This report presents our research on Russian nationalists who fought in Ukraine on the side of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) or Lugansk People’s Republic (LNR). We have no intent of covering everyone, who, to some extent, espouses nationalistic views—after all, participation in an irredentist war is a nationalistic act in and of itself. We focus only on individuals who had been active in the Russian nationalist movement prior to the outbreak of the hostilities and thus, in a sense, both represented the movement during the war and represented this military experience within the movement.
Our research is an attempt to discuss which groups, and which specific activists within them, have participated in the war, and what changes these militants and their organizations have experienced as a result. We also attempt to evaluate the overall effect of these events on the Russian nationalist movement.
In our work on the article, we used publicly available information, such as media publications, social network materials, and, most frequently, websites of right-wing radical groups, their social network communities, and the members’ personal pages. Preliminary analysis of the available data allowed us to identify specific ultraright groups, for which we had more detailed and personalized information on their involvement in the war on the side of the separatists; we then attempted to track the principal postwar options available for the former nationalist fighters after they returned from the LNR/DNR. We had no preliminary hypotheses regarding such options, but only correlated our newly collected information with previously published data.
The main problem encountered had to do with the fragmentary nature of the information on participation in the hostilities and, frequently, also on the subsequent activity (especially if this activity could be considered dubious from a legal standpoint). Many nationalists either never had any intention to advertise their activities during the war and afterward, or have later removed much of the previously published materials; not all valuable information was saved in time. However, if a noticeable number of people had pursued a certain postwar trajectory, we are unlikely to have missed this trend.
Participation in the Hostilities
The participation of Russian nationalists in the fighting in Donbas was covered extensively in the mass media and on social networks, but very few publications have attempted to summarize the information on this topic. Attention has focused either on the overall participation of Russian citizens in the conflict (thus losing sight of the nationalists specifically) or on the Russian ultraright activists fighting on the Ukrainian side. Only a small number of authors (Likhachev Reference Likhachev2016; Yudina Reference Yudina2015) have provided a more or less thorough summary of our topic of interest.
In order to assess the postwar fate of these militants, we need to recap, at least briefly, the data collected by SOVA Center staff and other researchers in order that the scale of a given group’s participation in the war can then be correlated with the consequences of such participation.
Russian nationalists never comprised a large percentage of Russians in the combat zone (Mitrokhin 2015), but their contribution to the military operations in the Donbas has been significant. Providing even an approximate number of the members of the ultraright who at some point visited Donbas is very difficult. According to the most approximate estimates, known nationalists fighting for “Novorossiya” numbered at least 200 people, not counting the “unregistered” Cossacks. In mid-2014, Marlene Laruelle (Washington Post, June 26, 2014) estimated the number of fighters sent to the Donbas by nationalist movements as between 100 and 200 people. According to the estimate provided to the authors by Alexander Tarasov, the Director of the Phoenix (Feniks) Center for New Sociology and the Study of Practical Politics, approximately 90 nationalists fought on the side of the DNR/LNR in late 2014. Most likely, however, larger numbers of them visited the area in spontaneous rotation during the period of active military operations.
Cossacks, en masse, may well be classified as Russian nationalists, but are always regarded by the latter as a separate movement. They also perceive themselves as distinct, and, most importantly, they comprise a very particular movement based not only on ideological cohesion, but also on collective political and economic interests at the local level. Only infrequently are people with actual military experience encountered among the Cossacks—but they are nevertheless more numerous among the Cossacks than in any other Russian nationalist group. As such, the participation in the war of Cossack organizations, particularly those based in regions bordering Ukraine, was to be expected. However, we should emphasize that the key official (registered) Cossack organizations could not participate directly in the war due to their status as quasi-state structures.
