RDK II: GLADIO in Russia
Well then couch potatoes, is it not the RaHoWa yet? Belgian guns and mystery killers, French curators and American coordinators. Ritual executions, Wotanjugend and Slava Rusi.
While the world focuses attention on the ongoing negotiations between Russia, the US, and Ukraine, I propose looking elsewhere - to the world of covert operations. They’ll be important in times of peace, war, and everything in between. False flag terrorist operations are an excellent way to destabilize any unwanted peace process. And activities to disorganize the enemy’s rear are always on the menu in wartime. When battlefield successes are scarce, an exciting assassination or two is great for the PR war.
Last week, we looked at how the most extreme (and FBI-infiltrated) nazi-satanist group on earth (the Order of the Nine Angles, O9A), inspired one of the leaders of the Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK), a military unit created and managed by the Ukrainian government in 2022 to conduct asymmetric warfare on Russian territory. We also looked at the network of thousands of ‘esoteric hitlerists’ at ‘Wotanjugend’ that the RDK’s Alexei Levkin boasts sprawls across Russia.
Today, I was going to to analyze a spate of school shootings and serial killings in Russia committed by young people inspired by or associated with the RDK and O9A in Russia. But when the article reached 7,000 words at a draft stage, I realized I had to break it up. Tomorrow all that meat will come out for paid subscribers.
Today’s post will focus a bit more on the RDK itself, and the relationship it enjoys with Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence (GUR), headed by Kyryllo Budanov. I mentioned it in the last article, but didn’t delve into it too deeply. This link is of no small importance, given, for one, that a recent poll showed that Budanov is apparently the second most trusted man in the country, after former army chief Zaluzhny (Zelensky was third). I certainly wouldn’t want to implicate him in school shootings without carefully establishing my argument.
Distant isles
Budanov’s GUR calls itself ‘the Island’, and its office is located in a ‘a derelict string of buildings on a peninsula on the Dnieper River’ in Ukraine’s capital. This Island has quite a global reach. While it often boasts of its supposed success attacking Russian military targets across the world, I mean something else.
In March 2019, the Australian neo-nazi Brenton Tarrant killed more than 50 people in an attack on a mosque in New Zealand. According to the Royal Commission on the matter, Tarrant had visited first Ukraine, then Russia in 2015, spending a month in both countries.
And as journalist Leonid Ragozin pointed out in May 2023, Tarrant had plenty of supporters in the Island-created Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK):
Russian neo-Nazi Aleksandr “Piter” Skachkov (on the right) was arrested by Ukraine’s security services (SBU) in Kharkiv in 2019 for publishing the manifesto of Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant. His fresh photo from the Russian border checkpoint seized by Ukrainian troops in Belgorod region.
Time now to have a closer look at Budanov, the RDK, and the west.
Budanov and the west
It seems that my good friends over at the New York Times decided to release some timely material for my substack. Just yesterday, the NYT released a new article on the war in Ukraine, which included some information on the sort of operations that Ukraine’s intelligence services conduct in Russia. I also must state my deep shock and disgust at the Russian narrative put forth by the NYT regarding Ukraine’s status as the arena for a proxy war!
One European intelligence chief recalled being taken aback to learn how deeply enmeshed his N.A.T.O. counterparts had become in Ukrainian operations. “They are part of the kill chain now,” he said.
Time and again, the Biden administration authorized clandestine operations it had previously prohibited. American military advisers were dispatched to Kyiv and later allowed to travel closer to the fighting. Military and C.I.A. officers in Wiesbaden helped plan and support a campaign of Ukrainian strikes in Russian-annexed Crimea. Finally, the military and then the C.I.A. received the green light to enable pinpoint strikes deep inside Russia itself.
In some ways, Ukraine was, on a wider canvas, a rematch in a long history of U.S.-Russia proxy wars — Vietnam in the 1960s, Afghanistan in the 1980s, Syria three decades later.
