Igor Strelkov

In May 2020 Strelkov confessed in an interview with Ukrainian journalist Dmitry Gordon that he ordered the killing of Popravko and another man: "Yes, these people were shot on my orders. No one ripped open their stomach. Do I regret that they were shot? No, they were enemies." Strelkov also stated that the killing of Rybak was also to some extent under his responsibility.

On 19 June 2019, Dutch prosecutors charged Strelkov for murder in the MH17 crash and issued an international arrest warrant against him.

On 19 June 2019, the Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team (JIT), investigating the shooting down of MH17, officially announced a criminal case against Strelkov. The court proceedings were scheduled to start on 9 March 2020 before the District Court of The Hague, at the Schiphol Judicial Complex [nl] The JIT said it would ask Russia to extradite the suspects who are currently on Russian soil, saying: "The criminal trial will take place even if the suspects choose not to appear in court." Interfax news agency quoted Strelkov as saying: "I do not give any comments. The only thing I can say is the rebels did not shoot down the Boeing."

According to different sources, he unreservedly demands that the "liberal clans" (liberal elements of the Russian elite) be destroyed. On 28 May 2016 he formed the Russian National Movement, a political group in favor of "uniting the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Belarus, and other Russian lands into a single all-Russian state and transforming the entire territory of the former USSR into an unconditional zone of Russian influence."

— Igor Strelkov, "Radio-KP", 18 January 2016

In an interview with "Radio-KP" on 18 January 2016, Strelkov acknowledged that he used extrajudicial punishment and at least four people were executed by firing squad, while he was in Sloviansk.

In March 2016 Strelkov's appearance as panelist on Moscow Economic Forum along with Oleg Tsarev and Pavel Gubarev attracted critical reactions in Russia, with Yaroslav Grekov from Ekho Moskvy accusing MEF organizers of "promoting terrorism".

In May 2016, Strelkov announced the creation of the Russian National Movement [ru] , a neo-imperialist political party. The party is in favor of "uniting the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Belarus, and other Russian lands into a single all-Russian state and transforming the entire territory of the former USSR into an unconditional zone of Russian influence." Strelkov said "the Russian National Movement fully rejects President Vladimir Putin's regime and calls for an end to the current climate of fear and intimidation of Russia's citizens". The party has called for "strict quota system for migrant workers from the former Soviet republics in Central Asia and the Caucasus" and the cancelling of laws on internet control.

In an interview on 22 January 2015, Igor Strelkov, one of the major "Russian self-defence" commanders in 2014 Crimean crisis, explained that the "overwhelming national support for the self-defence" as portrayed by the Russian media was fiction, and they actually had to "forcibly drive the deputies to vote [to join Russia]". Under his command, the rebels "collected" the deputies into the chambers to vote. A majority of the law enforcement, administration and army did not support the "self-defence" (one notable exception being Berkut) and only the presence of regular Russian army in Crimea "made the whole thing work". Strelkov took part in commanding Russian troops in their capture of the Simferopol airport.

In July 2015 a writ was filed in an American court by families of 18 victims formally accusing Strelkov of 'orchestrating the shootdown'. The writ claimed damages of US$900 million and was brought under the Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991

After Lugansk commander Alexander "Batman" Bednov was killed by other militants in January 2015, Strelkov criticised the killing as a "murder" and "gangster ambush", and suggested that other commanders seriously consider leaving Donbass to Russia, as he did. In a January 2015 interview for Anna News, Strelkov said that in his opinion "Russia is currently at state of war", since the volunteers who arrive to Donbass "are being supplied with arms and shells". He also noted that "he never separated Ukraine from Soviet Union in his mind" so he considers the conflict as a "civil war in Russia".

In October 2015, Strelkov said that he planned to create a party that would oppose Putin's government and "respond to the Western fascist threat that Russia faces today."

In 2014 Anonymous International disclosed what it said were Strelkov's personal emails, revealing that he had served in the FSB for 18 years from 1996 to March 2013, including in Chechnya from 1999 to 2005, The Moscow Times reported. The newspaper also said Strelkov was born in Moscow and that it contacted him by email and phone but that he would not confirm the claims. A local pro-Russia militia leader in Ukraine, Vyacheslav Ponomarev, a self-described old friend of Strelkov's, said the information about Strelkov was true. His pseudonym "Strelkov" ("Strelok") can be roughly translated as "Rifleman" or "Shooter". He has also been dubbed Igor Groznyy ("Igor the Terrible").

The emails leaked in May 2014 and allegedly authored by Strelkov contain his diaries from Bosnia and Chechnya he sent to his friends for review. One story describes an operation of capturing Chechen activists from a village of Mesker-Yurt. Asked by one of friends why he didn't publish them, Strelkov explained that "people we captured and questioned almost always disappeared without trace, without court, after we were done" and this is why these stories cannot be openly published.

