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Asked how many soldiers the Freedom of Russia Legion has, Ponomarev said, “It’s against the law in Ukraine to give the number, just directly prohibited,” but he gave a strong hint. “If you listen to what Mr. Putin has said recently, he said that it was 2,500. … It’s not that far off. His number is a little bit over. The actual number is smaller.”
Ponomarev said that, on average, the Freedom of Russia Legion receives about 1,000 applications each month, but the number of applicants who actually commit to leaving Russia to join the legion are only about 50 each month. He said the legion scrutinizes applicants not just to weed out double agents and spies, but also to identify those likely to be reliable fighters.
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Applicants are “providing passport data, they’re providing phone numbers, they’re providing emails, there are a lot of services that allow us to do the initial analysis,” Ponomarev said.
“Then we have two more procedures. There is an appointment with a psychologist, who is trying to understand why the person wants to join, and whether he is stable and whether he would be disciplined — drinking problems, sometimes. And then the final one is a lie detector.” He said that, each month, dozens fail the lie-detector test. The entire process usually takes four to six months.
But having an otherwise cleared applicant take a lie-detector test presents its own challenge: “You need to get him outside Russia,” Ponomarev said, “so it’s a question of a visa, and it’s a big problem. How can you get him into Ukraine, or into Poland, or into Moldova? Moldova is heavily infiltrated by Russian agents. And it’s sometimes not very easy to get to other countries, they require Schengen visas.” Those visas permit a holder to travel almost anywhere within the European Union and stay up to 90 days in any 180-day period.
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“Schengen visas, right now in Moscow, are very hard to get,” he says with a chuckle. “Russian security forces are surveilling the embassies. It’s a whole process.”
At this stage, the line blurs between the Freedom of Russia Legion and the resistance groups within Russia who are committing sabotage or violent attacks like the car bomb that killed Dugina.
“Many of the people we are ready to accept, but we cannot always get them physically outside of Russia, and they usually go into this resistance movement in the home front,” Ponomarev said. “That’s why our proportion of people who are inside the country is almost 10 to 1 to those who are in the front.” (Because Ponomarev said earlier in our conversation that the number of Russians fighting on behalf of Ukraine was slightly less than 2,500, it is reasonable to conclude he’s asserting that the resistance has something fewer than 25,000 members working inside Russia.)
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A nonfatal but high-profile example of the resistance’s work was the two drones that flew over the Kremlin last May. One drone appeared to have struck the dome of the Kremlin Senate, which houses Putin’s office, and another exploded above it. No deaths or injuries were reported.
“Nobody was thinking about these high-precision drones, they are very lightweight, so they don’t carry much of the explosives, so it’s more fireworks, rather than a serious attack,” Ponomarev said. “But it was very interesting fireworks. Symbolic.”
Ponomarev and I chatted at the Matisse restaurant, with panoramic views of Kyiv. He travels with at least one bodyguard that I can see.
I asked Ponomarev how he lives with the risk of retaliation from Putin’s agents.
“People at the front line, they have more risk,” he said. “I have security. We just have to fight. It would be wrong if Ukrainians are fighting, and I were not.”
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KYIV — Ilya Ponomarev is a former member of the Russian legislature and was the only lawmaker to vote against the annexation of Crimea in 2014. The following year, he was charged with embezzlement — an accusation he says was motivated by politics and his defiance of Vladimir Putin. Ponomarev is now in exile in Ukraine, working as the political head of the Freedom of Russia Legion, a group of Russians fighting alongside the Ukrainians against the Russian army, or as he calls it, “the Putinist army.”
In addition, Russians “who are igniting the war, financing the war, making propaganda around the war, they are legitimate military targets, and they should be targeted,” Ponomarev told me during an interview. “They are more harmful than any missiles. They kill more people with what they do. That’s why we’re doing this and continue doing this. We understand that sometimes it is met with mixed reaction.”
Ponomarev — contradicting past comments, apparently — told me that he and the Freedom of Russia Legion were not involved in the 2022 car bombing in Moscow that killed Daria Dugina, the daughter of ultranationalist writer and Putin favorite, Alexander Dugin.
“Dugin, he was the man — to my mind, he was overexaggerating his role, nevertheless, he was saying ‘I invented this war.’” Ponomarev said. (In 2014, Dugin told BBC News that war between Russia and Ukraine was “inevitable,” and he called on Putin to intervene militarily in eastern Ukraine “to save Russia’s moral authority.”)
Asked how many soldiers the Freedom of Russia Legion has, Ponomarev said, “It’s against the law in Ukraine to give the number, just directly prohibited,” but he gave a strong hint. “If you listen to what Mr. Putin has said recently, he said that it was 2,500. … It’s not that far off. His number is a little bit over. The actual number is smaller.”
Ponomarev said that, on average, the Freedom of Russia Legion receives about 1,000 applications each month, but the number of applicants who actually commit to leaving Russia to join the legion are only about 50 each month. He said the legion scrutinizes applicants not just to weed out double agents and spies, but also to identify those likely to be reliable fighters.
Applicants are “providing passport data, they’re providing phone numbers, they’re providing emails, there are a lot of services that allow us to do the initial analysis,” Ponomarev said.
“Then we have two more procedures. There is an appointment with a psychologist, who is trying to understand why the person wants to join, and whether he is stable and whether he would be disciplined — drinking problems, sometimes. And then the final one is a lie detector.” He said that, each month, dozens fail the lie-detector test. The entire process usually takes four to six months.
But having an otherwise cleared applicant take a lie-detector test presents its own challenge: “You need to get him outside Russia,” Ponomarev said, “so it’s a question of a visa, and it’s a big problem. How can you get him into Ukraine, or into Poland, or into Moldova? Moldova is heavily infiltrated by Russian agents. And it’s sometimes not very easy to get to other countries, they require Schengen visas.” Those visas permit a holder to travel almost anywhere within the European Union and stay up to 90 days in any 180-day period.
“Schengen visas, right now in Moscow, are very hard to get,” he says with a chuckle. “Russian security forces are surveilling the embassies. It’s a whole process.”
At this stage, the line blurs between the Freedom of Russia Legion and the resistance groups within Russia who are committing sabotage or violent attacks like the car bomb that killed Dugina.
“Many of the people we are ready to accept, but we cannot always get them physically outside of Russia, and they usually go into this resistance movement in the home front,” Ponomarev said. “That’s why our proportion of people who are inside the country is almost 10 to 1 to those who are in the front.” (Because Ponomarev said earlier in our conversation that the number of Russians fighting on behalf of Ukraine was slightly less than 2,500, it is reasonable to conclude he’s asserting that the resistance has something fewer than 25,000 members working inside Russia.)
A nonfatal but high-profile example of the resistance’s work was the two drones that flew over the Kremlin last May. One drone appeared to have struck the dome of the Kremlin Senate, which houses Putin’s office, and another exploded above it. No deaths or injuries were reported.
“Nobody was thinking about these high-precision drones, they are very lightweight, so they don’t carry much of the explosives, so it’s more fireworks, rather than a serious attack,” Ponomarev said. “But it was very interesting fireworks. Symbolic.”
Ponomarev and I chatted at the Matisse restaurant, with panoramic views of Kyiv. He travels with at least one bodyguard that I can see.
I asked Ponomarev how he lives with the risk of retaliation from Putin’s agents.
“People at the front line, they have more risk,” he said. “I have security. We just have to fight. It would be wrong if Ukrainians are fighting, and I were not.”
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