Nearly five years in prison required against opponent Igor Guirkine in Russia
Russian prosecutors on Thursday requested nearly five years in prison for Igor Girkin, an ardent Russian nationalist and veteran of the 2014 fighting in Ukraine, who became a critic of the Kremlin prosecuted for “extremism”.
This former commander of the pro-Russian separatists in Donbass, better known under the pseudonym “Strelkov”, denounced for months the incompetence of the Russian authorities on his widely followed Telegram account. He went further than other Russian nationalists by implicating the president, Vladimir Putin, himself.
“The prosecutor requested four years and eleven months in prison against Igor Strelkov”, announce his supporters on Telegram. The entire trial was held behind closed doors.
Igor Girkin was arrested in July, a month after the abortive rebellion of the leader of the Wagner group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, another virulent critic of the Russian general staff, who was killed in August in what the Kremlin presented as a plane crash.
In one of his last messages before his arrest, Mr. Guirkine wrote that a “shabby” ruled Russia and that she would not tolerate this ” coward “ spends six more years in power. Under investigation for “extremism”he nevertheless announced, at the end of August, his candidacy for the presidential election in March.
Aged 53, he became known in the spring of 2014 by becoming the most publicized and one of the most influential military leaders of the pro-Russian separatists who took up arms in eastern Ukraine.
A former colonel in the FSB, the Russian intelligence service, he organized the first armed militias and governed the separatist stronghold of Sloviansk with an iron fist, then serving as defense minister of the self-proclaimed republic of Donetsk.