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For a brief moment, the Kremlin thought it had won a small but satisfying victory.
One of its most wanted enemies, one of the most prominent anti-Putin Russians fighting alongside Ukraine, was supposedly dead, killed in a drone strike.
Instead, it was revealed only days later that the Kremlin got conned, and the $500,000 bounty money awarded ended up directly funding the very war it’s trying to win.
Denis Kapustin, a far-right Russian militant also known by his name of war “White Rex,” was reported dead on December 27 after an alleged Ukrainian drone strike on the southern front.
Kapustin is a former football hooligan who has been banned from the Schengen Area since 2019 for promoting neo-Nazi ideology.
Despite this, he has become one of the most prominent anti-Putin Russians fighting on behalf of Ukraine.
Russian intelligence services had long hunted Kapustin, placing a $500,000 price on his head. After news broke of his supposed assassination, Moscow paid out the bounty, not realizing the money was going straight to Ukraine.
Kapustin is the founder of the pro-Ukrainian Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK), which was set up in 2022 and later carried out cross-border raids into Russia’s Belgorod and Kursk regions.
After reports of Kapustin’s death emerged, the RDK confirmed it.
“We will definitely take revenge, Denis,” the group said on Telegram.
“Your legacy lives on.”
But on New Year’s Day, Kapustin dramatically re-emerged alive and unharmed in a video released by Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, the HUR.
“Welcome back to life,” HUR chief General Kyrylo Budanov said cheekily, congratulating Kapustin and his team on a successful intelligence operation.
“First of all, Mr Denis, congratulations on your return to life. That is always a pleasure. I am glad that the money allocated for your assassination was used to support our struggle,” General Budanov added.
The Timur unit announced: “Our side also received a corresponding amount of funds allocated by Russian intelligence agencies for the implementation of this crime.”
Kapustin remains inside Ukrainian territory and is “preparing to continue carrying out assigned tasks”, according to a Ukrainian commander.
His family moved from Moscow to Germany when he was 17, before Kapustin relocated to Ukraine in 2017.
In the early weeks of Russia’s full-scale invasion, he helped establish units that later became Ukraine’s 3rd Assault Brigade, which played a key role in defending Kyiv.
Responding to reports of his death, the 3rd Army Corps said: “We together confronted the common enemy in the battle for Kyiv.”
“He perceived [Ukraine] as a place of real resistance and freedom,” it added.
Kapustin established the RDK in August 2022 with the stated goal of overthrowing Putin to bring “peace to Russia” and end a regime of “lies, corruption, and lawlessness.”
Russia has labelled the RDK a terrorist organisation and has sentenced Kapustin twice in absentia to life imprisonment on charges of treason and terrorism.
In March 2024, the group stormed into Russia using tanks and armoured vehicles, clashing with security forces and capturing Russian soldiers.
Kyiv insists that while the RDK operates under Ukrainian command, the cross-border incursions were not ordered directly by Ukraine’s leadership.
It comes as the war enters its 1,409th day with Ukraine launching a wave of overnight drone attacks across several Russian regions, hitting energy and industrial sites, according to local officials.
Targets were struck in Krasnodar, Tatarstan and Kaluga, sparking fires at several facilities.
In Krasnodar, flames broke out at the Ilskiy oil refinery, while an energy storage site in the city of Almetyevsk, in Tatarstan’s Volga River region, was also hit. An industrial facility in Lyudinovo, in the Kaluga region southwest of Moscow, was damaged as well.
As the new year began, Russia and Ukraine traded accusations of attacking civilians.
Moscow reported a deadly strike on a hotel in Russian-occupied southern Ukraine. Kyiv responded by insisting it strictly targets military and energy infrastructure.
Ukrainian officials said civilians were hit elsewhere. Kherson regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin said a man was killed and an 87-year-old woman injured in attacks on the city on Thursday.
Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Oleksiy Kuleba said rail facilities were attacked in three separate regions.
Russia’s feared FSB and GRU intelligence agencies have a long reputation for ruthlessness, but through the course of the war Ukraine has repeatedly shown its ability to outsmart its rival agencies.
In November, it was reported that Ukrainian intelligence used Russia’s own agents against it, accepting missions openly offered by the FSB for financial reward, only to sabotage them.
In one case, a Ukrainian double-agent accepted a task from a Russian jobs board to build a bomb, which was then handed to a Russian saboteur. The bomb was filled with flour, and the Russian agent was arrested after it failed to detonate.
Ukraine has also claimed responsibility for assassinations of senior Russian officials, while Kyiv is suspected of orchestrating several others.
In April, Yaroslav Moskalik, deputy chief of the main operations directorate of Russia’s army, was killed by a car bomb in a Moscow suburb. Russian outlet Baza reported the device was strapped to a parked Volkswagen and detonated remotely as he walked past.
A month later, former Ukrainian politician Andriy Portnov was shot dead outside the American School of Madrid while dropping off his daughters, in what appeared to be a professional hit.
Most recently, Lieutenant General Fanil Sarvarov, 56, head of the Russian army’s operational training directorate, died in an explosion in Moscow on December 22. At least seven nearby cars were damaged in the blast.
Another senior figure, Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov — who oversaw Russia’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons — was killed on December 17 by a remotely detonated device hidden inside an electric scooter.
“Kirillov was a war criminal and an absolutely legitimate target, as he gave orders to use banned chemical weapons against the Ukrainian military,” a Ukrainian security source told The Telegraph.
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