Shortly before his arrest, Mikhail Kriger lived in Troitsk, in New Moscow. Local residents remembered him as a large older man who regularly ran through the park at about 7:30 a.m. with an equally large dog. Kriger is now 65 years old; according to people who knew him, he remained in very good physical shape before his detention.
In 2016, two years after Russia began its invasion of Ukraine, it was still possible to protest the war openly. In central Moscow, pickets by the Solidarity movement with Ukrainian flags were even officially approved. At the same time, police were already declining to open cases against provocateurs who attacked participants in those actions.
YouTube still contains footage from two anti-war pickets where the 56-year-old Kriger fights back against attackers. In one episode, he knocks out a man his own age; in another, a much younger, solidly built man, while also fending off several more supporters of the self-proclaimed Luhansk and Donetsk entities who were 10 to 15 years younger than him.
Near the park in Troitsk, his GAZelle van once displayed an advertisement reading: “Earthworks, kriger.ru.” By the time of his arrest, however, that business was already gone. According to the Kontur.Focus database, Kriger closed his company “Ai Da Kriger!” in 2017, and shut down his sole proprietorship, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Kriger, in 2021. When he was detained in November 2022, he was working in grocery delivery.
Human rights advocates Sergei Davidis and Anna Karetnikova, who had worked with Kriger since the early 2000s, told Novaya Gazeta Europe that after February 24, 2022, financial obligations connected to his former business may have been one reason he did not leave Russia.
At the same time, they said, it was a matter of principle for Kriger to remain in the country and not conceal his views. He joined the democratic movement in the late 1980s, served as a municipal deputy in Moscow, took part in defending the White House during the coup attempt, but refused to accept a defender’s medal because of his negative view of Boris Yeltsin.