MH17 war criminal, Igor Girkin, detained in Moscow, Russia

MH17 war criminal, Igor Girkin, detained in Moscow, Russia.

Russian authorities have detained outspoken pro-war blogger Igor Girkin, a hardline nationalist critic of Russia’s flagging military campaign in Ukraine, also known as Strelkov.

His wife said he was taken from their Moscow flat while she was away.

He later appeared in court accused of appealing for extremist activity, and could face five years in jail.

Strelkov, a former FSB intelligence colonel, played a key role in Russia’s 2014 landgrab of Crimea. He co-founded an ultra-nationalist political group called the Angry Patriots Club this spring, and told Reuters that Russia was “on the cusp of very grave internal political changes of a catastrophic character.”

The day after Wagner’s brief insurrection ended, on June 25, he said that if Putin “is not ready to take the leadership over the creation of war-ready conditions” in Russia, “then he really needs to transfer the powers, but legally, to someone who is capable of such hard work.”

But the final straw for Putin may have come on Tuesday, when Girkin called the president a “lowlife” and a “cowardly bum” in a blistering post on his Telegram channel.

He went on to lead Russia’s proxy army in the ensuing war in eastern Ukraine.

Igor Strelkov was one of three men convicted in absentia by a Dutch court last November of murder for his role in a missile strike in 2014 that downed a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet over the conflict area, with the loss of all 298 people on board.

But as the full-scale invasion of last year became increasingly bogged down, Strelkov’s criticism of military failings and the commander in chief, President Vladimir Putin, became more vociferous.

“We have already lost,” he told social media followers last year.

A few days ago he called the Kremlin leader “a nonentity” and “a cowardly waste of space”, says BBC Russia editor Steve Rosenberg. Girkin, who also goes by the nom de guerre Igor Strelkov, is among the best-known of Russia’s “milbloggers,” a group of war correspondents who support the invasion but have grown increasingly critical of the military’s faltering operations in Ukraine. Girkin had in recent months taken his criticisms to another level, lambasting the Russian state and even Putin himself.