— Igor Girkin, — Newspaper "Zavtra", 20 November 2014

According to an accomplice, Strelkov arrived in Crimea describing himself as the "Kremlin's emissary," and soon after formed the Crimean self-defense forces. His position was above that of self-declared Crimea prime minister Sergei Aksyonov, and his main task in March 2014 was the accelerated military training for the newly formed Crimean forces, and selecting the best among them for transfer to the invasion of the Donbas. Strelkov personally negotiated and oversaw the withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from Crimea.

— Igor Strelkov, Newspaper "Zavtra", 20 November 2014

On 12 April 2014, Strelkov led a group of militants who seized the executive committee building, the police department, and the Security Service of Ukraine offices in Sloviansk. Strelkov claimed that his militia was formed in Crimea and consisted of volunteers from Russia, Crimea, and also from other regions of Ukraine (Vinnitsa, Zhitomir, Kiev) and many people from Donetsk and the Lugansk region. According to him, two thirds were Ukrainian citizens. The majority of men in the unit had combat experience. Many of those with Ukrainian citizenship had fought in the Russian Armed Forces in Chechnya and Central Asia, others had fought in Iraq and Yugoslavia with the Ukrainian Armed Forces. In an interview, Strelkov stated that he was given orders not to give up Sloviansk.

On 15 April, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) opened a criminal proceeding against "Igor Strelkov". He was described as a Russian recruiter and leader of armed "saboteurs" and a chief organizer of the "terror" in Ukraine's Sloviansk Raion (including an ambush that killed one and wounded three SBU officers), who had coordinated Russian military takeovers of Ukrainian units in Crimea during the 2014 Crimea crisis in March, after having crossed the Russian-Ukrainian border in Simferopol on 26 February. In Crimea, he was reported to be instrumental in negotiating the defection of the Ukrainian Navy commander Denis Berezovsky. The next day (16 April), he allegedly sought to recruit Ukrainian soldiers captured at the entrance to Kramatorsk.

On 10 July 2014, news outlet Mashable reported finding execution orders three days earlier for Slavov and Lukyanov in Strelkov's abandoned Sloviansk headquarters. The orders were signed "Strelkov" with the name Girkin Igor Vsevolodovich printed underneath. Also sentenced to death was Alexei Pichko, a civilian who was caught stealing two shirts and a pair of pants from an abandoned house of his neighbour; according to an unconfirmed story, his body "had been dumped on the front lines" after he was executed. On 24 July, Ukrainian authorities exhumed several corpses from a mass grave site on the grounds of a children's hospital near the Jewish cemetery in Slovyansk, which might contain as many as 20 bodies of those executed by order of "Strelkov". Among the identified victims were four Ukrainian Protestants who the police and locals said have been kidnapped on 8 June after attending a service at their church, falsely accused of helping the Ukrainian Army, robbed for their cars, and shot the following day.

Multiple sources cited a post on the VKontakte social networking service that was made by an account under Strelkov's name which acknowledged shooting down an aircraft at approximately the same time that the civilian airliner Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) was reported to have crashed in eastern Ukraine in the same area near the Russian border on 17 July 2014. The post specifically referenced how warnings were issued for planes not to fly in their airspace and the downing of a Ukrainian military Antonov An-26 transport plane which the Ukraine Crisis Media Center suggested was a case of misidentification with the MH17. This post was deleted later in the day and the account behind it claimed that Strelkov has no official account on this social service. Most of the 298 victims in the plane's crash came from the Netherlands; on 19 July the country's biggest newspaper De Telegraaf included Strelkov's photo in the front page collage of pro-Russian rebel leaders under the one-word headline "Murderers" ("Moordenaars"). Russian opposition lawyer and politician Mark Feygin posted a purported order by Strelkov where he instructs all his men and commanders who "have in their possession personal effects from this plane" to deliver the found items to his HQ so "the valuables (watches, earrings, pendants, and other jewelry and items from valuable metals)" would be transferred to "the Defense Fund of the DPR." Strelkov was reported to be the author of an alternative version of the incident, wherein "no living people were aboard the plane as it flew on autopilot from Amsterdam, where it had been pre-loaded with 'rotting corpses'." This conspiracy theory was then distributed and discussed in Russian state-controlled media outlets.

At his press-conference on 28 July 2014, Strelkov denied his connection to the downed plane and announced that his militants were killing "black-skinned" mercenaries.

According to ITAR-TASS news agency on Wednesday, 13 August 2014, Strelkov was seriously wounded the previous day in fierce fighting in the pro-Russian rebel held territories of Eastern Ukraine, and was described to be in "grave" condition. DNS representative Sergei Kavtaradze refuted this news this shortly after, saying Strelkov is "alive and well".

