A pro-war nationalist responsible for downing flight MH17 has been arrested after he accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of weakness and indecision in Ukraine.
Igor Girkin, an extreme nationalist militia leader turned blogger, was arrested at his Moscow flat and detained for two months on extremism charges after a court appearance.
He faces up to five years in prison if convicted.
He argued that total mobilization is needed for Russia to achieve victory and recently criticised Putin as a ‘nonentity’ and a ‘cowardly mediocrity.’
He said: ‘A lot of empty talk, the minimum of action and the utter lack of responsibility for failures — that is Putin’s style of late. A nonentity that has managed to cheat a large part of the population has been at the country’s helm for 23 years.’
Girkin’s charges signal the Kremlin’s toughened stance with critics after last month’s abortive rebellion by the Wagner mercenary company.
Girkin was convicted of murder in the Netherlands, in absentia, last year for his role in the downing of a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet over eastern Ukraine that had 10 Britons on board.
Strelkov has over 875,000 subscribers on his messaging app channel, the Club of Angry Patriots, where he issued a statement protesting his detention as a ‘provocation’ that ‘undermines the population’s trust in law enforcement organs’ and ‘carries extremely negative consequences for the country’s stability.’
A former colonel in the Federal Security Service, he took part in the Kremlin’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and then led fighters in eastern Ukraine during the first months of a Moscow-backed separatist rebellion there in 2014.
His role in downing MH17 killed all 298 people aboard the Boeing 777 and he was accused along with two others of bringing the Buk air defence missile system from a Russian military base into Ukraine and putting it into position for launch.
The Dutch Public Prosecution Service said it was watching the developments ‘with interest, although we cannot verify what is going on.’
A statement continued: ‘We would, of course, like nothing more than for this man, who has been sentenced to life imprisonment in the Netherlands, to serve his prison sentence here.
‘The victims of MH17 and their relatives deserve that. But the fact is that Russia does not extradite its citizens, and this event, unfortunately, does not bring that any closer.’
