A woman doused the BMW X6 of Yevgeny Sektarev with petrol before setting it alight.
James Kilner and Josie Ensor
August 28 2022 02:30 AM
An anti-war protester was arrested in central Moscow yesterday after torching the car of a Russian general in charge of military censorship.
The attack, reported by Russia’s Baza news agency, is among the most violent protests yet against the war in Ukraine and comes a week after a car bombing in the capital killed Darya Dugina, a rising pro-Kremlin journalist.
Police told Baza that a woman doused the BMW X6 of Yevgeny Sektarev with petrol before setting it alight.
Photos showed the mangled wreckage of the car’s boot parked outside a residential block.
Mr Sektarev is the deputy head of the 8th Directorate of the Russian General Staff, the department responsible for censoring soldiers and officers.
The woman told police she burnt the car as an anti-war protest, according to Baza.
Vladimir Putin’s regime has arrested thousands of people for merely expressing dissent against the war, an offence that now carries a maximum sentence of 15 years in jail.
Public protest has, as a result, been limited but saboteurs have fire-bombed army recruitment centres and hacked government websites. Before the assassination of Dugina, Moscow felt a long way from the war in Ukraine. But the attack in a wealthy neighbourhood, which Russia blamed on Ukraine, generated anxiety in the capital’s elite.
Kyiv says it had nothing to do with the killing, with officials pointing the finger at the Russian secret service.
The burning of Sektarev’s car came as Russian forces were increasing their attacks in east Ukraine, drawing Ukrainian units away from the southern front, where Kyiv is reportedly planning an offensive to retake the Kherson region.
But despite intensifying their attacks on Siversk and Bakhmut, which lie north of Donetsk city, the British ministry of defence said Russian forces had made little progress. “Overall, Russian forces have secured few territorial gains,” it said in its daily intelligence briefing.
Journalists reporting from Bakhmut, which had a pre-war population of 72,000, said that most residents had now fled the town. Video showed empty streets, populated by stray dogs, some of them household pets abandoned in hurried evacuations. The boom of artillery exchanges splices through videos from Bakhmut.
Many of its buildings are now in ruins. Ukrainian officials said that several civilians had died in the Russian bombardments.
As the Kremlin resumes its offensive in Donbas, Ukraine’s government ordered more civilians to evacuate from more regions. As well as ordering civilians in Donetsk to flee, the Ukrainian government also told people living in the eastern Kharkiv region, southern Zaporizhzhia and Mykolaiv to leave their home.
“I call on people to evacuate and not to hope that the enemy shows mercy,” said Iryna Vereshchuk, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister.
The Ukrainian government has already told people to flee from Kherson city where it is planning an offensive.
Russia’s army captured Kherson city in the first few days of the war and its officials have since tried to turn it into an enviable model for life under their control. But residents have said the Russian occupiers rule by fear, arresting and torturing dissenters. They also said jobs and food are running low and that the economy is collapsing.
These complaints are not confined to Kherson. In Mariupol, destroyed in the first six weeks of the war by intense Russian bombing, a promised rebuild has failed to happen.
Instead, Russian news agencies have been reduced to reporting the installation of the city’s first working traffic lights last week.
Putin has also made an uncharacteristic omission that parts of Ukraine captured by Russia were not proving attractive places for families to live in.
He said the Kremlin would pay 10,000 roubles, roughly €166, to the parents of every child who enrols for school in these areas.
Meanwhile, in a rare interview, an FBI chief has said that a Russian official is expected to defect over the course of the war with Ukraine and work with Western intelligence.
Michael Driscoll, the head of the FBI’s New York office, said it was “very likely” that a disgruntled Kremlin apparatchik will part with the Russian president as the casualties of his invasion mount.
“In moments like this when you’re dealing with a significant conflict and there is apparently clear disagreement among Russian citizens, and you can see that from protests on the streets of Russia, then the possibility that somebody might be willing to have a conversation with us about that and seek to perhaps to do the right thing for the sake of the greater good I think is very likely,” Mr Driscoll said.
The FBI chief was speaking to journalist Richard Kerbaj for his new book The Secret History of the Five Eyes and this excerpt has been shared exclusively with The Sunday Telegraph.
