MOSCOW, January 28 (RIA Novosti) – A Moscow court found a former senior KGB foreign intelligence officer guilty of extremism and sentenced him to 2 1/2 years in jail.
Valery Vdovenko, 58, was charged with setting up the Severnoye Bratstvo (Northern Brotherhood) nationalist movement, aimed at overthrowing the government by staging a revolution and "cleansing" the country of non-Slavs.
Investigators said Vdovenko, who had "theoretic knowledge to overthrow governments," wanted to unite all Russian radical nationalist groups within the Severnoye Bratstvo and set up a new state called Kievan or Svetlaya Rus within Russia.
Investigators said Vdovenko led the group, set up in 2006, and found ways to finance it. Vdovenko pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Severnoye Bratstvo was banned as an extremist group by a Moscow court in August 2012.
One of Severnoye Bratstvo’s founders, Anton Mukhachyov, was sentenced to nine years in prison in September 2011 for extremism and fraud. In October 2012, another Severnoye Bratstvo founder, Pyotr Khomyakov, was jailed for four years on the same charges.
Vdovenko, a former officer of the First Directorate of the KGB, which handled external espionage, worked for the Russian government and the president’s administration in the 1990s. He was one of the founders of the nationalist Rodina party, which was barred from the 2005 elections to the Moscow city legislature because the group incited racial hatred in its political campaign.
