing bodies in Russia” to take over after Putin’s fall.
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Ponomarev is acutely aware of the barbs. In Lviv, Ukraine, at a recent summit of prominent Russian exiles supporting the violent resistance against Putin, he was lambasted by Leonid Nevzlin, a rich former business partner of the onetime oil baron Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Nevzlin, by Ponomarev‘s account, expressed distrust of the Freedom of Russia Legion and accused Ponomarev of wanting to be the “new Navalny.” (Navalny himself never supported armed resistance to Putin.)
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Given the small and insular nature of the anti-Putin opposition, its internal disagreements have the character of family squabbles of a certain intense character. A parallel, perhaps, is to the American 18th-century revolutionaries who all aimed to get rid of King George III but were riven by personal enmities and tactical disputes. So, too, the leading figures in the Russian opposition to Putin are all familiar with each other from way back. Ponomarev himself, years ago, worked as a deputy at Yukos, the Russian oil conglomerate once presided over by Khodorkovsky. From his base in London, Khodorkovsky now funds a wide variety of anti-Kremlin political activities and serves as a founding member of the Russian Anti-War Committee [Free Russia Forum]. Through an aide, Khodorkovsky told me that the committee “has decided that we shall not cooperate with Ilya Ponomarev because we are in favor of a range of nonviolent ways of resistance, and as such, the committee cannot support armed resistance.” The aide added that Khodorkovsky, “as an individual,” is “not involved” in any way with the anti-Putin military insurgency being mounted by his fellow Russians.
But some members of the Anti-War Committee have embraced the ongoing Russian war on Putin. Among them is Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion turned political activist who is a declared supporter of the Russian volunteers in Ukraine. Another committee member told me he would be assassinated if Putin’s operatives knew how active he is in the military effort to stop the invasion of Ukraine. The committee, it seems, is splintering on the core, inescapable question of the necessity of violence to effect change in Russia.
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One target of Ponomarev’s lobbying efforts is Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, a former FBI special agent who sits on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and is a leading supporter of US military aid to Ukraine. Ponomarev says the anti-Putin resistance has support from elected officials in both the House and the Senate, but “it is all very sensitive, and many people even have to deny our acquaintance.” Fitzpatrick’s office declined to comment.
A Ponomarev associate suggested I imagine “Charlie Wilson’s War,” the 2007 film about the flamboyant congressman from Texas, played by Tom Hanks, who heroically secured funding for the CIA to arm the mujahideen resistance to Soviet forces in Afghanistan [Soviet-Afghan War]. To stay with the movie parallel, it seems Ponomarev is searching, too, for a CIA officer to back the rebellion cause, a role played in the film by Philip Seymour Hoffman. “I know a lot of good officers” in the CIA, Ponomarev told me, who “sympathize” with the anti-Putin insurgency. But when I asked the CIA for comment, the agency comes as close to a full denial of involvement as one can imagine it making. “Consistent with US policy,” a spokesperson told me, “the CIA works closely with the Ukrainian Security Services, and not ad hoc groups of volunteers.”
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Whoever emerges as the leader of the violent resistance, it has attracted backing from some seemingly improbable figures. Supporters include Evgenia Chirikova, a Russian environmental activist who won global acclaim for her efforts to protect an old-growth forest outside Moscow. “This violence started with Putin,” she told me from her base in Tallinn, Estonia. “We need to organize an equal answer.” Another avowed militant is Andrey Volna, a renowned trauma surgeon in his early 60s who once occupied a prestigious medical post in Moscow. “In general, I am an extremely peaceful guy,” he told me from Tallinn. “Unfortunately, we need military force to change the fascist, dictatorial power.”
Paul Starobin is the author of “Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia.“
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