On the eve of another anniversary of the murders of Stanislav Markelov and Anastasia Baburova, a memorial plaque to Anna Politkovskaya was smashed at her building on Lesnaya Street in Moscow, while insulting posters appeared at the site where Markelov and Baburova were killed. In correspondence with Novaya Gazeta Europe, NS/WP, which is designated as a terrorist organization in Russia, described the broken plaque as one of its actions.
On January 18, police detained 44-year-old religious scholar and former TASS and RIA Novosti employee Alexander Filippov over the damage. He told the court he had not broken the plaque and had only approached to remove withered flowers, after which it supposedly fell by itself. Tverskoy District Court rejected that account and fined him 1,000 rubles for petty hooliganism. Novaya Gazeta’s editors and Politkovskaya’s children are demanding a criminal vandalism case.
The outlet notes that NS/WP originally emerged as an ultraright forum in the mid-2000s, and in 2021 Russia’s Supreme Court declared it a terrorist organization. After being released from compulsory psychiatric treatment, Andrei Pronsky, who was later sentenced in December 2025 to life imprisonment in the case over a planned attack on Vladimir Solovyov, relaunched the brand together with neo-Nazi Roman Zheleznov.
“The global goal is a new world order after a total war, a war of all against all, in which people will develop racial consciousness,” the NS/WP administrator told the newspaper’s reporter.
According to Novaya Gazeta Europe, the network runs closed Telegram channels that distribute videos of arson attacks and beatings in Russia and Ukraine. On January 13, NS/WP claimed responsibility for a murder committed on December 9 in Odesa: the victim was Denis Trebenko, head of the Jewish charity foundation Rakhamim. Sources in Odesa’s Jewish community told the paper that he was not a community leader and had no connection to the 2014 events at the House of Trade Unions.
The group’s administrator also confirmed the prosecution’s version that the planned attack on Solovyov had been coordinated with Ukrainian intelligence services. Sources among anti-fascists and right-wing politicians told the outlet that the NS/WP label remains influential because of its notoriety and the radicalization of the milieu, while the group itself says it seeks a further “escalation of real violence.”