“History has shown us that that kind of thing happens all of the time,” he said.
James Kilner and Josie Ensor
August 28 2022 02:30 AM
An anti-war protester was arrested in central Moscow yesterday after torching the car of a Russian general in charge of military censorship.
The attack, reported by Russia’s Baza news agency, is among the most violent protests yet against the war in Ukraine and comes a week after a car bombing in the capital killed Darya Dugina, a rising pro-Kremlin journalist.
Police told Baza that a woman doused the BMW X6 of Yevgeny Sektarev with petrol before setting it alight.
Photos showed the mangled wreckage of the car’s boot parked outside a residential block.
Mr Sektarev is the deputy head of the 8th Directorate of the Russian General Staff, the department responsible for censoring soldiers and officers.
The woman told police she burnt the car as an anti-war protest, according to Baza.
Vladimir Putin’s regime has arrested thousands of people for merely expressing dissent against the war, an offence that now carries a maximum sentence of 15 years in jail.
Public protest has, as a result, been limited but saboteurs have fire-bombed army recruitment centres and hacked government websites. Before the assassination of Dugina, Moscow felt a long way from the war in Ukraine. But the attack in a wealthy neighbourhood, which Russia blamed on Ukraine, generated anxiety in the capital’s elite.
Kyiv says it had nothing to do with the killing, with officials pointing the finger at the Russian secret service.
The burning of Sektarev’s car came as Russian forces were increasing their attacks in east Ukraine, drawing Ukrainian units away from the southern front, where Kyiv is reportedly planning an offensive to retake the Kherson region.
But despite intensifying their attacks on Siversk and Bakhmut, which lie north of Donetsk city, the British ministry of defence said Russian forces had made little progress. “Overall, Russian forces have secured few territorial gains,” it said in its daily intelligence briefing.
Journalists reporting from Bakhmut, which had a pre-war population of 72,000, said that most residents had now fled the town. Video showed empty streets, populated by stray dogs, some of them household pets abandoned in hurried evacuations. The boom of artillery exchanges splices through videos from Bakhmut.
Many of its buildings are now in ruins. Ukrainian officials said that several civilians had died in the Russian bombardments.
As the Kremlin resumes its offensive in Donbas, Ukraine’s government ordered more civilians to evacuate from more regions. As well as ordering civilians in Donetsk to flee, the Ukrainian government also told people living in the eastern Kharkiv region, southern Zaporizhzhia and Mykolaiv to leave their home.
“I call on people to evacuate and not to hope that the enemy shows mercy,” said Iryna Vereshchuk, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister.
The Ukrainian government has already told people to flee from Kherson city where it is planning an offensive.
Russia’s army captured Kherson city in the first few days of the war and its officials have since tried to turn it into an enviable model for life under their control. But residents have said the Russian occupiers rule by fear, arresting and torturing dissenters. They also said jobs and food are running low and that the economy is collapsing.
These complaints are not confined to Kherson. In Mariupol, destroyed in the first six weeks of the war by intense Russian bombing, a promised rebuild has failed to happen.
Instead, Russian news agencies have been reduced to reporting the installation of the city’s first working traffic lights last week.
Putin has also made an uncharacteristic omission that parts of Ukraine captured by Russia were not proving attractive places for families to live in.
He said the Kremlin would pay 10,000 roubles, roughly €166, to the parents of every child who enrols for school in these areas.
Meanwhile, in a rare interview, an FBI chief has said that a Russian official is expected to defect over the course of the war with Ukraine and work with Western intelligence.
Michael Driscoll, the head of the FBI’s New York office, said it was “very likely” that a disgruntled Kremlin apparatchik will part with the Russian president as the casualties of his invasion mount.
“In moments like this when you’re dealing with a significant conflict and there is apparently clear disagreement among Russian citizens, and you can see that from protests on the streets of Russia, then the possibility that somebody might be willing to have a conversation with us about that and seek to perhaps to do the right thing for the sake of the greater good I think is very likely,” Mr Driscoll said.
The FBI chief was speaking to journalist Richard Kerbaj for his new book The Secret History of the Five Eyes and this excerpt has been shared exclusively with The Sunday Telegraph.
“History has shown us that that kind of thing happens all of the time,” he said.
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