Anti-Putin activists threaten to escalate violence to stall Russia’s conflict in Ukraine.

On January 4, a Trans-Siberian Railway track in Krasnoyarsk, Russia, exploded. The Russian army supplied Ukraine through rail.

BOAK, the Combat Organisation of Anarcho-Communists, provided photos and footage of a railway bridge explosion on Telegram.

According to Ukrainian intelligence, this was the sixth such event this year after 40 in 2022, signaling Russian anti-war resistance is becoming bolder.

Since February’s invasion, Ukrainian resistance has sabotaged Russian-occupied regions. A secret network of activists in Russia and Belarus is also slowing the Russian war machine.

“We are not only against Putin and the war but also against Russian imperialism and the existing capitalist system of oppression,” a BOAK spokesman told Al Jazeera via email.

Anarcho-communist BOAK promotes a decentralized society in harmony with nature that prioritizes people before business. It opposes all oppression.

It opposes Russia’s Communist Party, which supports Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Stalinism.

“We are outraged by this fratricidal carnage, and we believe only by ending Putin’s assault we can expect for this to stop and never happen again,” the BOAK spokesperson added.

“The government’s defeat in this imperialist war allows the revolutionary movement to show people how oppressed they were and what needed to change. We know that revolutionary change is the only way to attain these aims, and an underground organization using partisan and guerrilla means is needed to implement them.

Partisans
BOAK and other Russian anti-war groups like Stop the Trains call themselves partisans after World War II partisans who hid in Belarusian, Ukrainian, and western Russian forests and attacked German forces.

BOAK claims to have been around for 10 years, but before the Ukraine war, it mostly built its network and gathered resources. BOAK claimed responsibility for torching a Turkish company’s Kyiv cellular tower in 2019 protesting Ankara’s foray into northern Syria.

BOAK has several dozen cells of varied sizes that function independently, although the central network may coordinate or publicize their activity. The central organization makes decisions that effect everyone by consensus due to its horizontal command structure.

The gang uses open-source websites like Wikimapia to find targets and shares its findings on Telegram with extensive instructions for other saboteurs. Russia penalized Telegram in August for not removing anarchist content.

BOAK targets railroads, which the army utilizes to transport supplies.

“They feed Russian aggression,” the representative said. They transport soldiers, equipment, and ammunition. Stop them and the Russian army will starve.”

Before Russian individuals were imprisoned for sabotage, Russian officials blamed derailments on broken railroad lines.

Army recruitment centers, police stations, national guard facilities, and United Russia party headquarters have also been attacked. According to independent Russian media site MediaZona, scores of conscription offices and government buildings have been set on fire, generally with Molotov cocktails, since the war began.

BOAK may have started some of these fires. Some were set by political and independent arsonists.

“While we can always be sceptical of claims, what we do know is claims of attacks and proof of those attacks, including photos and videos, are frequent enough that certainly attacks are occurring quite frequently, perhaps several per week,” New Lines Institute non-resident fellow Jeff Hawn told Al Jazeera.

“Most, however, have very minor impact: delaying but not blocking mobilisation of reservists from certain districts and hindering supply transit to the front,” Hawn said. The moral impact is greater. The dictatorship knows the war makes people more willing to fight them directly, and Russian soldiers at the front know people behind the lines are against them.”

Assassination
The gang has not yet assassinated anyone but declared it would solely target state security personnel. It targets railways near military targets where civilian trains are unlikely to travel to minimize harm to passersby.

“We accept the destruction of oppressors,” the spokesperson stated.

Other group assassination schemes are questioned.

In August, journalist Darya Dugina, daughter of ultra-nationalist scholar Alexander Dugin, was killed in a Moscow car explosion apparently intended for her father. The Kremlin blamed Kyiv for her killing, but exiled Russian parliamentarian Ilya Ponomarev, now in Kyiv, blamed the National Republican Army (NRA), a secret organization dedicated to overthrowing Putin.

Al Jazeera’s historian Sergey Radchenko denied the NRA’s existence.

“Persistent rumours to this effect, when they are not part of some psyop operation, only indicate to people’s unhappiness with Putin’s regime’s perceived political stability and suggest wishful thinking, which sadly is not anchored in any evidence,” Radchenko said.

Six members of the illegal National Socialism/White Power group were detained in April for plotting to kill TV analyst Vladimir Solovyov, a vociferous Putin and war supporter.

The neo-Nazis have hurled Molotov cocktails into draft offices, but media sources imply the Solovyov plot was crudely staged.

Even while they oppose Putin, Hawn said anti-war groups have diverse ideas and no shared vision for a post-Putin Russia.

“It’s hard to envisage these activities [actual or otherwise] being the beginning of something bigger,” Hawn remarked. “However, escalation is possible.”

He predicted that tradecraft and attacks would improve with time.

Belarus has railroad saboteurs. Russia uses it as a logistics base, even though it’s not fighting.

Since May, Belarusian railway saboteurs have been convicted of “terrorism,” which carries the death penalty.

In the latter days of December, Putin approved legislation that punishes sabotage with up to a life sentence, up to 20 years for supporting, training, or organizing saboteurs, and up to 10 years for being part of a sabotage group.

BOAK vowed to keep fighting Putin.

According to its spokeswoman, such changes take time.