His death always seemed strange, from the announcement itself to the way it supposedly occurred. His brigade, the Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK), announced it on social media with hardly any details, granting their leader a heroic end—the end of a warrior, as Maksym Zhorin emphasized in his heartfelt tribute. Denis Kapustin, “White Rex,” had fallen on the front lines after being struck by an FPV drone somewhere on the Zaporizhzhia front, one of the two currently active fronts. Doubts began to surface immediately after the RDK’s announcement, accompanied by a black and white photo of their fallen leader. Like other figures whose importance wasn’t military, such as Andriy Biletsky, Kapustin hadn’t been particularly active on the front lines, and his group had primarily engaged in specific operations as part of the special forces of the General Directorate of Military Intelligence of Ukraine, headed by Kyrylo Budanov, including raids like the one that made the group famous in purely civilian villages on the Russian side of the border.
The only detail that made Kapustin’s deployment to the front lines plausible was the death of at least five soldiers from the group that same week, something that has been explained as a consequence of Ukraine’s difficulty in replenishing its ranks due to casualties and recruitment challenges. Although in the interview he gave to Fox News during his visit to the United States, Zelensky stated that, for the first time in the war, Russia had suffered net losses that year (fewer recruits than deaths on the front lines), it is not Russia that is having problems replacing soldiers who are killed, wounded, or need to be relieved at the end of their rotations. The presence of groups like RDK, which was never intended to be an infantry unit, is just further evidence of this.
However, sending a group to the front lines doesn’t necessarily imply the presence of leaders like Kapustin, who are more media figures than military leaders and who don’t direct operations but are merely political and ideological role models for the rest of the soldiers. In that sense, the natural comparison for White Rex is Andriy Biletsky, a figure who has risen through the military ranks thanks to the war, but who has never been a strategist or a commander in charge of the day-to-day operations of Azov, neither in its initial form in 2014 nor in its current reorganization as the 3rd Assault Brigade. The chances of a Russian drone deliberately detecting and hitting Kapustin didn’t seem particularly high beyond a stroke of luck in an attack—not on the person, but on the location where the RDK was detected.
The lack of details surrounding the death, the absence of a Russian statement regarding the attack, and, above all, the lack of a funeral or public tribute in which the other far-right groups that had paid their respects to the fallen comrade and vowed revenge could participate, made the initial version of a heroic death on the front lines increasingly implausible. However, the Ukrainian GUR (State Security Command) has not allowed time for rumors such as a settling of scores or Zelensky’s attempt to eliminate key neo-Nazi figures to take hold. This latter hypothesis was initially put forward by the more optimistic analysts, who interpreted Kapustin’s elimination by Ukrainian state security forces as the removal of groups or figures capable of hindering peace in the event of a mass demobilization of hundreds of thousands of battle-hardened men with strong ideological convictions.
The reality has turned out to be more prosaic. Kapustin hadn’t fallen, neither on the front lines nor behind them, and those who saw something strange in the RDK’s statement suspected they were right. Yesterday, in his provocative style and with a desire to create a spectacle, Kyrylo Budanov revealed the final trick. “RDK commander Denis Kapustin is alive,” the group announced yesterday on its social media. On their profile, the message appeared after the statement issued a few days ago by the group’s military commander, who, in the most serious tone possible, demanded that rumors and speculation be avoided and called for trusting only the official information published by the RDK. Taking advantage of the media interest generated by the supposed heroic death , the group appealed to its followers to enlist and contribute financially to its funding. Any excuse is good enough to ask for more money from its followers, and they can’t afford to miss the opportunity to financially exploit a faked death.
The plot uncovered yesterday by Kyrylo Budanov is a carbon copy of the SBU’s 2017 special operation , the staged death of journalist Arkady Babchenko. As then, the faked death has been justified as a way to avoid a political assassination by the Russian secret services. In both cases, the person Russia supposedly wanted to kill was an irrelevant figure in the country, living in Ukraine, with no intention of returning and no followers to whom he could appeal. But also as on that occasion, reality and fiction can be interwoven to create an epic tale of a great Ukrainian victory against evil Russia, which has once again failed in its attempt to eliminate an enemy. “Failure of the Russian special services. RDK commander Denis Kapustin is alive and $500,000 has been received for his elimination, which will reinforce the special forces of the General Directorate of Intelligence,” the group claimed, using the same excuse used to justify Babchenko’s death: to prevent a Russian assassination and profit from it.
In this war where reality and fiction, facts and myths blur, nothing needs to be proven to be believable. “As a result of a complex special operation carried out by the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, which lasted more than a month, the life of RDK commander Denis Kapustin, whom Russian dictator Vladimir Putin considers his personal enemy, was saved, and a group of people involved in the crime within the Russian special services and their perpetrators were identified,” RDK adds to its epic description of an operation that is more imaginary than real and which it has decided to turn into the equivalent of the climax of a Western with a final duel between the protagonist and the antagonist.
“I suppose seeing Leonid Nevzlin, [Mikhail] Khodorkovsky’s partner and a Haaretz shareholder, solemnly lamenting from Israel the death of an avowed Nazi was worth it. As were the obituaries by Western journalists who portrayed him as a complex personality who chose the right side of history. Now, especially for them, he’s alive and well, standing in front of the Spayka, a fascist symbol, a Russian version of, well, Fascism,” commented Russian opposition journalist Leonid Ragozin. “Heroes never really die,” he concluded. Especially heroes artificially created by the whims of intelligence services.
The operation to revive Denis Kapustin has turned out to be the latest stunt by Kyrylo Budanov’s GUR (Ukrainian Special Forces). “I met with Kyrylo Budanov and offered him the position of Chief of Staff to the President of Ukraine. At this time, Ukraine needs greater attention to security, the development of the Ukrainian Defense and Security Forces, and the diplomatic path of negotiations, and the President’s Office will be primarily responsible for fulfilling these tasks for our state. Kyrylo has specialized experience in these areas and the capacity to achieve results,” Volodymyr Zelensky wrote yesterday to announce, more than a month after Andriy Yermak’s forced resignation, who will take charge of the President’s Office. Budanov’s negotiating credentials are highly questionable, as Russia has always considered his special operations gratuitous provocations, but his international connections could prove useful.
Budanov’s appointment marks a clear change of course. Unlike Yermak, with whom he clashed and whom he repeatedly tried to remove, Kyrylo Budanov is close to the United States. As a 2023 article in The Washington Post highlighted, when designing the intelligence collaboration that began in 2014, the United States chose the GUR as its ally. For the CIA, the GUR was a smaller, more manageable intelligence agency, and above all, “less burdened by Soviet times, while the SBU was still perceived as infiltrated by Russian intelligence.” “The GUR was our baby,” says one of the former agents tasked with implementing an intelligence collaboration that entails US control and power within the inner workings of Ukraine, whose main leader now holds a key executive position at a crucial moment.
In addition to his relationship with this indispensable ally, Budanov possesses the ability to control some of the most radical and ideologically driven battalions, which have formed part of his special forces during this period. Among these battalions is Kraken, the Azov reorganization in which Maksym Zhorin and Denis Kapustin collaborated after the defeat at Azovstal—a connection that links Budanov to another rising political figure, Andriy Biletsky. The former GUR leader is also bolstered by his close ties to figures like Davyd Arakhamia, leader of the parliamentary faction of Zelensky’s party—a network of important connections that puts Budanov a step ahead of other contenders for political power, especially the increasingly isolated [Valerii] Zaluzhnyi.
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