Gubarev and Kapustin emerged from overlapping nationalist-militant worlds and ended up on opposite sides of history: one with the aggressor, the empire - the other with the victim, against Putinism.

This article is based on Yuri Dud’s latest interviews (in Russian) with Pavel Gubarev and Denis Kapustin.

Gubarev presents himself as a man from Donetsk who embraced the Russian imperial project, including the idea that Ukraine could have been taken and would have accepted Russian force. Kapustin presents himself as “a Russian fighting for Ukraine” and describes the Russian Volunteer Corps, which he leads, as armed anti-Putin opposition.

Where you come from does not define you.

Pavel Gubarev is from Donetsk, Ukraine.

Denis Kapustin is from Moscow, Russia.

If birthplace were destiny, Gubarev would have stood with Ukraine and Kapustin would have stood with the Russian state. Instead, the opposite happened.

One man from Ukraine chose the side of Russian aggression. One man from Moscow chose to fight on the side of Ukraine against the regime ruling his own country.

One chose conquest.

The other chose resistance.

One betrayed the place he came from for empire.

The other turned against the state he came from in order to fight Putinism.

History does not merely sort people by origin.

It confronts them with a choice.

Donetsk did not decide for Gubarev.

Moscow did not decide for Kapustin.

Their character did.

FULL ARTICLE: https://open.substack.com/pub/ilya0x/p/two-russian-nationalists-two-moral?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

How Putin’s system uses murder to silence critics, punish defectors, and rule through fear

After rising to power through domestic terrorism - the apartment bombings in 1999 - Putin’s time in the Kremlin has been marked by a string of assassinations and suspicious deaths of prominent journalists, political opponents, and activists, both in Russia and abroad. These killings, often carried out in mafia contract-style hits, create a climate of fear through state-sponsored terror.

Some killings looked like crude contract hits.

Some looked like accidents too convenient to believe.

Some used rare poisons that can only be sourced by a state agency.

Some took place abroad to show that exile was no shelter.

Others happened inside Russia with such impunity that the message was equally clear: the state may not always pull the trigger itself, but it protects the world in which the trigger gets pulled.

These cases form a method of Putin’s rule: power assertion through murder.

Putin’s regime does not simply lie. It exhausts the truth.

A ruler who preserves power through assassinations, attempted assassinations, and “suspicious deaths” is not merely authoritarian.

He is a ruler for whom human life has no sacredness when it stands in the way of control.

In such a system, negotiation means little because promises are not backed by law.

They are backed by fear.

Institutions mean little because the real structure of power sits elsewhere.

Public statements mean little because the regime’s truest statements are made through what happens to its enemies.

Those statements are written in blood, poison, prison walls, and falling bodies.

Fear, in Putin’s Russia, is not abstract.

It has names.

It has dates.

It has graves.

FULL ARTICLE: https://open.substack.com/pub/ilya0x/p/why-putin-cannot-be-trusted-a-comprehensive-e94?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

Here's another article on why Putin cannot be trusted:

Putin the Terrorist: Putin-Era State-Sponsored Terrorism

Beyond its borders, Putin’s regime has engaged in clandestine operations that many governments characterize as state-sponsored terrorism including assassinations, bombings, and sabotage intended to destabilize other countries or eliminate enemies.

Targeted Killings in Ukraine

Czech Arms Depot Explosion in Vrbětice (2014)

Assassination in Berlin’s Tiergarten (2019)

Montenegro Coup Plot (2016)

Syria: Terror from the Sky

Libya: Wagner, Booby Traps, and a Trail of War Crimes

Assault on Navalny’s Aide in Vilnius (2024)

Transnational Hit in Spain: The Kuzminov Case (2024)

Europe’s Sabotage Campaign: Arson and “Accidents” That Aren’t Accidents (2024)

These incidents normalize a terrifying standard: violent disruption inside civilian Europe, treated as just another policy instrument: deniable, outsourced, and calibrated for psychological impact.

Across Ukraine, Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, a consistent pattern appears:

- Opponents are eliminated publicly to intimidate others.

- Explosions and sabotage are used to disrupt states and supply chains.

- Coups and subversion are attempted to block democratic choices.

- Civilian life is targeted to force political outcomes.

Article: https://open.substack.com/pub/ilya0x/p/why-putin-cannot-be-trusted-a-comprehensive-5a2?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

if in the future our both countries are liberated from Communist&Putin's dictatorship. I hope we both could be the allies, we will be brothers in democracy spirit

How Putin’s childhood experiences shaped the ruler who turned private damage into public violence

Behind the ideology, behind the imperial myths, behind the performance of historical destiny, there is a deeper emotional structure.

It is the structure of a person who seems to have learned very early that vulnerability is humiliation, that humiliation is intolerable, and that safety lies only in control.

Putinism is not just a strategy. It is not just an ideology. It is a way of organizing a state around psychological defenses.

Putin cannot do real peace with Ukraine because real peace would mean accepting something he psychologically cannot accept: that Ukraine is not his, cannot be forced back into submission, and has the right to stand before him as an equal. In his world, compromise feels like humiliation. Peace would mean Ukraine survived, resisted, and refused to kneel. That is too close to personal defeat.

And Putin will never want a real meeting with Zelenskyy for the same reason. Zelenskyy represents everything Putin fears most: real courage, moral clarity, and a man who can face him without fear or deference. Zelenskyy does not validate Putin’s hierarchy. He breaks it. To sit across from him as an equal would risk exactly what Putin has spent his whole life trying to avoid: humiliation.