As a result, the Cossack National Guard of the Great Don Army (Vsevelikoe Voisko Donskoe), created in April–May 2014, ended up being the most notable armed Cossack association involved in the conflict. Nikolai Kozitsyn took over overall command as the ataman of the Army (Makarenko Reference Makarenko2014). Detachments of armed Cossacks began to arrive on LNR territory on May 3, when they raised the flag of their Army over the Antratsit City Administration building. By early June, they controlled an extensive area in the west of the LNR (Bondarenko Reference Bondarenko2014), even though they did not report to the LNR leadership. That being said, Igor Strelkov, the head of the DNR Armed Forces at that time, accused the Cossacks of evading military action (Makarenko Reference Makarenko2014). Kozitsyn’s Cossacks never played a truly significant role in the war, despite participating in a number of battles. Meanwhile, their conflicts with the LNR leadership turned violent in the fall of 2014. The LNR employed its famous Prizrak (Ghost) Brigade, commanded by Aleksei Mozgovoy, and succeeded in driving the Cossack formations out of Antratsit in late 2014. Viacheslav Pinezhanin, the Antratsit Commandant appointed by the Cossacks, was shot to death (Obozrevatel’ 2014). By March 2015, the Cossacks had also been forced out of Krasnyi Luch. As a result, many Cossacks of the Don Army, including Kozitsyn, left the LNR and returned to Russia; the remainder agreed to join the LNR Armed Forces. The Sixth Motorized Infantry Cossack Regiment, under the leadership of ataman Pavel Driomov, was formed in the spring of 2015. Driomov was killed in the conflict with the LNR authorities in December of that year, whereupon the Cossack detachments were either disarmed or became part of the LNR “territorial defense battalions.”
Other Cossack formations noticed in Donbas included the Black Raven Volunteer Platoon of the Black Earth Belt (Dobrovol’cheskii vzvod Chernozemiia “Chernyi Voron”), led by Voronezh nationalist Evgeny “Hetman” Mazepin, the Bratina Cossack Community, and the Wolves’ Hundred (Volchia Sotnia, also known as Terskaia Volchia Sotnia) Reconnaissance Group. The latter group was led by Evgeny “Dingo” Ponomarev, who was killed by a landmine on August 27, 2014, near Krasnodon. The Wolves’ Hundred participated in the Crimean self-defense forces as part of the Rubezh Volunteer People’s Squad (Dobrovol’naia narodnaia druzhina; RND) during the annexation of Crimea; later, part of the group moved to Donbas and took part in the capture of Kramatorsk under the leadership of Kramatorsk “People’s Mayor” Vyacheslav Ponomarev. In the fall of 2014, the Wolves’ Hundred was in Donetsk, where it was known as the Cossack Rapid Response Detachment and reported to the DNR Prosecutor General’s Office. Aleksandr “Babai” Mozhaev, who liked posing in front of television cameras and attracted journalists with his exotic appearance, was the most famous representative of this group. In the second half of November, the Wolves’ Hundred returned to Russia “to rest.”
Thanks to the war, Alexander Barkashov’s Russian National Unity (Russkoe Natsional’noe Edinstvo, RNE)—or more precisely, several groups of activists from the long-disbanded RNEFootnote 1 that remained loyal to the original leader—reemerged from political nonexistence. With the start of the “Russian Spring,” the RNE supporters and Barkashov personally became involved in active recruiting to “volunteer detachments” via the webpage of the “European Action—Russia” group and via the Soratnik website of Barkashov’s RNE. In March 2014, an armed detachment was formed under the auspices of the RNE, with the leader’s son, Piotr Barkashov, as its commander; this unit fought in the ranks of Prizrak. In May 2014, the Belarusian branch of the RNE increased its level of engagement and began forming volunteer detachments. RNE activists from many regions of Russia had joined such detachments by August; groups of Donbas-bound volunteers appeared in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Murmansk, Bryansk, and Altai. Activists from the RNE are known to have participated in battles near Krasnodon—in Antratsit, Krasnyi Luch, and Snezhny—in 2014 (VKontakte 2014).
Barkashov recruited volunteers not only for his own unit, but also for other detachments, such as the Donetsk Russian Orthodox Army (Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Armiia; RPA). In May 2014, the SBU made public the record of an intercepted conversation between Barkashov and Dmitry Boitsov, the leader of Orthodox Donbas (Pravoslavnyi Donbas) and an RPA commander, who was responsible for security during the May 11 referendum on Donbas’s independence from Ukraine. In this conversation, Barkashov instructed Boytsov on how best to conduct a referendum and ensure “the desired result” (YouTube 2014).
Pavel Gubarev, the first “people’s governor” of the Donetsk region and an ideologist of the Donbas “Russian Spring,” had been involved with the RNE in the past (YouTube 2016a), but we do not know whether and how this affected participation in the war by Barkashov’s followers. The names of other RNE activists who fought in Ukraine are known as well—for example Mikhail Barkashov (Batkovich), mistakenly identified as a son of Alexander Barkashov by the Ukrainian media. The number of people who were sent to Donbas by the RNE is difficult to estimate. The largest group photo available to us shows 20 people; we can assume that, in total, they numbered about twice as many.