In November 2014 in an interview for "Moscow Speaking" radio said that "the existence of Lugansk and Donetsk People's Republics in their current form, with the low-profile but still bloody war, is definitely convenient for USA in the first place, and only for them, because they are the ulcer that divides Russia and Ukraine". Later in November in an interview for "Zavtra" newspaper Strelkov stated that the war in Donbass was launched by his detachment despite both Ukrainian government and local combatants avoided an armed confrontation before. Also he recognized himself responsible for actual situation in Donetsk and other cities of the region.

In late April 2014, Strelkov was identified by Ukrainian intelligence as Colonel Igor Girkin, registered as a resident of Moscow. Journalists visiting the apartment where he allegedly lived with his mother, sister, as well as his former wife and two sons, were told by neighbors that a "fancy black car" had that same morning picked up the woman living there. The neighbors also described him as "polite" and quiet, and knew him under two surnames, Girkin and Strelkov. Strelkov is known as a fan of military-historical movement and has participated in several reenactments connected with various periods of Russian and international history, but especially the Russian Civil War where he would play a White movement officer. His personal idol and role model is said to be the White Guard general Mikhail Drozdovsky, killed in a battle with the Red Army in 1919. According to The New York Times, "his ideological rigidity precedes any connections he has to Russia's security services, stretching back at least to his days at the Moscow State Institute for History and Archives. There, Mr. Strelkov obsessed over military history and joined a small but vocal group of students who advocated a return to monarchism."

In his interview with Oleksandr Chalenko on 2 December 2014, according to the journalist, Strelkov did confirmed that he is an FSB colonel, but this claim was then subjected to censorship and omitted from publishing. He also acknowledged that anarchy exists among the so-called Novorossiya militants. He stated that Igor Bezler's militants in particular acted independently, the so-called "Russian Orthodox Army" had split in half, and others forces represented a patched cover of various unrelated groups. Strelkov criticised the ongoing attacks on the Donetsk International Airport as pointless and harmful.

During the weekend of 26–27 April, the political leader of the separatist Donetsk People's Republic (DPR), Strelkov's long-time friend, Alexander Borodai, also a Russian national from Moscow, ceded control of all separatist fighters in the entire Donetsk region to him. On 26 April, "Strelkov" made his first public appearance when he gave a video interview to Komsomolskaya Pravda where he confirmed that his militia in Sloviansk came from Crimea. He said nothing about his own background, denied receiving weapons or ammunition from Russia, and announced that his militia would not release the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) observers that it had taken hostage unless pro-Russia activists were first freed by the Ukrainian government. On 28 April, the EU sanctioned "Igor Strelkov" as a GRU staff member believed to be a coordinator of armed actions and a security assistant to Crimea's Sergey Aksyonov. On 29 April, Strelkov appointed a new police chief for Kramatorsk. On 12 May, "I. Strelkov" declared himself "the Supreme Commander of the DPR" and all of its "military units, security, police, customs, border guards, prosecutors, and other paramilitary structures."

On the night of 4–5 July, during a large-scale offensive by the Ukrainian military following the end of a 10-day ceasefire on 30 June, Strelkov and his militants fled from Sloviansk, which was then captured by Ukrainian forces, thus ending the separatist occupation of the city which had started on 6 April. Shortly before this, a video was posted on YouTube in which Strelkov desperately pleaded for military aid from Russia for "Novorossiya" ("New Russia", an historical name for South-East Ukraine with particular popularity amongst separatists) and said Sloviansk "will fall earlier than the rest." Other rebel leaders denied Strelkov's assessment that the people's militia were on the verge of collapse. One of them, the self-proclaimed "people's governor" of Donetsk Pavel Gubarev, compared Strelkov to the 19th century Russian general Mikhail Kutuzov, claiming that both "Strelkov" and Kutuzov would "depart only before a decisive, victorious battle." However, his retreat was strongly criticized by the Russian nationalist Sergey Kurginyan and a rumor inside Russian ultranationalist circles alleged Russia's powerful "grey cardinal" figure Vladislav Surkov conspired with east Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov to organize a campaign against "Strelkov" as well as against the Eurasianism ideologue Alexander Dugin. Kurginyan accused Strelkov of surrendering Sloviansk and not keeping his oath to die in Sloviansk. Kurginyan believes that surrendering Sloviansk is a war crime, and Strelkov should be responsible for that. Donetsk People's Republic security minister Alexander Khodakovsky, the SBU Alfa defector and commander of the rebel Vostok Battalion, also protested and threatened a mutiny.

