Ukrainian intelligence reveals anti-Kremlin militia commander reported dead is still alive

Kapustin speaks to reporters near the Ukrainian-Russian border following an RVC cross-border raid into Russia’s Belgorod region, 24 May 2023. Photo: EPA / Sergey Kozlov

Ukrainian military intelligence said on Thursday that Denis Kapustin, the commander of the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC), who was reportedly killed on Saturday, is in fact still alive.

The Ukrainian Defence Ministry’s Main Directorate of Intelligence (GUR) said that Kapustin, the leader of the RVC, a far-right paramilitary volunteer force that fights alongside the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) against the Russian military, was reported dead so as not to sabotage an operation to save his life after Russia’s secret services placed a bounty of $500,000 on his head.

It said the operation to save the life of Kapustin, “whom Russian dictator Vladimir Putin considers a personal enemy” had taken over a month. “We also established who within the Russian secret services had ordered the crime and who was to carry it out,” the GUR said.

Ukraine had received money to murder Kapustin that would now go to support Ukraine’s special forces, the GUR continued. It also published footage of Kapustin saying he was willing to continue performing combat and special missions.

The RVC announced the death of its founder late last month, saying he had died while carrying out a combat mission in Ukraine’s southeastern Zaporizhzhia region.

The Russian authorities have twice sentenced Kapustin to life imprisonment in absentia on treason and terrorism charges over his role in a 2023 raid by the RVC and other pro-Kyiv groups into Russia’s western Bryansk region. Later that year, he participated in a separate incursion into the neighbouring Belgorod region.

Russia’s Federal Security Service also accused Kapustin of involvement in a thwarted plot to assassinate ultranationalist Russian media magnate Konstantin Malofeyev, who runs the pro-Kremlin Tsargrad television channel.

A former football hooligan and neo-Nazi activist from Moscow who spent much of his youth in Germany, Kapustin moved to Kyiv in 2017. Since 2019, he has been prohibited from entering Europe’s Schengen area due to his involvement in far-right movements within Germany’s mixed martial arts scene.

The Interior Ministry of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia has described him as “one of the most influential neo-Nazi activists and the creator of a professional fighting subculture”.

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Kapustin founded the RVC to fight alongside the AFU. The group, which is banned in Russia as a terrorist organisation, says its fighters hold “conservative views and traditionalist beliefs” and describes its mission as the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity within its 1991 borders and the overthrow of Vladimir Putin.