Inside the plot by Russian exiles to overthrow Putin

For part of the past year, he had been fighting in Ukraine — not as a participant in the Russian invasion but as a leader of a volunteer brigade of anti-Putin fighters. Battling alongside Ukrainian troops, Ammosov saw action against his own countrypeople. Today, he no longer dreams of defending his motherland. He dreams of destroying it, by any means necessary.

The most important thing to understand about Ammosov is that, despite his Russian-sounding name, he is a Sakha, a member of a Turkic people native to Siberia. Sakha is also the name of his native province in northeastern Russia, an expanse of land nearly as vast as India. It is, Ammosov says, wondrously endowed with natural resources — diamonds, gold, silver, uranium, iron ore, coal, and several rare earth elements. Yet its people are destitute, while its riches are siphoned off by those Ammosov has come to see as "Moscow oligarchs" tied to Vladimir Putin. "We are richer than the Arabs," he says, "but we live in poverty."

And the poverty bred anger, turned inward. His youngest brother was shot dead in a drunken brawl. "Everyone in Sakha is surrounded by many deaths of loved ones," he tells me.

But it was only when Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in 2022, that Ammosov began to plot the overthrow of his homeland. The war, as he sees it, presents a rare opportunity to inflict defeat on Moscow's "imperials" and break up Russia entirely. And with Russia in pieces, Sakha could become its own sovereign nation.

"I am a former GRU captain," Ammosov tells me. "I know how to destroy countries."

And how, I ask, do you do that?

"We were developing new strategic weapons to destroy the US economy," he says, citing his work as a senior researcher at the GRU. "The same can be applied to Russia. Mathematical modeling of individual sectors of the economy to identify vulnerabilities." He pauses. "There are plenty of people who want to destroy their country in any country," he says. "You just need to give them the tool."

As fantastic as Ammosov's objectives may sound, he is not alone. As peaceful opposition to Putin's brutal rule has come to be seen as increasingly futile — especially in the wake of the death in February, under the "care" of Russian authorities, of the imprisoned opposition leader Alexey Navalny — the ranks of militant resistance to Russia are growing. Ever since the invasion of Ukraine, a loosely connected and sometimes fractious cohort of Russians, both inside the country and in exile, has come to believe that Russia can be liberated only through violence and sabotage. Some, like Ammosov, want to break up the Russian Federation entirely. Others, namely a band of far-right Russian nationalists, have contempt for nonethnic Russian citizens like the Sakha and aim to remove Putin to establish rule by "real Russians" only. Some are leftist anarchists. Still others are Western-oriented liberals, hopeful of anchoring a post-Putin Russia in the broader European community.

As I found in months of wide-ranging interviews, everyone aspiring to a new Russian revolution grasps the seemingly impossible odds of their bid to topple Putin. They grasp, too, the risk that their open embrace of bloodshed poses to their own lives. Moscow's security-services operatives do not hesitate to kill the Kremlin's adversaries, even on foreign soil. In Warsaw, Ammosov shows up for our meeting wearing a T-shirt and shorts, without, to my eye, a security detail. But when I ask him whether he's concerned for his safety, he is clear-eyed. "Of course," he says. "We're at war." To be safe, he has stashed his wife and two children in another city.

A reminder of the risk arrived in the early hours of August 1, when a Russian drone strike in Kyiv nearly destroyed the home of Ilya Ponomarev, a political leader of the militant anti-Putin opposition. Ponomarev — who was profiled last year in The Washington Post under the headline "Could this man bring down Putin?" — was bloodied by the attack, but he survived. "This means that we have managed to identify the weak points of the [Putin] regime, and they are doing everything to stop me," he told me hours after he was struck.

Russia, of course, is no stranger to revolution. The new generation is heir to a national tradition of political violence and subversion that dates back centuries. "Today's Russian oppositionists find themselves in a similar situation to their 19th-century forefathers: that the move to violence is in part a result of a closing of 'normal' politics," Sean Guillory, a historian at the University of Pittsburgh, says. "The use of violence is to accelerate the revolutionary clock." For Ammosov and the other combatants, the question isn't whether violent revolution is justified. It's whether violence has any chance of success where all else has failed.

