They attack army recruitment centers with Molotov cocktails, sabotage railroads, derail trains loaded with military equipment, and attack the vehicles of pro-war activists: since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, several groups of militants with various motivations carry out clandestine operations in Russia to protest against the war, reveals the Russian independent newspaper, The Insider. Those are the “Russian partisans”, continues the newspaper, which investigated their actions at length, most often under the radar of the media, and was even able to speak with representatives of a mysterious “Fighting unit of anarcho-communists”.
Since the start of the war, The Insider counted 23 attacks against voenkomat (literally “military commissariats”), these offices of information and enlistment of the army present in all the cities of Russia. Twenty of them caught fire after being attacked with Molotov cocktails, three others were vandalized. “It is an unprecedented fact in the country”, specifies the newspaper, adding that it was difficult for the authorities to ignore these attacks, the militants having taken care to film themselves and to broadcast their exploits on the Web.
This was not, however, a coordinated action, nor even the act of a single group, but that of a variety of small groups, ranging from left-wing anarchists and pro-Ukrainian activists to far-right groups . Sometimes it was just lonely acts