General Donahue [in charge of coordinating cooperation with the Ukrainian military from March 2022 onwards - EIU] was a star in the clandestine world of special forces. Alongside C.I.A. kill teams and local partners, he had hunted terrorist chiefs in the shadows of Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan. As leader of the elite Delta Force, he had helped build a partnership with Kurdish fighters to battle the Islamic State in Syria. General Cavoli once compared him to “a comic book action hero.”
Disappointingly, the latest NYT article said little about covert operations inside Russia, despite the fact that General Donague, one of the main characters of the article, is described as a renowned covert warriors.
A February 2024 article from the NYT was more detailed on the matter, and identifies Budanov as the key rising star in Ukraine’s intelligence community, per the US:
Around 2016, the C.I.A. began training an elite Ukrainian commando force — known as Unit 2245 — which captured Russian drones and communications gear so that C.I.A. technicians could reverse-engineer them and crack Moscow’s encryption systems. (One officer in the unit was Kyrylo Budanov, now the general leading Ukraine’s military intelligence.)
The article, as always with the NYT, is also filled with claims that the Americans didn’t want to work with the ballsy Ukrainians, ‘Yet a tight circle of Ukrainian intelligence officials assiduously courted the C.I.A. and gradually made themselves vital to the Americans.’ Those poor unwitting American intelligence agencies!
As the partnership deepened after 2016, the Ukrainians became impatient with what they considered Washington’s undue caution, and began staging assassinations and other lethal operations, which violated the terms the White House thought the Ukrainians had agreed to. Infuriated, officials in Washington threatened to cut off support, but they never did.
Naturally, it was Nalyvaichenko of the SBU (Security Services of Ukraine) who renewed cooperation with the CIA in 2014. I wrote about this Ukrainian spook and his idolization of 1940s genocidal fascism here. But instead of the old SBU, ‘riddled with Russian spies’, the star of US intelligence in Ukraine would be the GUR, the general directorate of intelligence:
Unlike the domestic agency, the GUR had the authority to collect intelligence outside the country, including in Russia. But the Americans had seen little value in cultivating the agency because it wasn’t producing any intelligence of value on the Russians — and because it was seen as a bastion of Russian sympathizers.
At the time [2016], the future head of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, General Budanov, was a rising star in Unit 2245. He was known for daring operations behind enemy lines and had deep ties to the C.I.A. The agency had trained him and also taken the extraordinary step of sending him for rehabilitation to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland after he was shot in the right arm during fighting in the Donbas.
One day after General Kondratiuk was removed [due to his role in a controversial operation on Crimea in 2016 that supposedly enraged Biden - EIU], a mysterious explosion in the Russian-occupied city of Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine, ripped through an elevator carrying a senior Russian separatist commander named Arsen Pavlov, known by his nom de guerre, Motorola.
The C.I.A. soon learned that the assassins were members of the Fifth Directorate, the spy group that received C.I.A. training. Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency had even handed out commemorative patches to those involved, each one stitched with the word “Lift,” the British term for an elevator.
…
A team of Ukrainian agents set up an unmanned, shoulder-fired rocket launcher in a building in the occupied territories. It was directly across from the office of a rebel commander named Mikhail Tolstykh, better known as Givi. Using a remote trigger, they fired the launcher as soon as Givi entered his office, killing him, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials.
The first Trump administration also saw an acceleration in investment in Ukraine’s covert capabilities:
But whatever Mr. Trump said and did, his administration often went in the other direction. This is because Mr. Trump had put Russia hawks in key positions, including Mike Pompeo as C.I.A. director and John Bolton as national security adviser. They visited Kyiv to underline their full support for the secret partnership, which expanded to include more specialized training programs and the building of additional secret bases.
The base in the forest grew to include a new command center and barracks, and swelled from 80 to 800 Ukrainian intelligence officers. Preventing Russia from interfering in future U.S. elections was a top C.I.A. priority during this period, and Ukrainian and American intelligence officers joined forces to probe the computer systems of Russia’s intelligence agencies to identify operatives trying to manipulate voters.