Soon after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Sokolov told me, he began to think "there is no future for Russia." The problem was that entrenched Soviet-era elites, including bureaucrats and ex-KGB officers, were carving out a system of "state capitalism" that was severely impeding the nation's progress. He came to support independence for any region of Russia, including Ammosov's Sakha, with a capacity for "self-rule."

During our conversation, Sokolov was joined by his close associate Anastasia Sergeeva. From 2009 to 2016, Sergeeva served as the Moscow program director of the International Republican Institute, a nonprofit funded by the US government that aims to foster democracy around the world. Washington, of course, has a long and checkered history of recruiting, funding, and arming insurgents pitted against America's global adversaries. But when I asked Sokolov and Sergeeva whether the CIA is supporting their revolutionary activities, they both scoffed. "They are afraid," Sokolov said — scared of riling the Kremlin. Russian businessmen are bankrolling his efforts, he tells me, but he declines to name any individuals.

Sergeeva shares her assessment of what is spurring Russians to turn against Russia. Under Putin's rule, she says, "the country is closed." For a Russian man of fighting age, there are two options. One is to "sell his life expensively" by taking a cash bonus to join the war in Ukraine, which has taken the lives of more than 100,000 Russian soldiers. The other is "to escape from the country and forget about everything." That bleak choice, Sergeeva added, leaves many Russian men "frustrated" by an immovable "weight" pressing on them. The Russians have a word for this particular type of distress: toshno, which literally means a physical feeling of nausea — completely sick of the state of things.

This sort of man, Sokolov chimed in, "can't stand the situation." "He can't look in the mirror," he added. "He feels loneliness in Russia, where everyone else supports the war." To volunteer to fight alongside fellow Russians in Ukraine is to seek a new "brotherhood."

For an example of this type of man, Sokolov pointed me to a businessman in his early 50s who goes by Valter, his military call name. After volunteering to fight in Ukraine, he was wounded in action and is now recuperating in Kyiv. When I contacted him via WhatsApp, Valter told me he is divorced, with an adult daughter. By his mother, he is an ethnic Ukrainian. The invasion of Ukraine made him feel like "an accomplice to an incredible crime," but he knew that going to war against Putin — "the devil himself" — would permanently sever his ties to his family in Russia. But now, he said, "I can look at myself in the mirror." He shared photos of his multiple bullet wounds, including a gaping gash in his upper left arm and bone fragments in his hand. "Of course, I will return to the front as soon as the activity of my hand is restored," he said.

In Warsaw, I met with Tatiana Kosinova, the mother of a volunteer now fighting against Russian forces in Ukraine. In Russia, she worked for Memorial, a now disbanded group cofounded by the human-rights activist Yelena Bonner that documented the horrors of the Soviet Gulag. After fleeing the country with her son in 2022, she met Sokolov in Warsaw and began helping him recruit volunteer fighters. Her son, she told me, "wanted to be in the first group of our volunteers," and "I'm very proud of this." As for Putin, he is a "usurper, bandit, and fascist," she said, who "needs to be overthrown, killed, destroyed."

For some, resorting to armed rebellion is the culmination of a lifetime of disillusionment with the Kremlin. On a video call from Kyiv, a fighter who goes by Itil told me he is a Crimean Tatar who was born in Moscow in 1979. He grew up in the circus, the family business, and performed as an acrobat all over the Soviet Union. His father, he said, was a "badass" who hated the USSR. Over shortwave radio, the family listened to the Voice of America. Itil says he served as a high-ranking clerk in a military command center tasked with planning Russia's response to a nuclear attack by a hostile power. Inspired by his idol, the charismatic liberal politician Boris Nemtsov, Itil became active in anti-Putin demonstrations. But when a buddy was arrested and jailed, for pushing a police officer at a street protest, Itil fled to Ukraine to avoid a similar fate. (Nemtsov was assassinated on a bridge near the Kremlin in 2015.) For him, Russia's 2022 full-scale invasion was the tipping point. "I see children killed," he recalled. "I am going mad." He signed up to fight against Russian soldiers. These days, he works mainly behind the front lines, tending to wounded volunteers in Kyiv hospitals. In the event that Russian armed forces overrun Ukraine, he plans to evacuate his Ukrainian wife and her daughter, who's from a previous relationship. As for himself, "I will not run again. My fear is over."

