AS the figurehead of Russian armed resistance and a devout Kremlin enemy, Ilya Ponomarev has more than one reason to look over his shoulder.
The Russian rebel, 48, has earned his place in Vladimir Putin’s firing line after declaring war on the despot’s regime – and tells The Sun how he plans to smash it to pieces in a revolution not seen for 100 years.
Ilya Ponomarev spearheads a Russian opposition movement that is preparing for a ‘democratic revolution’
GettyHe told The Sun he might fear for his life but ‘we are at war’ and ‘we must fight’[/caption]
The exiled opposition leader being escorted out of Bolotnaya square in Moscow in 2012
Ponomarev sat down for a tell-all interview with The Sun
Over the years, the 48-year-old has watched dozens of his friends and colleagues murdered or imprisoned by Putin’s ruthless regime.
But the leading Kremlin opponent now has an extra target on his back.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the exiled Russian politician has been planning for a major battle against Putin – one that he hopes will see his volunteer armies march on Moscow.
He told The Sun that the world needs to get used to the “100 per coming reality” that Putin will be toppled.
Wearing the white and blue pin of “new Russia” flag, he warned: “It’s just a matter of when.”
Although he hopes it won’t have to be bloody, he predicted the scale of such an event could mirror the Russian Revolution of 1917 that violently brought the end of centuries of monarchy.
Ponomarev was a member of the Russian State Duma from 2007 until 2016.
However, after being the only MP out of 445 to vote against the annexation of Crimea in 2014, he was exiled “under personal order’s from Putin”.
The lonely voter said at the time that history would prove he was right.
“I knew at the end of the day we would be facing this war,” he said looking back now. It was “obvious” that Putin desired all of Ukraine” – even if no one else was willing to say so.
Now on the outside, he heads a network of pro-Ukrainian guerrilla fighters and helps lead a Russian shadow cabinet to prepare for Putin’s “inevitable” demise.
He knows his comrades are not “traitors” to the motherland, but will one day be its “liberators” – purging Russia of Putinism, which Ponomarev calls “modern-day fascism”.
He said he had “always dreamed of changing the world”, but might not have realised quite how big or dangerous his mission would become.
Sitting down for an interview in London, Ponomarev makes a joke about his tea being poisoned.
He laughs, but the seriousness is not lost on him.
Inside the Kremlin, people are waiting, watching and ready to jump
Ilya Ponomarev
“I never feel safe. My very close friend [Alexander] Litvinenko was killed here in London and it all happened in front of my eyes,” he said.
The defected Russian spy died an agonising death in 2006 after his tea was poisoned with the radioactive nerve agent Novichok in a London hotel.
In September 2021, a European court finally ruled the Putin critic had been murdered by the Kremlin.
But Ponomarev remembers something invaluable he learnt from his assassinated friend.
“[Litvinenko] told me to psychologically accept you are at war, he was always drawing the parallels with World War 2,” he said.
He told Ponomarev to compare the battle against Putin to French leader Charles de Gaulle’s fight to free his country from Nazi Germany.
“He was victorious and led his country forward. This is exactly our role model,” he explained.
“Right now, we are fighting against the evil of Putinism… but the outcome will be the same.”
In Kyiv, Ponomarev’s home since his exile, he once admitted he sleeps next to a machine gun.
Is he scared? “What can we do? We are at war, we know what we are dealing with. Our men on the ground are risking far more than us.”
Toppling a tyrant
Ponomarev helps lead a Russian shadow cabinet, the Congress of People’s Deputies, that meets in Poland and is made up of 100 members.
Forty of its members still live in Russia and the rest in exile.
Together, they are drawing up battle plans to create a post-Putin Russia – working out the actual political mechanics needed to pull off a revolution.
For the last two years, the shadow cabinet has been drawing up plans for a post-Putin Russia, rewriting its constitution, and waiting for what Ponomarev calls the “trigger moment”.
The end of Putin’s rule is near, the Kremlin insider warned, but there are four main likelihoods to produce that end of his regime.
The first is Putin being ousted by the political top brass.
The despot, who Ponomarev said rules like a “Godfather-style mafia boss” may “decide which strings to pull” – but there are still wolves at his door.
In this case, he said the keys to the Kremlin would naturally be transferred into the hands of Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin.
It would mean the war would end, Ponomarev explained.
“But restitution could drag on for years, territories would not be returned and war criminals would go unpunished,” he said.
If this scenario came to be, little would change – and Russia would remain under the tyrannical rule of corrupt elites.
The second option would be “darker”, Ponomarev said. Russia’s security council, bristling with ex-KGB soldiers, could take control and lead Russia on an even more “evil evolution”.
The secretary of the security council, Nikolai Patruschev, has long been tipped as a potential presidential replacement and already has “a lot of power in his hands,” explained Ponomarev.
But a third option could involve a military coup with a potentially wayward “Prigozhin-style” strongman snatching power.
He said that these military men have “a lot of momentum and popularity” right now among the masses after fighting in Ukraine.
There is only one positive scenario that would guarantee there would be no more Putinism
Ilya Ponomarev
But the fourth and final option is the one Ponomarev is willing to stake his life on.
He said: “There is only one positive scenario that would guarantee there would be no more Putinism.”
Together with his political allies, they want to kickstart a revolution that would see “people take to the streets”.
This could be aided by a system collapse from the inside. He doesn’t mention who, but he claims he is engaged with “top-level” figures inside the Kremlin who he hopes will defect to their side.
“Inside the Kremlin, people are waiting, watching and ready to jump,” Ponomarev said.