Naturally, all this only increased in 2022:
Within weeks, the C.I.A. had returned to Kyiv, and the agency sent in scores of new officers to help the Ukrainians. A senior U.S. official said of the C.I.A.’s sizable presence, “Are they pulling triggers? No. Are they helping with targeting? Absolutely.”
Both article emphasize numerous times that the US has not been involved in Ukraine’s operations on Russian soil. Yesterday’s article mentions this in the context of Budanov:
A foreshadowing had come back in March, when the Americans discovered that Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, the HUR, was furtively planning a ground operation into southwest Russia. The C.I.A. station chief in Kyiv confronted the GUR commander, Gen. Kyrylo Budanov: If he crossed into Russia, he would do so without American weapons or intelligence support. He did, only to be forced back.
This is referring to operations by Budanov’s RDK on the Belgorod and Bryansk border regions of Russia around that time. Which brings us to Budanov’s relationship to the RDK.
Budanov and the RDK
Originally, Budanov simply praised the RDK as ‘brave Russian partisans’. Nowadays, he doesn’t make any effort to hide his agency’s full-bodied support for a group whose leader is banned from entering the EU for his violent neo-nazism.
Budanov’s GUR put out an entire movie praising the RDK’s operations on Russian soil in June 2024, called ‘the Legion of Light’:
What a coincidence that the US, claiming to oppose any operations on Russian soil, ended up being closest with the figure in the Ukrainian intelligence community that seems to have conducted the most operations on Russian soil. In the above video, Budanov boasted:
"The [Russian] Grayvoron district has been completely emptied. Something is happening in the city of Belgorod itself. The situation there is severe. The Russians themselves have now understood what it means to live under wartime conditions,"
"It is highly advantageous that they managed to pull forces from the front to defend their own borders. When the situation begins to shift radically and Russia starts retreating, they will also play their part"
Quite the ‘independent partisans’, as they were gleefully described by Ukrainian when they first attacked the Bryansk region of Russia in March 2023. media. An April 2024 Politico article that was quite candid about the ‘neo-nazis’ in the RDK was also just as clear about who was in charge:
The whole enterprise is a pet project of Kyrylo Budanov, the head of GUR. As the cross-border raids unfolded last month, Budanov praised the Russian paramilitaries as “good warriors” on a national newscast. “They’ve been helping us since the first day … They have fought in many of Ukraine’s hottest spots. We’re going to try and help them as much as we can,” he said.
Budanov was also clear about his relation to the RDK in an April 2024 interview with the Washington Post:
To counter the Russians, Budanov plans more cross-border attacks by the “Russian volunteers” who operate inside Russia with support from his service, along with more drone attacks. He explained: “We’ve offered a plan aimed at reduction of Russian potential. It encompasses a lot of aspects, like the military industry … critical military targets, their airfields, their command-and-control posts.”
The goal is to show that President Vladimir Putin cannot “protect the population from the war getting into Russia,” he explained. “When you’re sitting, say, in St. Petersburg, and you’re seeing the war only on TV, you will always be supportive. … But people start to get nervous when some facility [is attacked] near their house.”
Budanov scrolled his phone for images from a Telegram channel that show Russian civilians in the town of Belgorod surveying damage to local buildings. The bombs that had caused most of the destruction were Russian S-300 antiaircraft missiles shot at Ukrainian drones, he said, rather than the drones themselves, but the traumatizing effect on the population was the same.
The above logic is quite important for my main argument about Budanov’s relationship to networks we will analyze tomorrow operating in Russia. In his words, the goal is to traumatize the local Russian population, to demonstrate them that their government cannot protect them. Note the extreme pessimism about the Russian population as a whole. In the next line, he states that
Putin’s war was supported by over 70 percent of Russians, he said.
He continues:
“In reality, the damage done by those [antiaircraft] missiles is a lot higher than the damage that would potentially be done by a drone,” he said.
When I asked if Ukrainian attacks inside Russia would continue, Budanov offered a rare trace of a smile. “I hope so,” he said. A cartoon circulating on the internet shows Putin meeting Budanov in a park and asking if his dog bites. Budanov answers no, and Putin pets the animal. The dog takes a gun and shoots Putin dead.
