‘Foiled bombing’ must make Russian corps and leader public enemy number 1 | Abroad

The thwarted attack is said to have been directed against Konstantin Malofeev, a (once) wealthy businessman and founder of the ultra-conservative Russian television channel Tsargrad (“Emperor’s City”).

The 48-year-old businessman, who became rich in Russian telecom, is known for his radical Orthodox Christian beliefs and aversion to liberalism and democracy. He has been under sanctions from the US, European Union and Canada since 2014 over allegations of financing pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.

The Russian security service FSB has identified the pro-Ukrainian Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK) and its leader Denis Kapustin as the evil mastermind behind the placement of explosives under Malofeev’s car. Whether Kapustin and RDK actually planned an attack on Malofeev is by no means certain. As proof of this, the FSB shared a short compilation of videos with the Tass news agency.

First of all, we see a suspiciously behaving man with a hood who stays at the same Mercedes as Malofejevs, eventually crouching down and apparently sticking something under it. The next image is of a robot that removes an explosive device from under Malofeev’s (alleged) car in a parking garage.

RDK and Kapustin were also in the news last week, after they allegedly raided a village in the southern Russian region of Bryansk, which borders Ukraine, according to Russia. In that ‘terror attack’, as Russian President Vladimir Putin called it, two civilians were shot dead in their cars and a 10-year-old boy was injured.

But it seems that publication of the images is mainly intended to make Kapoestin and his club public enemy number 1. The independent news site Meduza.io stated that the news video about the events was fake. Intercepted telephone conversations between FSB officials suggest that they were aware of the raid on the village in advance. This could indicate that the Russian security service had staged the campaign of the RDK itself, in order to put Ukraine in a bad light. Kiev therefore called the incident a ‘false flag’ operation.

After all, Kapustin is a neo-Nazi, and that is the ideology that Ukraine has been propagating officially for nine years now, according to Moscow. According to Putin, one of the (invented) motives for the start of the Russian ‘special military operation’, now more than a year ago, was to ‘denazify’ the neighboring country.

The FSB also yesterday linked the failed attack on Malofeev to the murder of Darya Dugina last summer. Dugina was blown up in front of her father in a moving car on the Moscow highway in August. That father is the ultra-nationalist Aleksandr Dugin, and in terms of radical ideas he is four hands on one stomach with Malofejev.

Some suspect that the bomb was intended for Dugin himself. At the time, the FSB immediately accused Ukraine of being behind the attack, although the explanation seemed unlikely to many: a young Ukrainian would have lived for months with her 12-year-old daughter in the same apartment complex as Darya Dugina to prepare the murder. And once it was committed, she was able to cross the Estonian border undisturbed.

Konstantin Malofeev himself stated on Monday that everything was fine with him. “I want to assure you that nothing today or tomorrow – threats or terrorist attacks – will affect my fervent and sincere patriotic position,” he added combatively.