On 16 December 2025, at a Russian school in the town of Odintsovo, near Moscow, Timofey Vladimirovich Kulyamov, a 15-year-old student, carried out a knife attack, killing a 10-year-old Tajik student. After some resistance, during which the attacker held another student hostage, Timofey was arrested by the authorities. The attack was livestreamed.
The interesting and unusual aspect of this attack is that it has two distinct and clear sources of influence within it. The first one is the extreme right accelerationist ideology, while the second can be attributed to the True Crime Community (TCC) and nihilistic movements such as No Lives Matter (NLM) and the Maniacs Murder Cult (MKY). Specifically, TCC refers to a fandom created with the intention of satisfying people’s curiosity about true crime stories. Among TCC members, there is a small group of people who develop an obsession with murderers, mainly serial killers and school shooters, bordering on wanting to emulate their crimes. Those who are part of this extreme fandom normalise violence. This pool of fans can go so far as to commit criminal activities to emulate their idols, converge within the “The Com”, an online community that lauds and drives violence and gore. NLM and MKY can be defined as nihilistic movements that promote violence and mass killings through the online sharing of violent and propagandistic material. These two groups share recruitment methods and a common view of violence as a means of expression and identity. MKY operates mainly in Russia, while affiliated groups such as NLM are mainly active in English-speaking countries.
In Timofey’s case, the manifesto, clothing, personalised weapons and helmet, along with the livestream of the attack, allowed for the identification of at least some of the influences behind his radicalisation.
Particularly, Timofey’s manifesto explicitly references, through direct quotations, shooters who are widely celebrated within the TCC and in the extreme right milieu. Among them, it is possible find Eric Harris, one of the perpetrators of the 1999 Columbine High School shooting; Dylann Roof, responsible for the 2015 Charleston church attack; and Brenton Tarrant, along with his manifesto The Great Replacement. Beyond these references, the text incorporates key elements of accelerationist extreme right ideology, including anti-Muslim and antisemitic sentiments and the belief in the superiority of the white “race”.
The manifesto also conveys profound contempt for society, which is perceived as hypocritical, disgusting and degenerate, a cause of stress, fear and hate in which people and their lives have no value. Timofey further claims hate toward Muslims, Jews, Black people, and white individuals, whom he accuses of failing to defend their own race. He emphasises that this latter group should emulate what he describes as non-white “heroes”, such as Solomon Henderson and Arda Küçükyetim, whom he credits with having done more to protect the white race than white people themselves.
The analysis of the personalised helmet, softair gun and vest used by the 15-year-old also reveals the extreme right and nihilist movements’ influences that shaped his view (Figure 1, Figure 2).
The knife attack in Odintsovo confirms two trends, notably the young age of the attacker, and that the ideological influence of the extreme right, although present, does not in any way limit inspiration from other extremist phenomena.
Timofey, while drawing heavily on extreme right accelerationist ideology to give shape to his motivations, appears to have been driven primarily by personal hatred rooted in a deeply distressing life situation. His action, although justified by himself through the lens of white supremacy, seems to be based more on his anger and discontent. While in many past cases ideology seemed to be the primary basis for radicalisation, to which the desire to commit a violent act was only added later, in this case, it seems that ideology was simply the vehicle for conveying this anger.
What happened at the school in Odintsovo highlights that a young individual already influenced by radical ideology could find additional justifications for violence within nihilistic movements. These movements, lacking a coherent and structured ideological framework, could facilitate the emergence of hybrid, unpredictable, and increasingly blurred threats.