Those who apply from inside Russia are instructed to get to a former Soviet republic — such as Armenia, Georgia, or Kazakhstan — that Russian citizens can enter without a visa. Once they're there, Sokolov subjects them to a "deep background" interview via remote video from his post in Warsaw. To weed out the Kremlin's spies, he asks the applicants about their motives for seeking to enlist and grills them on their biographical details. Sokolov says those working for Russia's security service, the FSB, invariably trip over some aspect of their cover story. They "always make a mistake," he says.

Applicants who pass the interview stage, some 70%, are told to wait as their transit to Ukraine is worked out. Sokolov works with Ukrainian military authorities to discreetly move the recruits in batches of about 20 at a time, roughly every 30 days. Once in Ukraine, the recruits are subjected to additional methods of verification, including a lie-detector test. Those who pass are asked to sign a contract with Ukraine's Ministry of Defense, put on the payroll, and dispatched to training camps at secret locations. From there, they go to the front lines, attached to a brigade composed of fellow Russians but headed by a Ukrainian officer.

In practice, the system has proved far from smooth. Initially, Sokolov recruited Russians for an existing brigade, known as the Russian Volunteer Corps. But the RDK turned out to be made up largely of what Sokolov calls "far-right" types, including Nazis, who refused to accept the basic principles of liberty and freedom of thought as proclaimed by the European Convention on Human Rights. They insisted, for example, on "clear blood criteria" for determining who is a Russian. Sokolov also believes the brigade had been "infiltrated" by the FSB.

Last year, Sokolov cut ties with the RDK. With his Ukrainian contacts, he established a new brigade, the Siberian Battalion, with Ammosov as a leader. But Ukrainian military intelligence, Sokolov says, kept the unit on too tight a leash, rendering it ineffective in the field. Now he's standing up another brigade, one that will operate directly under the aegis of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. As yet unnamed, the new unit will be trained and advised by military veterans from America, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, and Australia. The goal, Sokolov says, is to "execute complex operations," as opposed to mere hit-and-run raids. The unit's Russian participants will be true soldiers — and once their reputation for professionalism and bravery is established, he is confident, the new brigade will become a magnet for fresh batches of volunteers.

The Ukrainian government in Kyiv considers the number of Russian volunteers on the ground a state secret. Unsubstantiated estimates among anti-Putin militants range as high as 10,000 — a tiny band of brothers, at best, compared with the 450,000 in Putin's armed forces in Ukraine now. Whatever the precise count, every volunteer matters. Kyiv is struggling to replenish the ranks of its armed forces, as the war has already claimed the lives of at least 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers.

The Russian volunteers are not a meaningful military threat to the Russian homeland, but their symbolic value is high. In March, as Russia was holding its sham presidential election, dozens of Russian fighters engaged Putin's forces in an assault aimed at the border regions of Belgorod and Kursk. The fighters claimed to have crossed the border into Russia; Putin's Defense Ministry insisted that it had "repulsed" the attack, dealing out heavy casualties. Whatever the case, the specter of Russians taking up arms against Russia is not an image that Putin wants to see spread to the populace at large.

But how exactly Putin is to be overthrown is a question, I found in my conversations with the rebels, that eludes a ready answer. There is no master plan. For every Ammosov, convinced that sabotage of the economy is the key, there are others who believe that their example, of militant resistance to Putin's soldiers in Ukraine, can inspire fellow Russians back in the motherland to turn against the tsarlike ruler in the Kremlin.

Still, every revolution, in the early going, has been dismissed as inconsequential, from Lenin and Leon Trotsky in tsarist-Russia times to Mao Zedong in China and Fidel Castro in Cuba. Violent revolution requires herculean levels of organization, patience, and luck.