Who are Budanov’s deadly dogs in Russia?
The RDK and Budanov
The RDK also enjoys coy references to its patron Budanov. RDK video on GUR’s birthday. Nowadays, they don’t try to hide that they work under Budanov at all. This is from a September 2024 post:
The Russian Volunteer Corps, in coordination with the 'Stugna,' 'Paragon,' 'Junger,' BDR (Battalion of Daring Ones), and 'Terror' units—as part of a special detachment under Timur of Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence (GUR MO) and the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU)—managed to eliminate the 'thorn' in Vovchansk, straighten and stabilize the front line. We passed this test with honor!
The RDK and the ‘Terror unit’, all working together in the happy GUR family. They are certainly a multinational bunch. The deputy commander of the Timur unit of GUR stated in an anonymous interview with a Ukrainian publication that he originally worked served in various Georgian intelligence services, then honed his craft as a spook in Israel.
The RDK telegram has also boasted of ‘French curators’ who used to train them, as well as the use of Belgian weapons in operations on Russian soil. They really ought to consult more with the NYT before posting on social media. Or perhaps the NYT would tell us that it’s merely the dastardly French who helped train the unit whose raison d’etre is operations on Russian soil and regime change in Russia, and that the timid CIA had nothing to do with it.
In a 2023 awarding ceremony, the RDK was also open about being a part of the GUR. Along with the usual ‘Glory to Rus’ (more on which soon), the first figure proclaims all RDK fighters to be members of the GUR:
The RDK and Russia
Just like Budanov, the RDK is also quite obsessed with the idea of destroying any feeling of security in Russia through individual terror. Here is a post of theirs from March 9 of this year:
Unknown heroes set fire to the entrance of the FSB’s main building in Moscow on Lubyanka Square.
The main product that Putin’s system sells to the people of Russia is ‘security.’ For this ‘security,’ they wage ‘wars on distant frontiers.’ For it, security forces read your private messages. The fight for ‘security’ justifies terror against their own population and removes all restrictions on the actions of law enforcement. The raids by the [Russian Volunteer Corps] have shattered the illusion of ‘security.’ And just days ago, right in the heart of Moscow, concerned Russian citizens proved—and sent us proof for publication—that the FSB can’t even ensure its own safety. So how can it protect its citizens?
The RDK’s members are quite familiar and supportive of grotesque acts of murder against non-military targets in Russia. In May 2024, Wotanjugend, created and led by the RDK’s Alexei Levkin, wrote a post praising Dmitry “Kissly” Borovikov. Here is how post-soviet neo-nazi expert Leonid Ragozin describes him:
the founder of Combat Terrorist Organisation, a white terror group that operated in St Petersburg in the 2000s, he is believed to be linked to the murders of an 8-year-old Tajik girl, a scientist, a Senegalese student union leader and two of his former comrades, ritually executed for disloyalty. Borovikov was killed by security agents when they attempted to arrest him, so he never stood trial. He was just 21 years old, but he left a considerable political and literary legacy. Apart from propagating hate murder, Borovikov is remarkable because he was an early advocate of Nazi internationalism - building links with white supremacist groups in other countries.
The relatively conventional military operations that took place in Bryansk and Belgorod certainly aren’t Budanov’s forte, and they collapsed under Russian military pressure within a few days. Budanov’s main claim to fame is through covert operations on Russian soil, particularly assassinations. This is where the RDK’s connections in Russia get very interesting.
Russian officials certainly accuse Ukrainian intelligence and the RDK of terrorism. In May 2023, Russia’s FSB claimed to have ‘neutralized’ two RDK members in Russia who attempted to assassinate our beloved Russian nationalist businessman Konstantin Malofeev with a car bomb.
In March 2024, Russian media reported that an RDK member, apparently acting under SBU supervision, blew himself up in the Samara region upon confrontation with law enforcement. He was apparently planning to attack a point of humanitarian aid. In one of their first telegram posts in August 2022, the RDK claimed that the ‘new strategy’ of the ‘Russian partisan movement’ was Molotov cocktail attacks on mobilization centres and attacks on railway lines.