“We need to provide not just a stick but also a carrot to get them out and that is very important so that the system will start to collapse.”
However, Ponomarev knows it could never be that simple and a fight will be required.
“[The revolution] will not be effective if it is not supported by military force, and this will always be created with Ukrainian support.”
But how that situation will develop is still a question mark.
He said the role of Congress of People’s Deputies is “to make sure the changes happen in a positive way and plan for the risks” – guiding Russia as it transitions to a functioning democracy.
For those who say their plans are “too risky, too dangerous”, Ponomarev argued that Russia has been suffering from crippling instability for decades. “We want to stabilise the system.”
“We need a new alternative,” he said. “We have to treat not symptom but the source of illness and that is not in Ukraine, it’s in Moscow.”
Marching on Moscow
The morning Ponomarev sits down with The Sun, Russia’s largest railway tunnel – 4000 miles from Ukraine’s frontlines – is bombed in a daring sabotage attack that temporarily severs the country’s link to China.
Ponomarev shot a knowing smile. “That was planned for months,” he said.
His comment gives a sense of the kind of long-term planning and commitment needed to pull off what are usually short-term disruptions, but highly symbolic wins for the cause.
It all appears to be part of a larger strategy to destabilise Russia, ignite further resistance and bring the war closer to home for Putin.
These kind of attacks inside Russia that target infrastructure and military bases are becoming bolder and increasingly frequent and Ponomarev said “major support is growing”.
“The interest is there, you can see it in the speed of growth of the movement… Now we see that people are ready to strike.”
Ponomarev describes his role as being the “political centre” of these disparate groups – helping with representation, coordination, support, but not military strategy.
“We will not dictate how they wage war.”
One such army is the Freedom of Russia Legion, which he claims is “by far the largest resistance network” inside Russia and a “well-established military force”.
We are at a major milestone… we are ready to strike
Ilya Ponomarev
The legion, which formed in spring of 2022 with the explicit aim of finally ending the Kremlin regime, has been growing from strength to strength.
Those that the legion cannot smuggle out of Russia to help them as they fight against Putin’s forces in Ukraine or launch raids in Russian borderlands, are told to stay in Russia and cause trouble deep behind enemy lines.
Ponomarev cannot say too much to protect their security but he can discuss what the forces have already claimed – assassinations of war criminals, attacks on fighter jets, factories, military bases.
“Even each minor attack helps to train and test the resolve of the recruits,” he said.
The Sun recently spoke to a commander of the legion, who goes by the call-sign of Caesar, who vowed Russia is ready to explode and they will help light its fuse in 2024.
In a secret bunker near Ukraine’s frontline, he warned Russia that his “warriors” will stop at nothing to “free our motherland” and “save Ukraine” in the process.
“We are the first military regiment who clearly and loudly says that only a struggle by force can change the power in Russia,” Caesar, 49, said.
The anti-Putin partisans have been scaling-up their secret operations and preparing for an armed struggle. “That’s why Putin is very, very afraid of us.”
Putin is very, very afraid of us
Ilya Ponomarev
Prior to the Wagner Group’s explosive, but aborted mutiny in June, the legion stormed across the border in tanks and led the biggest assault on Russian soil since Putin rose to power.
In a days-long battle in May, they “liberated” eight villages in the Belgorod region, even taking Russian soldiers captive and embarrassing Putin on the world stage.
Ponomarev said: “We saw people hugging them, giving them food, supporting them,” Ponomarev said, likening it to the treatment Wagner soldiers received from Russians during their brief insurrection.
Explaining the incredible scenes, he said: “Ordinary Russian people will always support those who are against Moscow – not against Putin or a specific political group, but against Moscow.
“They hate the centre, which they think is exploiting them.
“They will support those who represent force and arms, they don’t believe people who just talk in words, they want to see people who are serious.
“So [they support] criminals like Prigozhin or the my legion fighters, they don’t care. Those that are prepared to spill their own blood, the military strongmen – Prigozhin types – who are willing to take the fight to Putin and to the centre of power”.
Ready to strike
Backed by their voluntary military force made up of pro-Ukrainian Russian partisans, Ponomarev said he is ready to take on the Kremlin kingpin when the time is right.
“We are at a major milestone,” he said confidently. “We are ready to strike.”
“Big things are always being planned.
“This is defining moment in Russian history… it is light versus dark.
“I definitely agree with those that say it is the final moment for the existence of the empire, when Putinism is dismantled.. and Russia will change its insides.”
He said if the Putin’s regime is truly challenged and begins to implode – it could “vanish within three days”.
“The war changed everything,” he added.
“If Putin had not invaded Ukraine, it would have been an evolving political process and definitely not in this violent stage.
“I thought it would be a slow, uncommitted struggle. But right now it’s us or them, black or white, so the change [will] be dramatic and drastic and in a single moment.”
Is his opposition movement be ready? “We are preparing right now, we need to identify the right momentum to strike.”
For Ponomarev, the choice to follow them is easy.
“It is simple. You are with Putinism or you are with us.”
GettyPutin’s reign could ‘vanish in three days’ if his regime begins to collapse, the leading Kremlin opponent said[/caption]
Ponomarev alongside his Freedom of Russia Legion commanders who have been fighting for Ukraine and staging raids in Russia’s borderlands
He told The Sun the only way to defeat Putin is to ‘fight’ and he and his anti-Putin partisan fighters are ‘ready’
GettyPonomarev alongside anti-Putin opposition activists holds a rally in support of jailed leftist leader Sergey Udalsov in Pushkin Square in 2011[/caption]
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