Autumn wave of radical direct action on both sides of the front line

Ukraine/Russia

Meet the 23rd part of our regular overview, suspended since the beginning of summer this year...

Submitted by Thunderbird on November 15, 2023

Welcome to join the fundraising of our team for to work on this international column and offline volunteer activities. A couple of cups of coffee in your country, even before the war, could be equivalent to a day's earnings of a worker in Ukraine. Many thanks everyone in advance!

Let's start with how ended the spontaneous strike in Voronezh against returning to the front. As the ASTRA Telegram channel, which covered it, reported on November 1, most of the about 30 who refused to board the plane to Avdeevka were nevertheless convinced to go to fight. Prosecutors and psychologists worked with them at the base. It is unknown how many soldiers were held at that training ground Pogonovo, but only on October 28, according to an ASTRA source, 100-150 fighters were brought to this base from the famous field prison for refusers in Zaitsevo.

The same November 1, a group of mobilized from 20th Motorized Rifle Division of the RF in Crimea allegedly beat up a Russian colonel surnamed Musurbekov. It was reported by Ukrainian military intelligence. “An officer of the occupation army held the position of deputy regiment commander. On November 7, 2023, Musurbekov’s death from injuries was confirmed in a Simferopol hospital.” On the same day, the suspects, having changed into civilian clothes, allegedly left their place of deployment in the Simferopol district without permission and fled to the Krasnodar Territory. We did not find confirmation of this information in other sources.

A guy from the Trans-Baikal Territory attacked an enlistment center. On October 3, guards at the military commissariat of the Chernyshevsky district saw an unknown person who set fire to a cloth and threw the burning material out the window of this building. The fabric went out, there was no fire, the man disappeared. Soon, a 25-year-old resident of Chernyshevsk was detained on suspicion of attempted arson. Sergei L. stated that he tried to burn 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. As Sergei said, Ivan was treated poorly by his commanders during the war. This allegedly pushed him to start 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 arrested.

Yesterday, November 14, in the Kabardino-Balkarian town of Prokhladnyi, the enlistment office on Gagarin Street, 57, also caught fire. The area of the fire was 1 sq. meter, it was quickly extinguished by a watchman. On suspicion of arson, 24-year-old Daniil K. was detained. He explained the arson by the fact that this military commissariat drafted him to the Russian army.

On the other hand, in the Transcarpathian region in the far west of Ukraine, 49-year-old Vasyl Stetso was found barely alive near the military training ground with a broken head. He died on the way to the hospital on August 21. Before the war, he was a children's football coach, then he became a junior sergeant at the districtal enlistment center of Uzhgorod. Based on one version, the serviceman threatened one of the conscripts with a subpoena, he 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 removed so that he would not tell about corruption. It is perhaps no coincidence that the murder coincided with large-scale raids of military commissioners across the country on suspicion of bribery. Revenge from the relatives of those whom he sent to death is also possible. The cops started a criminal case under Art. 115 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (premeditated murder), but the circumstances of the incident are still mysterious.

Ukrainian media reported a wave of attacks on the property of prosecutors. On October 26, two such incidents occurred: in Chernihiv (Chernigov) at about 21:00 unknown persons set fire to the Ford Fiesta vehicle of Daria Lukyanets – the head of the Specialized Environmental Prosecutor's Office in the Chernihiv Regional Prosecutor's Office. During a search of the car, police found two bottles of gasoline. The second arson occurred in the village of Minai near already mentioned Uzhgorod. There they doused the car of the prosecutor of the Uzhgorod District Prosecutor's Office, Olexandr Trofimenkov, with gasoline and set fire to it. Two more such cases were recorded on November 4. The first took place in the Cherkassy region, where at about 23:00 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. The preliminary damage is 500,000 UAH. And again in the Chernihiv region, unknown ones broke the windows in the car of Yevgeny Lazarenko – the 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 Kyiv. At 2 a.m., an unknown person threw a burning handicraft item. It landed on a plastic canopy over the entrance to the cop office and caused fire damage to the roof. This happened in the Pechersk district of the city, where the Ukrainian government is located.

Since the information was obtained by us by monitoring open data, we can only guess to what extent these acts are ordinary street crime, and to what extent it was desperate popular resistance against the system as a whole. In any case, such series is unprecedented since the beginning of the full-scale war!

And two examples of individual resistance to capitalist exploitation. On September 14, the Kharkiv region police reported the exposure of a girl who caused losses to a private company in the amount of 380,000 UAH. Back on August 2, the owner of some delivery service in Kharkov filed a complaint with the cops, claiming that the operator placed an order for food, marked the payment, although the money was not received into the service’s account, and then the courier delivered the orders to the specified addresses. Thus, the 26-year-old employee delivered ready-made food to relatives and friends for free, sometimes also indicating her own details and address. This continued throughout last and this year. The investigator opened criminal case under Part 2 of Art. 190 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (fraud). The suspect was informed of suspicion.

Today the Dnipropetrovsk region police revealed the details on the attempt to blow up the director of Dniprospetsremont LLC in Krivoy Rog (Kryvyi Rih). As a result of investigative actions, a local resident born in 1958, an employee of this construction enterprise (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 gate of his boss for non-payment of the bonus by her. The grenade exploded when that woman opened the gate. During the search of the visitor’s apartment, two more RGD-5 grenades and one F-1 were seized. The man said that he brought the confiscated ammunition to his place of residence from the Donbass war zone in 2014. The criminal cases have been opened under Part 1 of Art. 263 of the Criminal Code (illegal handling of weapons, ammunition or explosives).

For a snack, let’s recall an earlier story about a hacker who seazed funds from Russian drug dealers and donated it for humanitarian aid in Ukraine.

Plus, our fascinating historical investigation into how Kharkov in 1919 became the center of anarchist expropriations and an attempt to end the Civil War by assassination the Red and White leaders.

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