TL:DR
- Ukraine staged the assassination of Denis Kapustin, leader of the Russian Volunteer Corps, to protect him and claim a $500,000 bounty.
- Initial reports claimed he was killed by a drone, leading the RVC to express their intent to avenge him.
- Ukrainian Defence Intelligence confirmed the operation aimed to deceive Russian authorities and bolster their special units.
- Kapustin, a far-right activist, founded the RVC to combat Russian forces, advocating for Ukraine’s territorial integrity and Putin’s removal.
Ukraine fakes hit on Putin’s ‘personal enemy’ and uses bounty to fund war effort | News World
Ukraine faked the assassination of the leader of the right-wing Russian Volunteer Corps – a group fighting the overthrow of Vladimir Putin – for which the Kremlin had allocated a $500,000 bounty.
Denis Kapustin, also known by his pseudonym ‘White Rex,’ is alive, despite confirmation from the Ukrainian Armed Forces last week that he was killed by an FPV drone in the southern Zaporizhzhia region.
‘We will definitely avenge you, Denis. Your legacy lives on,’ the RVC group wrote on Telegram last, adding that it would provide further details about his death in due course.
But the Defence Intelligence of Ukraine (GUR) today confirmed that this was part of a special operation to save Kapustin’s life – and in the process earn $500,000.
‘Welcome back,’ Ukrainian military leader Kirill Budanov congratulated the fighter in a video released on the GUR channel on Telegram.
This represents a major embarrassment for the Kremlin regime, which has been relying on the paramilitary leader’s death.
Budanov stressed that Kapustin is seen as ‘Putin’s personal enemy’ and that the operation took more than a month to execute.
‘A failure of Russian secret services – the RVC commander is alive, and the half a million dollars received for his “killing” will strengthen DIU special units,’ he added.
Kapustin himself said in the video that his ‘temporary absence had no impact on the work of the units’.
A former football hooligan and neo-Nazi activist from Moscow who spent much of his youth in Germany, he moved to Kyiv in 2017.
Since 2019, he had been banned from entering Europe’s Schengen area over his involvement in far-right movements within the country’s mixed martial arts scene.
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Kapustin founded the RVC to fight alongside the Ukrainian army.
The group, which is banned in Russia as a terrorist organisation, says its fighters hold ‘conservative views and traditionalist beliefs’.
It describes its mission as the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity within its 1991 borders and the overthrow of the Russian president.