The trial and sentencing of Ruslan Sidiki has exposed both the terror of an authoritarian state and the power of clandestine direct action

~ Josie Ó Súileabháin ~

At the Ryazan garrison military court, Judge Oleg Shishov on 23 May sentenced Ruslan Sidiki to 29 years of imprisonment for bombing railway tracks leading to the front and a drone attack on a military base. Sidiki will have to spend the first 7 in a high-security prison and after that in a high-security penal colony. He would also have to pay about 58 million roubles in fines and damages (about 640,000 Euros).

Russian Railways reported damages of more than 17 million Rubles and the disruption to 61 trains using the same line. Petrochemical outfit Apatit said that 700 tonnes of concrete crumbled and mixed with the soil, causing damage of 38 million Rubles. Bogdan Fedak, a representative of the Ministry of Defence, confirmed the drone at Dyagilyevo airfield caused minimal damage, but it did  threaten “the combat readiness of the military unit” although when pressed, he could not say what the threat was.

“Of course, any loud bang and news of an explosion can scare someone”, Sidiki said in his final statement to the court. “Just as missiles flying over houses and the start of military operations carry with them intimidation of the population of the country against which these actions are being carried out”.

Sabotage of the railways carrying military equipment through Russia into Ukraine rose sharply after the announcement of the full-scale war in 2022. The violent suppression of street protests and anti-war demonstrations has left no avenue but clandestine direct action.

“Early in the morning of February 24th” Sidiki wrote, “I was riding in the train Ryazan-Moscow… I began to monitor the news and saw that a large-scale invasion had begun. It was a very unpleasant feeling (knowing) that you couldn’t do anything. I saw how trains with military equipment are going, out of desperation I wanted to overshadow the gun trucks”.

By early March, Sidiki had written to a comrade in Ukraine to ask if they would fight in the armed forces. The comrade replied: “We burn their equipment in the hundreds, and they wipe our cities from the face of the earth”.

‘Beware, Moscow’

63 trains had de-railed in Russia in the first four months of full-scale war, according to media reports seen by The Insider. Several underground groups were claiming responsibility, uploading reports to social media and sharing recipes for explosives. Russian Railways has claimed that half of these derailments were due to technical problems rather than political sabotage—preferring to be accused of criminal negligence than admit to the scale of actions.

Already in 2020, the Rail Guerrillas in Belarus were active in sabotaging state infrastructure as part of the uprising against dictatorship in the country. In 2022 the focus mainly changed to sabotaging the Russian war machine in Belarus. The same year the Belarussian regime passed legislation that would allow the death penalty for attempted acts of sabotage, and violently crushed the movement in the country.

In April 2022, the Russian security service (FSB) announced it they had detained two Russians who were “supporters of Ukrainian Nazism” and were being charged with sabotage. A video was released as ‘evidence’ for their crimes, with one blurred-faced man talking to camera and wearing a shirt with Union Jacks on it. Their names were not released, but even after an investigation by The Insider, no data could be found on charges being brought in the region reported.

The announcement by the FSB did fit the public narrative of the “de-Nazification of Ukraine” as propagated by Russian leadership a little too well. Behind the scenes, the FSB was looking for the anarchists and other political activists. In the public chat ‘Beware, Moscow’ a message warned that the security service was after a “militant organisation of anarcho-communists”.

According to investigators, the group responsible for several acts of sabotage were not supporters of Ukrainian fascism but their political counterforce; the Combat Organisation of Anarcho-Communists (BOAK). The underground militant direct action group had managed to delay military freight trains by unscrewing 8 nuts, splitting a rail joint and partially dislodging the tracks. “As anarchists and revolutionaries”, a member of BOAK wrote in February 2025, “it was obvious that we needed to stand in defence of society when it faced fascist imperial aggression”.

“The defeat of Ukraine will bring about the triumph of the most reactionary forces in Russia”, another statement from BOAK reads, “finalizing its transformation into a neo-Stalinist concentration camp, with unlimited power concentrated in the FSB and totalitarian Orthodox imperialist ideology”.

Several BOAK comrades went to fight in the resistance in Ukraine, including one of the founders of the combat organisation Dmitry Petrov. From the first day of the invasion of Ukraine, Petrov worked to establish anti-authoritarian and autonomous military units, including the Anti-Authoritarian Platoon that fought until the summer of 2022.

“Right now we are going through a turning point in the history of eastern Europe”, Petrov wrote in ‘To be an independent force’. “In the abyss of events, the small black sail of the anarchist movement is clearly visible”.

In the following year, Dmitry Petrov was killed alongside Finbar Cafferly and Cooper Andrews as they were fighting close to Bakhmut in Ukraine.

Terror state

As Sidiki reflected in court, he was forced underground when “all opportunities to influence the situation peacefully” were cut off. “Whoever opposes war is declared a traitor and subject to repression… it is not surprising that someone would prefer to leave the country and someone will take up the explosives”.

Sidiki’s defence lawyer had argued that the charge of terrorist training should be dropped, referring both to the defendant’s prior knowledge of explosives and drone operations, and the court’s recognition of the defendant as a prisoner of war. Destruction of the property of the military is known as sabotage, Sidiki argued, whereas it is the Russian military targeting of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure that fits the legal definition of terrorism  — “committing an explosion or other actions that frighten the population in order to influence decision-making by the authorities”. Access to water, electricity and gas were severely restricted in order to put pressure on Ukraine’s leadership.

As reported by Mediazona, Sidiki previously reflected from prison, “did I feel like a guerrilla? I think I could be called that. If during the Second World War, people opposing the Third Reich on its territory were called partisans, then I can be attributed to them…”

“Torturing  with electricity and beating up a tied up person is an extremely low act” Sidiki said at his last hearing. “Here, responsibility falls not only on the one who used these methods, but also the one who knows, and the one who does not react and helps hide it”.

Standing in a cage, his final words to the court were from a fragment of a poem by Nestor Makhno:

Let them bury us now,
but our essence will not
sink into oblivion
It will rise at the right time
and win. I believe in it