[Russia/Ukraine] Autumn wave of radical direct action on both sides of the front line.
Read the 23rd part of our periodical summary, suspended since early summer of this year...
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Let's start with how the spontaneous strike in Voronezh against the return to the front ended. As reported on November 1 by the Telegram channel ASTRA, which covered it, most of the 30 or so soldiers who refused to board the plane bound for Avdeevka were nevertheless persuaded to go to fight. Prosecutors and psychologists worked with them at the base. It is unknown how many soldiers were held at this Pogonovo training camp, but on October 28 alone, according to an ASTRA source, between 100 and 150 fighters were brought to this base from the notorious Zaitsevo field prison for refusers.
On the same November 1, a group of mobilized men of the 20th RF Motorized Rifle Division in Crimea allegedly liquidated a Russian colonel surnamed Musurbekov. This was reported by the Ukrainian military intelligence. “An officer of the occupation army held the position of deputy regiment commander. On November 7, 2023, Musurbekov's death from his injuries was confirmed in a hospital in Simferopol.” On the same day, the suspects, having dressed in civilian clothes, allegedly left without permission their place of deployment in the Simferopol district and fled to the territory of Krasnodar. We have not found confirmation of this information from other sources.
An individual from the Trans-Baikal Territory attacked an enlistment center. On October 3, guards of the Chernyshevsky district military commissariat saw an unknown man who set fire to a cloth and threw the burning material through the window of the building. The cloth was extinguished, there was no fire, the man disappeared. Shortly afterwards a 25-year-old Chernyshevsk resident was arrested on suspicion of attempted arson. Sergei L. stated that he tried to burn down the facility as revenge for his brother Ivan. According to ASTRA, the brother went to fight in Ukraine voluntarily, but then left the unit without permission. According to Sergei, his commanders treated Ivan badly during the war. This allegedly pushed him to set the fire. A criminal case was initiated against the detainee under Part 1 of Art. 205 of the Russian Criminal Code (terrorist act). He was taken into custody.
Yesterday, November 14, in the Kabardino-Balkan city of Prokhladnyi, the enlistment office at 57 Gagarin street also caught fire. The area of the fire was 1 square meter, it was quickly extinguished by a watchman. Daniil K., 24, was arrested on suspicion of arson. He explained the arson by the fact that this military commissariat recruited him to the Russian army.
Elsewhere, in the Transcarpathian region of far western Ukraine, Vasyl Stetso, 49, was found barely alive near a military training camp with a broken head. He died on his way to the hospital on August 21. Before the war, he was a children's soccer coach, then a junior sergeant at the Uzhgorod district enlistment center. According to one version, the serviceman threatened one of the conscripts with a summons, the latter agreed to give him a bribe for a “white ticket”, but their meeting turned into a conflict. According to another, Stetso knew too much: he could have been dismissed so that he would not talk about corruption. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the murder coincided with large-scale raids of military commissioners across the country on suspicion of bribery. It is also possible that it was revenge by the relatives of those he sent to their deaths. The police initiated a criminal case under Art. 115 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (premeditated murder), but the circumstances of the incident remain a mystery.
Ukrainian media reported a wave of attacks on the property of prosecutors. On October 26, two such incidents occurred: in Chernihiv (Chernigov), at about 9:00 p.m., unknown persons set fire to the Ford Fiesta car of Daria Lukyanets – head of the Specialized Environmental Prosecutor's Office of the Chernihiv Regional Prosecutor's Office. During the search of the car, the police found two bottles of gasoline. The second arson occurred in the village of Minai, near the aforementioned Uzhgorod. There the car of the prosecutor of the Uzhgorod district prosecutor's office, Olexandr Trofimenkov, was doused with gasoline and set on fire. Two more such cases were recorded on November 4. The first took place in the Cherkassy region, where at about 11:00 p.m. the unfinished house of the head of the organizational and legal support department of the Cherkasy Regional Prosecutor's Office, Anna Volodina, was set on fire. Preliminary damage amounts to 500,000 UAH. And again in the Chernihiv region, unknown assailants smashed the windows of the car of Yevgeny Lazarenko, prosecutor of the Chernihiv Regional Prosecutor's Office. At the moment, the attackers are being identified by the investigation.
On the night of November 10, someone tried to set fire to the premises of a local police officer in Kiev. At 2 a.m., an unknown person threw a burning improvised object. It landed on a plastic awning over the entrance to the policeman's office and caused fire damage to the roof. This occurred in the Pechersk district of the city, where the Ukrainian government is located.
Given that we obtained the information through open source intelligence, we can only guess to what extent these acts are ordinary street crime, and to what extent they are desperate popular resistance against the system as a whole. In any case, these series are unprecedented since the beginning of the total war!
And two examples of individual resistance to capitalist exploitation. On September 14, police in the Kharkiv region reported a girl who caused losses to a private company amounting to UAH 380,000. On August 2, the owner of a delivery service in Kharkiv filed a complaint with the police, alleging that the female operator placed an order for food, marked the payment, although the money was not received on the service account, and then the courier delivered the orders to the specified addresses. In this way, the 26-year-old employee delivered prepared food to family and friends free of charge, sometimes also indicating her own details and address. This continued throughout last year and this year. The investigator opened a criminal case under part 2 of Art. 190 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (fraud). The suspect was informed of the suspicions.
Today the police of the Dnipropetrovsk region revealed the details of the attempted attack on the director of Dniprospetsremont LLC in Krivoy Rog (Kryvyi Rih). As a result of the investigative actions, a local resident born in 1958, an employee of this construction company (in English: Dnipro Special Repair), was detained. It was established that on the night of October 9 he tied an F-1 grenade to the door of his boss because of her non-payment of a bonus. The grenade exploded when the woman opened the gate. During the search of the visitor's apartment, two other RGD-5 grenades and an F-1 grenade were seized. The man said that he brought the seized ammunition to his place of residence from the Donbass war zone in 2014. Criminal cases have been opened under part 1 of Art. 263 of the Criminal Code (illegal handling of weapons, ammunition or explosives).
To spice it a bit, let's recall an earlier story about a hacker who took funds from Russian drug traffickers and donated them for humanitarian aid in Ukraine.
In addition, our fascinating historical research on how Kharkov in 1919 became the center of anarchist expropriations and an attempt to end the Civil War by assassinating Red and White leaders.