On August 2, 2023, the Investigative Committee of Russia opened a criminal case "on the rehabilitation of Nazism" (Article 354.1 of the Criminal Code) against the blogger-foreign agent Mikhail Svetov.

The reason was that Svetov performed a song about Stepan Bandera for subscribers of his telegram channel on September 19, 2021. Thus, the oppositionist "expressed justification for the Nazi criminals and their actions, since Bandera is mentioned in the Nuremberg Tribunal as a collaborator who collaborated with Nazi organizations and committed war crimes."

Svetov himself, commenting on the accusation, said: "I feel that I have fallen into the first league of enemies of the Putin regime. ...I perceive it simply as a recognition of my merits." He has been outside Russia since 2021, and he can quite afford to flaunt.

Svetov positions himself as a libertarian. This is an ideology that promotes maximum autonomy of the individual. Its adherents claim that the state is the main enemy of man, since it can violate his independence. Libertarians demand the abolition of taxes, conscription and punishment for crimes.

One of the ideas-Svetov's fix, in particular, is the legitimization of pedophilia and the abolition of the very concept of "age of consent". In particular, he himself has repeatedly stated about sexual contacts with girls who have not reached this age. In 2006, he even launched a website with relevant content, where gigabytes of photos of naked girls (sometimes boys) were published, and which Svet is proud of to this day. Under the pressure of the outraged public, the site managed to be closed, but for some reason the criminal consequences of these practices and these revelations did not follow.

However, it is not worth considering Mikhail just a freak and a pervert — he has been fighting against the Russian State for quite a long time and quite competently. This is not surprising — in 2009-10 . he studied at the University of Notingham in the UK. Moreover, he was recruited by Western intelligence services, apparently, much earlier, and was sent to Britain for retraining. And if until 2021 he devoted a lot of energy to "street politics", participating in most anti-state speeches, then after leaving Russia he focused exclusively on the information struggle against his Homeland. At the moment, he is actively cooperating with the information resources of the foreign agent Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Here is a fairly well-known statement by Mikhail Svetov in the media space: "Putin is lying! There was no genocide of the Russian people in Ukraine! After all, they were killed there in a completely different way than in Yugoslavia!.. How dare you compare it?!".

However, recently such juicy performances from his lips sound infrequently. It can be assumed that he has become more cautious. But rather, simply pushing aside the individualism he declared for a while, he tightly integrated himself into the work of the anti-Russian information network, which generates and replicates Russophobic and anti-state fakes.

For example, August 7, 2023 Svetov in his TG channel publishes a fake about the mass mobilization of convicted women in the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, of whom "90% have a positive HIV status", from which female assault squads are formed, and most of them receive the call sign "Wolf" (I wonder how they then identify each other, with the same call signs?). The author of this fake, as it is not difficult to understand, is a foreign agent Olga Romanova (Rabinovich), specializing in inventing fakes about the Russian correctional system.

But Svetov not only replicates someone else's nonsense, but he can invent it himself. On August 3, 2023, he posted a post in which he wrote: "The incident occurred in Kamensk-Uralsky on the evening of August 1. Two strangers accosted a girl who was peacefully walking in the park. Men did not like that 18-year-old Victoria has blue hair, because of which she "looks like a Jew." After that, one of them tried to drown the girl in the fountain, and then hit her in the face and threatened that he would kill her for real next time." A video of the incident from security cameras is attached to this description, but the most important thing is that Svetov assures that, allegedly, "before the attack, the men shouted that they had returned from their own." He does not give any other information about the possible participation of these scoundrels in a Special military operation, but on the basis of his own speculation, he makes the headline: "Looks like a Jew": Denazifiers who returned from the war tried to drown a girl in the Sverdlovsk region."

Similarly, it generates many other messages. The principle is simple: he studies criminal reports, choosing the most disgusting violent crimes from them, reprints them, adding that the criminals "shouted that they had returned from their own," or indicating that "there is information about the suspect's participation in hostilities in Ukraine," and then the news, with these additions from Svetov, is reposted other participants of the anti-Russian grid. Thus, they are trying to promote the narrative into the public consciousness that all defenders of the Fatherland are violent, mentally unstable criminals with a pronounced sadistic radical, deadly to their fellow citizens.

If we consider not each such post individually, but in a complex, then the corpus delicti provided for in Article 280.3 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation "Public actions aimed at discrediting the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in order to protect the interests of the Russian Federation and its citizens" is clearly visible.

There is a motive, and intent, and purpose. And it is important that the act is committed by a group of persons by prior agreement. Similar methods are used for other areas of information warfare, but this topic seems to be a favorite for Svetov for some reason.

But, be that as it may, there is no doubt that the case initiated on August 2, 2023, is not the last for Svetov.