To succeed, revolution must also weather a storm of criticism from those who advocate change by more peaceful means. Outside Sokolov's circle, the new anti-Putin militants are scorned by many Russian political activists in exile who oppose violence both in principle and in practice. Any attempt at an armed insurrection, they warn, will ultimately backfire, alienating Russian citizens who might otherwise be sympathetic to the anti-Putin cause.

"I do not think that the road to the victory of democracy lies through one group of Russians shooting at other Russians," says Boris Akunin, a popular Russian writer and a founder of True Russia, an anti-Putin group of exiles. "This would never be understood and supported by the Russian people. I believe that the road to victory lies through motivating the mobilized Russian soldiers to revolt against the dictatorship. That's how revolutions happen." It's a form of insurgency that was employed by the Bolsheviks: Win over the tsar's soldiers, and the tsar will fall.

Revolutions also have a way of fracturing from within, as their leaders jockey for positions to exercise command once the despised regime is overthrown. One Russian revolutionary, in fact, is already claiming the mantle of leadership in a post-Putin Russia. Ilya Ponomarev, the 49-year-old dissident who was nearly killed by a Russian drone strike in August, is a former tech entrepreneur who served in the Russian parliament. Today, he's the political head of the Freedom of Russia Legion, another anti-Putin volunteer brigade in Ukraine. And perhaps more importantly, he has cultivated a vibrant profile in Washington, where he has become a fixture of the Russian exile community.

One day in March, I met in Washington with Ponomarev and several figures in his retinue. We started with late-afternoon drinks at a hotel before shifting to more drinks, and pizza, at Ponomarev's ski-chalet-like home in Northern Virginia. As he drew on a flavored-tobacco water pipe and sipped from a bottle of Bold Rock Imperial Cider, Ponomarev extolled the prospects for a violent revolution in Russia, precipitated by the volunteer fighters in Ukraine. "We are supported by the Russian people," he told me. "We already have enough force to hold a certain ground" inside Russia. On my departure, he handed me an inscribed copy of his 2002 book, "Does Putin Have to Die?"

Yet unlike Trotsky, Mao, and Castro, Ponomarev is not hunkered down on the front lines with his fellow insurgents. Instead, he spends part of his time in Kyiv, punctuated by frequent visits to various European capitals and his home outside Washington. A Russian fighter in the Freedom of Russia Legion stressed to me that Ponomarev does not speak for those actively involved in battle.

He also claims leadership of a political group, the Congress of People's Deputies, that advocates for violent resistance to the Kremlin. During our meeting in Washington, Ponomarev introduced me to Alexei Sobchenko, a former State Department translator who now serves as a "foreign agent" for the congress. Sobchenko's registration papers, filed with the Justice Department in October, cite an address in Warsaw for the congress. But the group has no actual office there, as I discovered on my trip to Poland; the address led me to a residence in a leafy suburb on the outskirts of the city.

Ponomarev told me the home in Warsaw is just the group's "legal address." And it's true that the congress has organized several high-profile events in Warsaw, including a March forum that was attended by Michał Kamiński, the deputy speaker of the Polish Senate. Ponomarev told participants at the forum that the congress is "formulating alternative governing bodies in Russia" to take over after Putin's fall.

Other leaders of the insurgency dismiss such theatrics. In Warsaw, Sokolov and his associates all told me they consider Ponomarev a charlatan. Kosinova, whose son is fighting in Ukraine, likened Ponomarev to Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, the schemer in Nikolai Gogol's novel "Dead Souls" who "purchases" deceased male serfs to create a facade of wealth. That's quite a gibe. For an American equivalent, think of a flimflam-man compound of P.T. Barnum, Bernie "Ponzi Scheme" Madoff, and Donald "Trump University" Trump.

Ponomarev is acutely aware of the barbs. In Lviv, Ukraine, at a recent summit of prominent Russian exiles supporting the violent resistance against Putin, he was lambasted by Leonid Nevzlin, a rich former business partner of the onetime oil baron Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Nevzlin, by Ponomarev's account, expressed distrust of the Freedom of Russia Legion and accused Ponomarev of wanting to be the "new Navalny." (Navalny himself never supported armed resistance to Putin.)

