[2] He had studied within the same group as Pavel Popovskikh, a military officer later charged and acquitted by court with the contract killing of journalist Dmitry Kholodov.

The same year he received the Candidate of sciences degree (equivalent to PhD) for his dissertation Development of means and methods of special intelligence in the modern warfare.

[4] Rossiyskaya Gazeta asserts that during the 1999 NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia Kvachkov presented Slobodan Milošević with his plan of an "alternative war".

[4] On 17 March 2005, Anatoly Chubais, head of the state run monopoly RAO UES and a major privatization economic reformer, narrowly escaped an ambush outside Moscow when his convoy was blasted with roadside bombs and trapped under automatic gunfire.

Igor Yartykh, a lawyer who won a case involving former paratroopers accused of the murder of Dmitry Kholodov, took Kvachkov's defense.

He agreed to slander defendants after his kidnappers threatened to imprison his wife and showed him a forged protocol of the search in his apartment illegal ammunition and narcotics had been found.

He provided audio recordings of some of his conversations with militia officers pressuring him, but the judge refused to make an examination of this tape and to file it to the case.

[11] Pro-Kremlin liberal media pleaded for "tough sentences," to cool "folk avengers"[11] and finally, after three years of imprisonment Kvachkov, Naydenov and Yashin were acquitted by the court on 5 June 2008.

[13] On the other hand, he believes that acquittal of the guilty is better than sentencing of innocent[14] Kvachkov, in retaliation, called the attack on Chubais the "first act of armed resistance in the national liberation war",[15] Around the same time, Kvachkov said "now I have a chance to finish what I started", meaning his doctoral thesis,[16] but some media quoted it out of context.

Still he maintained that he did not participate in the assassination and that it was staged by Chubais himself to divert attention from his business problems[17] The case returned to court again after the prosecution's appeal.

The charges were linked to the activities of the group of Kvachkov supporters, the People's Front for Liberation of Russia, whose members in Tolyatti were accused of training with crossbows in a plot to overthrow the government.

[26] On February 8, 2013, the Moscow City Court sentenced Vladimir Kvachkov to 13 years in a strict regime colony for preparing an armed mutiny.

The verdict says that it was established that in 2009 Kvachkov offered his supporters in various cities to take part in an armed rebellion, which was supposed to begin on June 24, 2010.

It was planned to seize the buildings of the Kovrov branches of MVD, the FSB, the MChS, as well as weapons and ammunition in small groups.

One of the main pieces of evidence in the case was the recording of a conversation between several supporters of Kvachkov, when they were developing a plan for a sortie into Kovrov, intelligence, distribution of funds and human resources.

[4] Kvachkov was adamant to entreats of his supporters to run for the Duma mandate, which would set him free (elected representatives receive immunity from legal prosecution of any kind, criminal or civil).

[33] Another applicant for the elections, Communist Party member Yelena Lukyanova, a law professor at Moscow State University and the daughter of top-ranked Soviet apparatchik Anatoly Lukyanov,[34] withdrew from the race, even though Rodina and the Union of Right Forces had considered backing her bid.

"I withdrew because I cannot take part in an election where a candidate does not enjoy the same rights I do," she said, referring to Kvachkov, who was in jail, left without any options to support his own candidature.

[35] Both times, in 2005 and 2006, the Moscow branch of Labour Russia and Vanguard of Red Youth helped Kvachkov with his election campaign.

In August 2023, he was fined 40 thousand rubles for “discrediting the army,” and in October he was placed under administrative supervision and banned from participating in rallies for five years.

[41] His plan was based on the legal loophole: a convicted felon cannot vote or stand for a parliament, but if his case is lodged with the Court of Appeal he still has all the electoral rights.