(NewsNation) — The 22-year-old leader of an Eastern European white supremacist group admitted on Wednesday he planned to solicit hate crimes in New York.
Georgian national Michail Chkhikvishvili — known as “Commander Butcher” — was a leader of Maniac Murder Cult, which the Department of Justice describes as a “racially motivated violent extremist group.”
Since 2022, Chkhikvishvili has made multiple trips to Brooklyn, where he solicited people to commit hate crimes against Jewish people and other minorities.
He and his group’s plans, outlined in its “Hater’s Handbook” manifesto, were promoted primarily on the Telegram messaging app. One of the people he messaged was an undercover FBI employee, whom he asked to partake in various schemes.
The plans included having someone dress up as Santa Claus hand out candy laced with poison to racial minorities in 2023. Chkhikvishvili also spread manuals about creating lethal poisons and gases, including ricin, the following January as his plan evolved.
Prosecutors said Chkhikvishvili and the group’s violent rhetoric inspired multiple real-life attacks, including a January 2025 school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, and a stabbing outside of a Turkish mosque in August 2024.
Chkhikvishvili was arrestd in July 2024 in Moldova, and extradited to the United States in May 2025. He faces a maximum sentence of 40 years in prison.