In late December, the 2nd Western District Military Court in Moscow sentenced defendants in the case of the NS/WP group. Investigators said they had set fire to draft offices, police vehicles, and cars marked with the Z symbol, and had also prepared an attempt on TV host Vladimir Solovyov. Group leader Andrei Pronsky received a life sentence, while the others were given terms ranging from 12 to 28 years; one more participant had earlier been sent for compulsory psychiatric treatment.
Most of those convicted had previously faced charges for racist violence. Pronsky was arrested back in 2012 for murdering an acquaintance of Jewish origin and spent about nine years in a psychiatric hospital. After his release in 2021, Novaya Gazeta Europe writes, he became one of the people who relaunched NS/WP, a neo-Nazi internet brand known from the 2000s.
After February 24, 2022, the group opposed the war, but from its own far-right logic. FSB wiretaps played in court also captured discussions of other political killings, including that of Dmitry Muratov. Then, according to the case materials, Pronsky was contacted by Ukrainian neo-Nazi Artem Deriglazov, who is serving a life sentence, and was told of an alleged offer to arrange Solovyov’s murder in exchange for a review of his sentence. Investigators say the defendants gathered information on the presenter’s routes, bought weapons and forged Ukrainian passports, and were then detained.
The defendants told the court they were victims of political persecution and torture. They described beatings, simulated drowning, electric shocks, and teeth being filed down. At the same time, investigators are pursuing a separate case against another group, “Pure Blood”, whose members are accused of preparing an attempt on Margarita Simonyan; the defense says the idea was planted in the teenagers’ minds by a man they knew only by the nickname “Fash,” allegedly linked to NS/WP.
According to the administrator of the anti-fascist channel “Public Appeals,” the ideology of “people-hate” is built on devaluing human life, dividing people into the “worthy” and the “expendable,” and easily adapting to different political contexts.
The newspaper links the current NS/WP activity to Roman Zheleznov, known as “Zyukhel,” one of the identified administrators of the original NS/WP network. After moving to Ukraine in 2014 and later falling out with former allies, he is believed to have rebuilt the network together with Pronsky. At the same time, the revived organization has become a convenient framework for opening new criminal cases against far-right activists.
Against this backdrop, xenophobic violence in Russia is rising. According to the Sova Center, by early December there had been 276 attacks, leaving seven people dead. In 2024, a person linked to NS/WP killed Ukrainian politician Iryna Farion in Lviv, showing that the network remains active despite arrests and competing claims that it is tied either to Ukrainian or Russian security services.