A Ukrainian military leader on Putin’s hit-list conned the Kremlin out of $500,000 by faking his own death to collect8 the bounty, Kyiv revealed on Thursday.
Denis Kapustin, a far-right military commander and founder of the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC), a battalion of far-right Russians who fight for Ukraine against Putin, was reported to have been killed in a drone strike in Zaporizhia on December 27 after spending months atop the Kremlin’s most wanted list.
“We will definitely avenge you, Denis,” the RVC wrote in a Telegram post ‘confirming’ Kapustin’s death. “Your legacy lives on.”
But in a stunning twist, Ukrainian military intelligence (HUR) revealed on Thursday that the assassination of Kapustin, 41, had instead been part of an elaborate hoax cooked up by Kyiv to save the militia leader’s life and trick Russia into paying them a half-a-million dollar bounty that had been placed on his head.
“Welcome back to life,” HUR chief Kyrylo Budanov announced in a video on January 1, congratulating Kapustin on bamboozling the Kremlin.
“First of all, Mr. Denis, congratulations on your return to life. That is always a pleasure. I am glad that the money allocated for your assassination was used to support our struggle,” he said. “I wish us all and you personally success.”
Budanov, who described Kapustin as a “personal enemy” of Vladimir Putin, said the plot had taken more than a month to organize and that the commander would promptly return to the frontlines to continue his duties after swindling the Kremlin out of its cash.
Kapustin, better known by his callsign of ‘White Rex,’ also confirmed his role in the plot and said his “temporary absence” had not affected his unit’s effectiveness on the battlefield.
“I am ready to move to the area of operations and continue commanding the RDK,” he said.
Formed in 2022, the RVC was one of several international brigades composed of dissident Russians who took up arms against Putin and played a key role in cross-border excursions into Russia’s Belgorod and Kursk regions in 2023 and 2024.
But Kapustin, who has been formally named a terrorist by the Russian government, has long been considered a controversial ally to Ukraine due to his association with several neo-nazi and far-right groups, which saw him banned from entering Europe’s Schengen zone in 2019 because of his extremist views.
The RVC describes its members as holding “conservative views and traditionalist beliefs” but has denied accusations of neo-naziism, instead claiming their goal is to establish a “true nation-state for Russians” that “lives in peace with the nations that surround it.”
“I have my set of views, it’s a patriotic set of views, it’s a traditionalist set of views, it’s a right-wing set of views,” Kapustin told Al Jazeera in 2023.
“You’ll never find me waving a flag with a swastika, you’ll never find me raising my hand in a Hitler sign. So why would you call me that?”
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