The legion's political leader considers the attack a badge of honor. "Nevzlin is just an old, bored man. He is jealous of all rising stars," Ponomarev told me. "My position is simple. There are no enemies in the opposition. We can debate the tactics, but we should not fight each other. Let the thousand flowers bloom."

But some members of the Anti-War Committee have embraced the ongoing Russian war on Putin. Among them is Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion turned political activist who is a declared supporter of the Russian volunteers in Ukraine. Another committee member told me he would be assassinated if Putin's operatives knew how active he is in the military effort to stop the invasion of Ukraine. The committee, it seems, is splintering on the core, inescapable question of the necessity of violence to effect change in Russia.

To win political support for the militants' cause in Washington, Ponomarev, in March, told me he was establishing a base of lobbying and public-relations operations at a three-story red-brick property on Capitol Hill, a few blocks from the Supreme Court. But the next day, when I dropped by the address, I found a real-estate agency's sign out front. Months later, there was still no record of a transaction. "The property is under contract with us, but the deal is not yet closed," Ponomarev assured me. Who, I asked, is "us"? "Right now, it is with me personally," he replied. "But the final deal would be some neutral NGO, so the house would be a joint effort by different opposition groups." He declines to say who is paying for the property, the value of which Zillow estimates is $2.24 million.

One target of Ponomarev's lobbying efforts is Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, a former FBI special agent who sits on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and is a leading supporter of US military aid to Ukraine. Ponomarev says the anti-Putin resistance has support from elected officials in both the House and the Senate, but "it is all very sensitive, and many people even have to deny our acquaintance." Fitzpatrick's office declined to comment.

A Ponomarev associate suggested I imagine "Charlie Wilson's War," the 2007 film about the flamboyant congressman from Texas, played by Tom Hanks, who heroically secured funding for the CIA to arm the mujahideen resistance to Soviet forces in Afghanistan. To stay with the movie parallel, it seems Ponomarev is searching, too, for a CIA officer to back the rebellion cause, a role played in the film by Philip Seymour Hoffman. "I know a lot of good officers" in the CIA, Ponomarev told me, who "sympathize" with the anti-Putin insurgency. But when I asked the CIA for comment, the agency comes as close to a full denial of involvement as one can imagine it making. "Consistent with US policy," a spokesperson told me, "the CIA works closely with the Ukrainian Security Services, and not ad hoc groups of volunteers."

Daniel Fried, a former US ambassador to Poland, rejects the notion that William Burns, the director of the CIA, "would allow any support" for Russians fighting Putin. The agency wouldn't risk being associated with them, Fried told me, "in case they do something you don't like." Still, he adds, the Biden administration is not actively objecting to Kyiv's standing up of the anti-Putin Russian-volunteer units. "We're not going out of our way to tell the Ukrainians to cut them off," Fried says.

Whoever emerges as the leader of the violent resistance, it has attracted backing from some seemingly improbable figures. Supporters include Evgenia Chirikova, a Russian environmental activist who won global acclaim for her efforts to protect an old-growth forest outside Moscow. "This violence started with Putin," she told me from her base in Tallinn, Estonia. "We need to organize an equal answer." Another avowed militant is Andrey Volna, a renowned trauma surgeon in his early 60s who once occupied a prestigious medical post in Moscow. "In general, I am an extremely peaceful guy," he told me from Tallinn. "Unfortunately, we need military force to change the fascist, dictatorial power."

The growing belief, even among former advocates of non-violence, that Putin can be deposed only by an armed insurrection, is what Russia's new revolutionaries are counting on. The idea is to act as a vanguard — or influencers, in the modern parlance — to set an example for their fellow Russians. By word and deed, they aim to create a flock of followers capable of toppling a tyrant. At the end of our conversations in Warsaw, when I ask Ammosov whether it's really possible to overthrow Putin, he points not to the future but to the country's not-so-distant past. "The Russian empire collapsed twice in the 20th century," he observes, referring to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the collapse of the USSR in 1991. And both times, he notes, the uprising happened suddenly, seemingly without warning. Russians know from long and bitter experience that when the last resort comes to look like the only resort, anything is possible.

Paul Starobin is the author of "Putin's Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia."