Ponomarev Deploys Sabotage, Arson, Terror and Murder To Overthrow and Dismantle Russia
March 7, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—After Western intelligence agencies succeeded in a violent coup in Ukraine in 2014, one confirmed by then-Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland to have included U.S. State Department funding of $5 billion, there’s been an escalation of the narrative that the Russian Federation must be dismantled, broken into pieces. The so-called Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum (FNPRF), which ran four major conferences in 2022, beginning on May 8, 2022 in Warsaw, is one of the most notorious such operations. It was founded by Ilya Ponomarev, who fled Russia after being charged with embezzlement in 2014, and in 2019 was granted Ukrainian citizenship.
Ponomarev created FNPRF in the spring of 2022 as an escalation over Garry Kasparov’s semi-annual Free Russia Forum (FRF), active since 2016. The FNPRF criticized the FRF as being dominated by “centralist thinking,” not being aggressive enough. Ponomarev, in the hours after the Aug. 20, 2022 car-bombing execution in Moscow of Russian journalist Darya Dugina, claimed credit for the assassination on behalf of his National Republican Army. He immediately published the NRA “manifesto” that day, calling for, among other things, a Russian military mutiny against President Putin.
Within a day and a half, after Russia’s FSB had named Natalya Vovk as the prime suspect, showing video of her stalking Dugina, Ponomarev explained that his NRA contacts inside Russia asserted that Vovk had had no direct role in the attack. Nevertheless, Ponomarev claims he contributed to Vovk’s escape.
A brief sketch of Ponomarev shows that he made a lot of money as an officer at Schlumberger Oilfield Services and at Yukos Oil, before becoming elected to the Russian State Duma in 2007. In 2012, he was a leader of the street protests in the attempt to overthrow Putin. His aide, Leonid Razvozzhayev, was accused of arranging a meeting between a Georgian official, Givi Targamadze, and a Russian opposition leader, Sergei Udattsov of the “Left Front,” in order to overthrow Putin. In August 2014, Razvozzhayev was accused of “plotting mass riots,” and sentenced to four and half years in prison. At that time, Ponomarev was under investigation and his bank accounts were frozen. He had taken up residence in San Jose, California, and in 2016 he sought residency in Kiev. On the last day of his presidency, May 17, 2019, Petro Poroshenko granted Ponomarev Ukrainian citizenship.
Currently, Ponomarev says that he is part of Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces and that he endorses acts of sabotage and arson in Russia. Eleven days after he claimed credit for the Aug. 20, 2022 assassination of Darya Dugina, he held a joint press conference with another Territorial Defense Forces operative, Denis Nikitin (aka Denis Kapustin) and Nikitin’s Russian Volunteer Corps, on organizing the revolutionary overthrow of the Russian government, and dismantling the Russian Federation. They are both committed to the immediate violent overthrow of Russia, though Ponomarev’s members reside inside Russia, and Nikitin’s are Russian exiles in Ukraine. Whatever Ponomarev’s involvement in the murder of Dugina proves to be, Nikitin is presently suspected in the similar, attempted car-bombing on March 6 of Konstantin Malofeev, CEO of Tsargrad TV. Malofeev was fortunately unhurt. And although no charges have yet been filed, his Russian Volunteer Corps took credit for the vicious March 2 attack on civilians in Bryansk Region, killing two adults and wounding one boy.
