Russian Anarchists Are Sabotaging Railways to Stop Putin’s War on Ukraine

Russian Anarchists Are Sabotaging Railways to Stop Putin’s War on Ukraine

From Vice News by Ella Fassler

A group called BOAK has claimed responsibility for destroying communications towers and delaying trains used to deliver weapons to the military.

In late June, a group of anarchists donned camouflage, covered their faces, and snuck out into a forest about 60 miles northeast of Moscow with a lofty goal: to sabotage Putin’s invasion of Ukraine by physically disabling railways used to supply weapons to the Russian military.

The group selected its target using Wikimapia, a “geographic online encyclopedia” that labels geographic features observed in photos from Google Maps. Once they arrived at the site, the group got to work, unscrewing dozens of nuts off the rails, and four off the rail joint, while keeping the electrical signal largely intact with a wire to evade detection over the course of several hours. Finally, they scribbled “BO(A)K,” on the tracks with a white marker before dissolving back into the countryside.

“We see [the] current conflict in Eastern Europe as the regional stage of global struggle,” an anonymous spokesperson from BOAK, the anarchist communist combat organization that claimed responsibility for the sabotage, told Motherboard in a written interview. “The defeat and collapse of Putin’s regime will give a chance at least for peoples of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia to make important steps toward social liberation.”

The BOAK spokesperson and others spoke to Motherboard under the condition of anonymity, in order to ensure their safety from retaliation by Russian authorities.

BOAK had claimed responsibility for the railroad action on their Telegram channel and blog. Sabotaging tracks that supply the Russian military is cost-effective, relatively easy for lay people, and does not harm civilians, the group told France24.

Russian railways had reportedly been sabotaged by various dissidents on as many as sixty-three occasions during the first three months of Putin’s invasion, according to a Russia-focused independent media outlet The Insider, although the publication noted some instances of malfunction may be attributable to routine mechanical failures. Some of the attacks were done in collaboration with a clandestine network of railway workers, hackers, and other dissidents located in Belarus, Russia, and elsewhere throughout the region. Human rights groups reported that in the early months of the invasion, at least 11 dissidents in Belarus were arrested after being linked to the sabotage by authorities.

The action in June wasn’t the first time BOAK claimed responsibility for an act of sabotage. In April, the group wrapped a cell phone tower’s electrical cables with rags, doused them in flammable liquid, and set them on fire to impede communications between police and military forces, according to the group. Prior to Putin’s assault on Ukraine, BOAK claimed responsibility for burning a telecommunications tower belonging to a Turkish company near Kyiv in solidarity with the Rojava Revolution in North and East Syria.

Others are choosing military recruitment and enlistment centers in Russia as their targets. According to local media reports and Telegram channels, at least 23 offices have been attacked from February to July, 20 of which involved arson. In some cases, the guerillas posted videos of the acts themselves; BOAK told the anarchist radio show The Final Straw that these acts of resistance are a spontaneous and decentralized phenomenon.

YouTube video: https://youtu.be/MhgJHca8XV0

For BOAK, taking direct action is important for sabotaging Putin and his war machine, but it also helps dissidents gain the strength, skills and power necessary for achieving their longer-term revolutionary political goals.

“We advocate social revolution as the replacement of statist and capitalist World Order, BOAK wrote, “by the popular self-government and collective control over [the] economy based on freedom, equality and solidarity.”

An American audience may associate anarchist communists in Russia with Leninist or Stalinist political traditions, but the group was clear to differentiate its methods and ideology from Marxist-Leninists.

“We do not need dictators, presidents and parliaments,” they explained. “We are against parliamentarianism even in ‘democratic’ states.”

Marxist-Leninists advocate seizing state power to bring about a stateless classless society, while anarchists argue that these methods ultimately reproduce the hierarchical structures that revolutionaries oppose when party officials inevitably become a new ruling class.

Instead, anarchist communists work toward building power from below by developing decentralized, non-hierarchical voluntary networks. Groups or communities within a network, sometimes called a federation, each have their own unique set of decision-making structures, economic and social arrangements, yet they reinforce each other in mutually beneficial ways. Higher order units within a federation may be created to administer and coordinate certain tasks, but they do not impose orders on lower-units like a hierarchical government does.

