An underground network of Russians says it’s helped Ukraine hit nine refineries. Almost everything we know about the group comes from one man — a former Gazprom executive.

The BBC Russian Service interviewed Igor Volobuev, a former senior executive at Gazprom and Gazprombank who now fights for Ukraine. Born in Ukraine, Volobuev spent more than 30 years in Russia but went home as soon as the full-scale war began. He once handled public relations and press outreach at Gazprom companies; today he is a drone operator in the Ukrainian army. Since May 2026, he has also served as the “face” of Chernaya Iskra, or Black Spark — an underground movement that allegedly operates inside Russia and passes information to Ukraine for strikes on oil facilities. Meduza reviewed what Volobuev says about Black Spark and what is known about the movement.

What Volobuev told the BBC about Black Spark

Black Spark reached out to the Ukrainian military on its own and offered to help, Volobuev said. Ukraine’s defense forces vetted the group’s members and confirmed they were who they claimed to be; the two sides then began cooperating. The group identifies sections of Russian oil refineries that are both critical and vulnerable to attack, and passes that information to the Ukrainian military. Since September 2025, Ukraine has hit nine refineries across Russia with the group’s help, including the Omsk refinery, the country’s largest by crude-processing volume.

“Why were these guys — the partisans — needed at all? They can infiltrate, and they can tell you that this particular [refinery] unit, say, has been hit and needs to be finished off in such and such a way, in such and such a place,” Volobuev said.

“Why is the word ‘black’ in [the movement’s] name at all? Because they believe that one of their main tasks is to strike Russia’s oil industry, the ‘lifeblood’ of Putin’s regime,” he said.

Volobuev stressed that Black Spark governs itself and does not answer to the Ukrainian military. Its work goes beyond helping Ukrainian forces hit refineries; the group also runs operations of its own, he told the BBC. A group of like-minded people who consider themselves middle class organized the movement; its members are all Russian citizens who still live in the country. There are enough of them, Volobuev said, to operate “in almost any region of Russia.”

Black Spark approached Volobuev and asked him to be its public representative, having concluded that the two shared “basic common values.” He later learned that he had known some of the group’s members personally back in Russia, which helped “establish a certain level of trust.” A face-to-face meeting with key figures in the underground, held outside both Ukraine and Russia, strengthened that trust.

“I won’t hide it: they really did want someone who already had a certain level of recognition and reputation to speak on their behalf, so that people would trust them. Because many people don’t believe such organizations exist. And that’s why they needed someone who would put his reputation on the line and answer for it with his name,” he said.

What he has said about the movement before

Volobuev first identified himself publicly as Black Spark’s spokesperson in May 2026. Then, as any organization’s public representative would, he began giving interviews to one outlet after another about what Black Spark is, who is behind it, its goals, and what it has achieved so far. Here is what he has told them:

• Ukraine had no hand in creating Black Spark and does not command the underground group. Its members do cooperate with the Ukrainian military, but they also carry out sabotage on their own inside Russia, including torching locomotives and blowing up gas pipelines.
• Only Russians belong to Black Spark. Its ranks include the middle-class members who organized the group, people with Ukrainian roots, others with combat experience, and businesspeople who fund its activities. Volobuev says he helps the movement for free.
• Black Spark needs publicity to recruit new members. That, Volobuev says, is why the underground organization has begun talking about itself openly: “They want to have their own representatives in every region of Russia. Without a public profile, that’s practically impossible.”
• Volobuev is the guarantor of Black Spark’s reliability. “I am the proof. If I’ve vouched for [Black] Spark, that means everything there is clean. […] This isn’t an FSB project. […] I’ve put my name on the line. If something happens, I’ll be the one who answers for it. I’m already in this up to my neck. I wouldn’t have done this if I weren’t confident that this is a real force against Putin,” he told the independent Russian outlet Republic.

What else is known about Black Spark

The Russian-language outlet Vot Tak, which traced the movement’s history, reported that Black Spark first became publicly known through a post published by Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces on September 7, 2025. The post described a strike on the crude distillation complex at the Ilsky refinery, carried out with help from a Black Spark cell in the Krasnodar region. Its headline opened with the phrase “From a spark, a flame shall be kindled” — the Decembrist line that Lenin took as the motto of his revolutionary newspaper, Iskra.

In the weeks and months that followed, Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces mentioned Black Spark in reports on strikes against other refineries, a Buk-M3 surface-to-air missile system, a Nebo-U radar station, and Russian ships in the Caspian Sea, as well as on other operations. In all, Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces mentioned the group on its Telegram channel 16 times between September 2025 and August 2026.

Black Spark launched its own Telegram channel in November 2025, two months after the Ukrainian military first mentioned it. Since then, the movement has added a website and YouTube and TikTok accounts, and it has produced an anthem and a manifesto. The manifesto includes this passage: “We are the true elite who spent years trying to change Russia’s regime through peaceful means. Putin’s terror killed our faith in dialogue. We realized that under a dictatorship, justice has no choice but to carry ‘Molotov cocktails.’”

For now, everything known about Black Spark’s existence and activities comes from Volobuev’s account, statements from the Ukrainian military, and the movement’s own social media posts — which are either videos of Volobuev or generic posts written in the style of other pro-Ukrainian Telegram channels covering the war.

On social media, Black Spark sometimes boasts about the sabotage Volobuev describes elsewhere. In recent months, the movement has claimed on Telegram to have blown up the Belousovo-Leningrad and Konnaya Lakhta gas pipelines near St. Petersburg, as well as a pipeline supplying the Nizhnekamskneftekhim petrochemical plant in Tatarstan. Meduza could not confirm any of those claims through open sources.

To judge by the media activity around it, Black Spark could be a real underground network — or bait meant to recruit would-be saboteurs inside Russia.

Sources at the Ukrainian General Staff told the BBC that Black Spark exists and works with the Ukrainian side, but they would not give further details.