It can’t be easy to find someone willing to risk their lives in an assassination or drone operation on behalf of Ukraine. Having a leadership position inside already existing networks of radically anti-government, violently terroristic individuals is certainly helpful.
Recall my last article, where RDK leader Levkin boasted about the thousands of followers he has in Russia through his ‘Wotan Jugend’ community and his national socialist black metal group M8L8th. What about top RDK fighter Kanakhin, who claims to have spent years deeply immersed in Russia’s O9A nexion, possibly even participating in ritual murders in the arctic wastes of the Kola peninsula?
No wonder Budanov chose them to lead his ‘pet project’ to take on Russia. He chose people with the most powerful network of agents in the Russian Federation. As Levkin states in an interview with Ukraine’s Army.TV this year, his first meeting with Azov in 2014 was on the basis of his status as a ‘representative of the Russian nationalist underground’.
RDK has always placed their ideology front and centre. Their very first telegram post was about a fallen fighter, emphasizing that he had joined the ‘rightwing movement’ as a young man. They also posted a video in August 2022 where a RDK fighter throws a sig heil while yelling ‘Glory to Rus’, their alternative to ‘Slava Ukraini’.
This slogan is part of the Russian neo-nazi ideology of a return to supposedly monoethnic, pagan medieval ‘Rus’ instead of ‘Putinist neo-bolshevik multinational Russia’. In reality, it means feudalistic balkanization, as I wrote in my article on nazi paganism.
In August 2024, Ukraine hosted an international conference of fascist organizations, including Wotanjugend and foreign GUR fighters. As Ragozin writes:
Half of the attendees wore military fatigues, being active servicemen with the Ukrainian army, most notably in GUR’s international units.
GLADIO and the RDK
In one interview, a GUR fighter who conducted numerous operations on Russian soil claims that the GUR had been laying the foundations for ‘stay-behind’ operations on territories that could be occupied by Russia long before 2022.
In this context, I am reminded of the cold war GLADIO network. This CIA operation was, in theory, aimed at creating networks of anti-communist warriors that could resist the Red Army if it occupied Europe. In reality, GLADIO operatives were hard at work at a range of terroristic operations inside Europe. Some were false flags blamed on the communists, such as the bombing at Italy’s Bologna train station that killed 85 people.
There were even more obscure GLADIO operations elsewhere. There are a number of ties between the mysterious 1980s Brabant killings in Belgium and GLADIO networks. In 1990, Belgian defence minister Guy Coeme stated on national television that ‘I want to know whether there exists a link between the activities of this secret network, and the wave of crime and terror which our country suffered from during the past years’.
The 16 shootings that took took place in the supermarkets and other public areas of the Brabant region near Brussels killed 28 people, with little discernible political motive. Some have speculated that their aim could have been simply to terrorize the Belgian population, pushing them to be open to anything, including a rightwing military coup, if it could bring about ‘law and order’.
Gladio researcher Allan Francovich also uncovered evidence that the killings were linked to the deep cooperation that existed in the 1970s between GLADIO operatives and Belgium’s most extreme neo-nazi group, the Westland New Post. Daniele Ganser’s book contains a great deal more information on the links between GLADIO and the Brabant killings.
This cold war history seems relevant given the special relationship, so to speak, existing between the CIA and Budanov’s GUR - and by extension with the RDK.
Nowadays, the RDK keeps on calling for Russian neo-nazis to active in the struggle against the government. In June 2023, Wotanjugend called them to join in the fighting in Belgorod - ‘well then couch potatoes, is it not the RaHoWa yet?’ The Racial Holy War is a popular concept among modern neo-nazis.
I’ll note that it is particularly popular among rightwing accelerationists of the O9A tilt. They believe that by acts of random violence such as school shootings and serial killings, decadent western society can be destabilized into a state of total war, which will be ideal for the emergence of a new galactic Reich.
