Russia’s arrest of ex-security official signals crackdown

Targeting critics who say Putin’s efforts are weak

MOSCOW — Russia’s arrest of Igor Girkin, the former security agent who was convicted this year in absentia by a Dutch court in the 2014 downing of a passenger jet over Ukraine, made clear that Moscow’s protection had come to an end.

But it was also a warning shot to the country's ultranationalist hawks, who believe President Vladimir Putin hasn't gone hard enough on Ukraine and have grown increasingly vocal about it.

As a former agent of the FSB, Girkin helped foment Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea and war in eastern Ukraine. But it wasn't his role in those actions, or in the murder of the 298 passengers and crew aboard Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, that got him into trouble with the Kremlin.

It was a social media post in which he accused Putin of weakness.

Now the 52-year-old, who goes by the alias Strelkov, sits in Moscow's notorious Lefortovo jail awaiting trial on a charge of inciting extremism, the latest entry in the list of pro-war patriots and erstwhile loyalists liquidated by a regime that will bear no dissent.

"Russia is a country at war," said Georgy Fyodorov, the Strelkov-supporting editor of Aurora, a far-left patriotic outlet. "And this is a signal that our government has zero tolerance, she is trying to protect herself and get rid of any threats against her."

It wasn't Strelkov's first public criticism of the government's conduct of the war. As a campaign that Moscow envisioned as a quick victory ground into the currently stalemated slog, he became one of the loudest critics of Russia's Defense Ministry. He called Putin a "nonentity," accused him of "cowardly mediocrity," and said he had misjudged the Ukraine war.

But a Telegram post in July apparently was the last straw. He told his 600,000 subscribers that Russia "could not survive another six years of [Putin's] rule." Within days, agents of the FSB, where he had worked for more than a decade, arrived at his Moscow apartment and led him away.

"The charge against me is absurd and my detention is insulting," he told the court last month in his most recent appearance.

Many have pointed out the irony that an internationally convicted war criminal was ensnared by Russia's wartime censorship laws, not his crimes.

Strelkov played a key role in the formation of the self-declared, pro-Russian Donetsk People's Republic in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and served briefly as its defense minister. He was found guilty by the Dutch court of deploying the Buk missile system that investigators said downed the Boeing 777 flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.

Strelkov's wife, Miroslava Reginskaya, 30, a Crimean who worked as his secretary during his brief tenure as defense minister of the Donetsk People's Republic, now uses his Telegram channel to publish his messages from prison, where he continues, apparently unhindered, to criticize the Kremlin's war strategy and foreign policy.