The group says that these direct actions mirror the anarchist ethos of people taking matters into their own hands, without permission from authority figures.

“[T]he parliamentary struggle in modern Russia is not only impossible, it contradicts the anarchist principle of the direct involvement of people into the transformation of society, [and] teaches people to trust ‘professional political experts,’” the BOAK spokesperson wrote. “Direct action, on the contrary, is an instrument to overcome alienation, it teaches people to participate in decision-making, to rely on their own strengths, and not just wait [for] orders from the privileged Minority.”

YouTube video: https://youtu.be/RrgmgUzvGKY

Of course, taking direct action against a heavily-armed state is extremely dangerous. Russian authorities often torture dissidents and sentence anti-war activists to lengthy prison terms. Vladimir Sergeev and Anton Zhuchov, for example, face up to ten years in prison for bringing molotov cocktails to an anti-war demonstration. While detained they both attempted to commit suicide, but survived after being hospitalized and were arrested once again.

The actions of groups like BOAK parallel militant acts taken by political dissidents around the world. In the United States, anarchist political prisoner Eric King is serving a ten-year sentence for throwing a molotov cocktail at a politician’s empty office in solidarity with the 2014 Black liberation uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri. Josh Williams was sentenced to eight years for lighting a trash can on fire during the Ferguson uprisings. And an innumerable number of protesters arrested during the George Floyd uprising have been sentenced to years behind bars. In May 2022, Brittany Martin was sentenced to four years in prison for allegedly yelling at a cop during a small demonstration in South Carolina.

BOAK is encouraging people around the globe to show solidarity for prisoners of war in Russia, and continue to pay attention to the atrocities committed in Eastern Europe even though the war is no longer front-and-center of the news cycle.

“We would just ask your readers not to turn a blind eye towards the events in Eastern Europe,” they wrote. “An effect of this battle definitely will reach far beyond its region. The forces who fight totalitarian regimes here need your support and participation.”

There are 22 Comments

all these recent articles covering the same thing using the same picture of that specific rail. they probably got it fixed by now. kinda counterproductive to notify everyone of the sabotage before it’s had its effect and to broadcast your activities

You must be new. And, no, brah. It is very productive. Action followed by communication is how ideas spread.

post pics of the wagons after they flip, not of the obstacles so they can avoid them. i know you're not new because you're the same troll as always

Backseat insurrectos are my favorite. They have ALL the best ideas. If only people would listen!

sure, slander all insurrectos on my behalf, since i am not one, though i'm happy to find out i've been promoted from armchair theorist and keyboard warrior, knighted by SirTrollsALot

Typical male humans, all that toxic manarchist action disregards the welfare of the women and children who could possibly be on a train due to train time schedules being disrupted by the war!

Typical toxic male troll non-anarchist commenter that doesn’t think train disrupters can be women.

Typical radical femarchist disregarding the lives of innocent fatherly males, other men, and boys who may be on the train due to the time schedules being disrupted by the war!

Typical incel buttarchist disregarding the lives of innocent furry males, otherkin, and bois who may run a train on their butts all the time but instead got disrupted by the war!

Typical boring troll making up stereotypes to (let's face it, this thread is dead after the femarchist rebute) disregard all life in the known universe that could fit into a train, and may have been in it, and a timetable schedule could have been erroneously interpreted due to the nearby presence of a ruthless war!

How embarrassing.

Typical nihilist negating everything from the safety of their keyboard abyss, who want to blow everything up.

No where is safe. Blow up everything and embrace the abyss and then blow up the abyss. Rubble rubble.

"blow up the abyss". I 'spose house wrecking is what its all about at the end of the day for nihilists?!

The Abyss is a spook, every nihilist knows this, even when distracted by a vicious war!

I stared into the Abyss. For quite long, as I felt it was damn cool! But then I became the Abyss, and for some reason ended up coming to this site everyday for trolling...

There are two photos I saw somewhere else a while ago (long forgotten where). One showed a line of derailed train cars tipped to the left side of the photo, the other showed a locomotive that had run off the rails and over the side at what was probably the start or end of a bridge.

The same type of photos shown here were also displayed, so my guess is this was held and then released after munitions train wrecks had already reminded Putin he has saboteurs fighting him inside Russia.

In the shuffling madness some anarchists stole the handle and the train it won't stop going; no way to slow down

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