This is the key ideology of the Order of the Nine Angles, for instance. They believe that by committing acts such as human sacrifice, child sexual abuse, serial killing and mass murder, the Judeo-Christian ‘aeon’ of human history will collapse, making way for a new, ultra-militaristic social order, the ‘Imperium’. In this glorious future, “Aryan” society will colonize the Milky way and establish a galactic society. Someone has been reading too much warhammer, as you can see.
In any case, I think the reader is now sufficiently convinced of the validity of a more paranoid approach towards seemingly ‘random acts of violence’ in Russia, the topic of tomorrow’s article. Become a paid subscriber if you haven’t already to find out about Russian school shooters, the Maniac Killers Cult, 14 year-old ‘hypnotized’ nazi murderers, and what this all has to do with scam call centres. Stay tuned, and stay safe.
Been to Russia many times and several times met people who espoused the most crazy racial theories. Once when attending some techno concert in Western Siberia it was explained to me that techno was "Aryan" music and no wonder it started in Berlin. Another time I met a young man at a hippie colony on the black sea who venerated a Swastika and had build a shrine to it. Russia is multinational and many - especially young men - feel under threat from the minorities and from immigrants. Part of Navalny 's appeal was his Russian nationalism. Putin is not a Russian nationalist but a preserver of empire. Look at how he coddles Kadyrov. Which pisses of the majority of Russians.
I sincerely believe that the greatest threat for his regime is from dissatisfied Russian nationalists. He is nilly willy stoking Russian nationalism by fighting Ukraine. Budanov is unfortunately not a fool.
Thank you once again for this fascinating and illuminating information.
Immediately when you mentioned the connection between CIA and these Neo-Nazis and school shootings in Russia my mind leaped to the school shootings in the USA. These instances have been increasing in number ever since 9/11. I also associate this activity with the Antifa and BLM riots of 2020. And the Hong Kong troubles before then which were the product of NED which is a CIA front and its subsidiary Oslo Freedom Forum. I saved a photo of Josh Wong posing at an OFF event along with the Chairman of the White Helmets and Klitchko, Mayor of Kiev.
In short I wondered if NED/OFF are funding and training, and with “trauma based identity destruction and mind control”, controlling and dispatching various types of "activists” and “sleepers” and school shooters inside the USA as well as abroad.
I remember reading an account of the travels of this man Brenton Tarrant. I think it was from our “Amazing Polly”, Polly St George. She copied some of Tarrant’s “accelerationist” manifesto. It sounded like pure CIA to me. He was said to have travelled widely without any visible means of economic support, and to have been in Turkey prior to a terrorist bombing and then to have spent time in Israel before later doing his worst in New Zealand. This is all from memory.
My intuitions in this dark speculation were sharpened by Dave McGowan’s terrifying book “Programmed to Kill”. Following the end of the Vietnam War and the CIA’s "Operation Phoenix” the “serial killer’ phenomenon became an increasing problem in the USA. CIA torture methods and LSD experiments producing “serial Killers” seemed to be coming home to roost.
Dave McGowan’s book “Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops and the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream” is a good source as well. As is Tom O’Neill’s “Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties” (notably Chapter 11 “Mind Control”)
I am pleased to have had copy of Daniel Ganser’s book for many years. Your paragraph here was interesting:
"This is the key ideology of the Order of the Nine Angles, for instance. They believe that by committing acts such as human sacrifice, child sexual abuse, serial killing and mass murder, the Judeo-Christian ‘aeon’ of human history will collapse, making way for a new, ultra-militaristic social order, the ‘Imperium’. In this glorious future, “Aryan” society will colonize the Milky way and establish a galactic society. Someone has been reading too much warhammer, as you can see.”
This reminds me of the wonderful final scene of the 1951 movie, “The Day the Earth Stood Still”. This was Micheal Renee as the extraterrestrial visitor warning earth:
“I have come to give you these facts. We are not concerned with how you run your planet. But if you threaten to extend your violence this Earth of yours will be reduced to a burned out cinder. The choice is up to you."