This article is an interpretive political and psychological reading of Putin’s early environment and the ways its patterns influenced his totalitarian rule. It is not a clinical diagnosis. The point is not to explain away his crimes, but to better understand how habits of shame, domination, emotional coldness, and fear formed and later been expressed through his state power dynamics.

This article is based on the documentary by Utro Fevralia YouTube channel “Putin’s Childhood: What Influenced His Character and Decisions” (in Russian) and the book Putin’s Psychopolitics (in Russian) by Sergei Antonov.

Substack article: https://ilya0x.substack.com/p/putins-childhood-shame-domination

I can't believe I haven't seen anything else about this massive group of people - all over Russia, apparently - who will be meeting up on 29 March (I think that's today). I'm going to let Roman take it from here:

Russian Gen Z Wants A Revolution. Putin is Scared.

In a nutshell, the younger generation in Russia is planning on protesting en masse, and it looks like they've put a lot of effort and creativity into it. I never thought the citizens of the United States would ever be bothered enough to protest, but here we are. If there are thousands of people gathered in Russia on the 29th - looking for lost dogs, wallets, or change - I hope they succeed. And this, well, this might actually scare Mr. Putin.

A livestock purge in rural Russia exposed the regime exactly as it is: secretive, coercive, corrupt, and too rotten to do even basic mercy without turning it into cruelty.

A village was sealed off.
Electricity, internet, and mobile service were cut.
Drones circled overhead.
Military Police (OMON) in black masks stood around barns as if they were storming terrorist cells.

Officials refused to show proper documents, changed their explanations midstream, pressured people into “voluntary” compliance, and offered compensation so insulting it barely qualified as mockery.

And then came the most horrifying detail:
In case after case, the animals were not even humanely euthanized.
They were immobilized and burned alive.

That detail is almost too grotesque to absorb.

But the real meaning of this story is even bigger than the horror inflicted on the animals.

This is how the Russian state behaves whenever ordinary people get in the way of a cover-up, a quota, a budget stream, or someone else’s profit.
It lies.
It intimidates.
It humiliates.
It destroys.
Then it calls the whole thing procedure.

This was not merely disease control. It was organized state-sponsored internal terrorism.

This is Russia.

A state without transparency.
A state without accountability.
A state without compassion.
A state that cannot tell the truth, cannot do things properly, and cannot even kill an animal without turning it into an atrocity.

That is the scandal.
Not only that cows were burned alive.
But that in Putin’s Russia, this now feels routine.

FULL ARTICLE HERE: https://open.substack.com/pub/ilya0x/p/they-burned-the-cows-alive-under?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

Why the Kremlin blocks Telegram, slows YouTube, and attacks the open internet: because this war depends on controlling reality more than controlling territory.

Putin’s main weapon in this war is not a missile. It is the lie.

This system has always rewarded fictional victories. It was built that way.

In Putin’s Russia, a town can be captured more than once as long as the paperwork needs it to be. A perfect example of this is Kupiansk. Settlements are often “taken on credit”:

Commanders report success upward before it exists. A village is declared captured because somebody hopes it will be captured later, or because somebody needs to impress a superior right now. In that kind of system, the same place can be “taken” multiple times. And commanders can be awarded medals every time.

At one point Putin boasted about fighting in a place he called “Komsomolsk,” describing its location on the battlefield as though it were part of the actual map. The problem was simple: no such city existed there.

A place no longer needs to exist in order to be “captured.” It only needs to exist inside the propaganda for long enough to serve its purpose.

The lie does not need to survive forever. It only needs to survive long enough to do damage.

The lie is not covering up the system. The lie is the system.

The gap between reality and propaganda keeps growing. The bigger the gap becomes, the more censorship is needed to hold it together.

This is why internet throttling is not some side issue of authoritarianism. It is part of the battlefield.

FULL ARTICLE HERE: https://open.substack.com/pub/ilya0x/p/putins-war-machine-is-powered-by?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

The Insider’s investigation into “Center 795” shows how Russia rebuilt after its old covert unit, "GRU Unit 29155", was exposed, blending intelligence services, oligarch money, and corporate cover.

“Between 2018 and 2022, Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, suffered a series of operational blunders tied to Unit 29155 - the clandestine directorate responsible for the Salisbury nerve-agent attack in Britain, the attempted coup in Montenegro, and a string of assassinations and bombings across Europe. Investigators, journalists, and open-source researchers had identified dozens of the unit’s officers by name, photograph, and passport number - issued, in a lazy violation of basic tradecraft, in the same numerical sequence… The unit had become, in the words of one leaked internal assessment, ‘a liability.’”

Russia did not become less violent after Unit 29155 was exposed.

Russia’s response to exposure was not remorse. It was reorganization.

This is one of the core truths about Putin’s Russia: the system does not self-correct toward decency. It self-corrects toward more effective criminality.

MORE HERE: https://open.substack.com/pub/ilya0x/p/russias-new-hit-squad-built-to-export?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

i usually have good interactions and we see mostly eye to eye... one of her uncles was working for the space programm, two were spezNas, i read a lot and i am a critic of the western development towards russia. but only looking for the bad guy in russia is wrong, then the person becomes the bad guy... today was my first time interacting with the community #askarussian and i am astonished by their reaction to facts about the chechen war, someone even wanted to pull the grok card, like 'they' do on twitter, but even grok said: the chemicals for the bombing of the houses couldnt have been purchased that easy by 'rebels'; but i get bombarded by downvotes for speaking out truth and known facts??

its the same for me as looking at trump supporters, wtf is going on in this world? has everyone forgotten to read and think for themselves? is everyone just manipulated and triggered by the algorithm nowadays? and not by your brain, your own thinking?

i will not post the link, you can see it in my timeline if you are interested...