The mystery man vowing that Putin's friends will get blown up soon

In a shocking televised address from Kyiv last week, 47-year-old ex-politician Ilya Ponomarev debuted as a self-described messenger for what he says is an underground resistance movement operating in Russia, the National Republican Army. Ponomarev read the group’s so-called manifesto on a Kyiv-based TV channel he founded seven months ago, called February Morning, in which they claimed responsibility for the car bomb that killed Darya Dugina, the daughter of Russian nationalist and staunch Putin ally Alexander Dugin…

Ponomarev’s associate at February Morning, Aleksey Baranovsky, a former supporter of ultra far-right organizations in Russia, told The Daily Beast that the media group received messages from the National Republican Army within an hour of the attack on Dugina in Moscow. He claimed that the group had asked Ponomarev to represent them and share their manifesto, in which they promised that “those who do not resign their power will be destroyed by us.”

“The initiative came from the group. They acted absolutely autonomously. We do not call them terrorists, they are an army of rebels,” Baranovsky told The Daily Beast. He said that about 10 employees of the channel gathered for a meeting with Ponomarev on Sunday to discuss his address. “He read the statement that we had received and commented on it.”