Alexander Cherkasov, head of Russia's leading human rights group Memorial, is convinced that the "Igor Strelkov" involved in Ukraine is the same person as a Russian military officer called "Strelkov", who was identified as being directly responsible for at least six instances (on four separate occasions) of the forced disappearance and presumed murder of residents of Chechnya's mountain Vedensky District village of Khatuni and nearby settlements of Makhkety and Tevzeni in 2001–2002, when "Strelkov" was attached to the 45th Detached Reconnaissance Regiment special forces unit of the Russian Airborne Troops based near Khatuni. None of these crimes were solved by official investigations. The website of Chechnya's official human rights ombudsman lists several residents of Khatuni who went missing in 2001 (Beslan Durtayev and Supyan Tashayev) as having been kidnapped from their homes and taken to the 45th DRR base by the officers known as "Colonel Proskuryn and Strelkov Igor"; another entry lists the missing person Beslan Taramov as abducted in 2001 in the village of Elistandzhi by the 45th DRR servicemen led by "Igor Strelko (nicknamed Strikal)". Cherkasov too lists Durtayev and Tashayev (but not Taramov) among the alleged victims of "Strelkov". Cherkasov and other observers suspected it was in fact the same "Strelkov" until May 2014, when Strelkov himself confirmed he has been present at Khatuni in 2001, where he fought against the "local population". According to Cherkasov, as a result of Strelkov's actions in Chechnya, two sisters of one of those "disappeared", Uvais Nagayev, in effect turned to terrorism and died three years later: one of these sisters, Aminat Nagayeva, blew herself up in the 2004 Russian aircraft bombings over the Tula Oblast aboard a Tu-134 "Volga-Aeroexpress" airliner, killing 43; the other sister, Rosa Nagayeva, participated in the Beslan hostage crisis that same year.

The Russian media has identified Strelkov as an officer of the Russian military reserves who has expressed hardline views on eliminating perceived enemies of the Russian state and has fought on the federal side in Russian counter-separatist campaigns in Chechnya and on the pro-Moscow separatist side in the conflict in Moldova's breakaway region of Transnistria. According to various sources, Strelkov took part in the Bosnian War as a volunteer on the Serb side, and in Chechnya under contract. In 1999, he published his memoirs of the fighting in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 2014, he was accused by Bosnian media (Klix) and a retired Bosnian Army officer of having been involved in the Višegrad massacres in which thousands of civilians were killed in 1992.

Vice News claimed that "during the 1990s, Girkin wrote for the right-wing Russian newspaper Zavtra, which is run by the anti-Semitic Russian nationalist Alexander Prokhanov" and where Borodai was an editor. Writing for Zavtra ("Tomorrow"), Strelkov and Borodai, who too was reported to have fought for Russia-backed Transnistria and Republika Srpska separatists in Moldova and Bosnia and Herzegovina, together covered the Russian war against separatists in Chechnya and Dagestan. He would also often write as a "Colonel in the Reserves" on Middle East subjects, such as the conflicts in Libya, Egypt and Syria, and for the Abkhazian Network News Agency (ANNA), a Russian-language pro-Russian publication which supports Abkhazian separatism in Georgia.

Igor Ivanovich Strelkov (Russian: И́горь Ива́нович Стрелко́в , IPA: [ˈiɡərʲ ɪˈvanəvʲɪtɕ strʲɪlˈkof] , Russian: И́горь Все́володович Ги́ркин , IPA: [ˈiɡərʲ ˈfsʲɛvələdəvʲɪtɕ ˈɡʲirkʲɪn] , born Igor Vsevolodovich Girkin; 17 December 1970) is a Russian army artillery veteran who played a key role in the Annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, and later the War in Donbass as an organizer of the Donetsk People's Republic's militant groups. Strelkov, a self-described Russian nationalist, was charged by Ukrainian authorities with terrorism. He is currently sanctioned by the European Union for his leading role in the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine. Ukrainian authorities have called him a retired colonel of the GRU (Russia's external military intelligence organisation).

According to a report issued by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, "reportedly, on 26 May, by order of Strelkov, Dmytro Slavov ('commander of a company of the people's militia') and Mykola Lukyanov ('commander of a platoon of the militia of Donetsk People's Republic') were 'executed' in Sloviansk, after they were 'sentenced' for 'looting, armed robbery, kidnapping and abandoning the battle field'. The order, which was circulated widely and posted in the streets in Slovyansk, referred to a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Council of the USSR of 22 June 1941 as the basis for the execution." The report also mentions Strelkov's efforts to recruit local women into his armed formations: "A particular call for women to join the armed groups was made on 17 May through a video released with Girkin 'Strelkov', urging women of the Donetsk region to enlist in combat units." Sloviansk's separatist "people's mayor" and former boss of Strelkov, Ponomarev, was himself detained on an order of Strelkov on 10 June for "engaging in activities incompatible with the goals and tasks of the civil administration".