The monarchist ultraright Russian Imperial Movement (Russkoe imperskoe dvizhenie; RID)Footnote 2 became another preexisting nationalist organization noticeable in the war in Donbas. The RID joined the movement in support of the “fight for Novorossiya” in May 2014 and was actively involved in the events in CrimeaFootnote 3 and southeastern Ukraine; its activists were observed in Odessa, Lugansk, and Slavyansk. Alexander Zhuchkovskii, a member of the St. Petersburg branch, was directly engaged in promoting the cause and recruiting volunteers.
Two paramilitary clubs led by Denis Gariev, hand-to-hand fighting instructor and coordinator of the RID, played a key role in the recruitment and training of volunteers: Reserve (Rezerv) and Imperial Legion (IL). These clubs exemplify the kind of nationalist militarization tolerated by the authorities. Reserve was founded in 2007 on the pretext of preparing youth for army service, “to promote a healthy lifestyle and the ideals of military valor based on the values of the Russian Orthodox Church and to study the history of Russian military glory” (Pravoslavnoe Voinstvo Reference Voinstvo2014). In 2013, in the midst of the ultraright anti-immigrant raids, the club formed a raiding group, Reserve Squad (Rezerv-Druzhina), co-founded by Gariev, Zhuchkovskii, and Yury Mernyi. Since May 2014, Reserve has declared itself to be the “St. Petersburg volunteer training center” for those wishing to join the military operations in southeastern Ukraine (Fontanka.ru 2017b). The club also collected “humanitarian aid” for the militia, which, at that time, was openly implied to include a very wide range of items, from food to military equipment (but stopping short of actual weapons). Gariev called himself “an assistant to the head of the delegation of the State Committee for Humanitarian Support of the DNR in the Russian Federation” (Fontanka.ru 2014). Reserve sent groups of five or six volunteers from St. Petersburg to the area of the Rostov region bordering Ukraine; they then entered Donetsk and Lugansk regions through a “humanitarian corridor.” Pre-deployment training lasted for two weeks. Among Reserve’s partners in this venture was the Militia Training Center in Kaluga.
The Imperial Legion Military-Patriotic Club (IL)Footnote 4 was formed by the RID in June 2014. Established specifically for involvement in the war, the club—again headed by Gariev—is headquartered in St. Petersburg. Its VKontakte page states, without providing details, that branches also exist in several other cities in Russia and abroad; it further reports that many members of the club have been awarded medals and distinctions by the DNR (Partizan Center 2017). In 2015, the IL VKontakte page reported that about 200 volunteers from Russia had fought in its ranks during the conflict in Novorossiya (VKontakte 2015a), but this number seems exaggerated. First, the RID has never shown the ability to assemble large numbers of participants for its peacetime events; and second (and more importantly), at least some texts produced by the war participants would presumably have mentioned that the unit was so big.
The IL volunteers first fought under the command of Igor Strelkov. After Strelkov left Donbas in October 2014, they were incorporated into Aleksei Mozgovoi’s Prizrak brigade in the LNR, but returned to the DNR by the end of the year (Russkii Obshche-Voinskii Soiuz Reference Soiuz2014). They participated in combat in Slavyansk, Nikishino, and Donetsk, as well as near Mariupol, Alchevsk, and Debaltsevo.
At least three IL fighters were killed, and at least two are missing. According to Ukrainian sources, 10 people from the IL were killed (Chetvertaia Vlast’ 2016). In January 2016, the IL group was withdrawn from the Donbas territory and returned to Russia (VKontakte 2016a), but some people stayed behind (for example IL fighter Sergei Bredikhin, who was killed near Gorlovka in July 2016 [Soobshchestvo v podderzhku Novorossii Reference Novorossii2016]).
The E.N.O.T. Corp. group also fought in southeastern Ukraine. (Although the name looks like an abbreviation, it is not; the name simply means “the Raccoon (enot) Corps.”) It was created in the spring of 2014 by activists from the following nationalist organizations: Bright Rus’ (Svetlaia Rus’), led by Igor MangushevFootnote 5; the Moscow branch of the People’s Council (Narodnyi sobor),Footnote 6 headed by Roman Telenkevich; and the People’s Council–affiliated Reserve Association of Military-Patriotic Clubs (not to be confused with the Reserve club connected to Imperial Legion). After the outbreak of hostilities, the group engaged in everything from collecting humanitarian aid and preparing and equipping volunteers to participating directly in the fighting; their “business trips” to the military operations zone and their participation in the conflict were masked as humanitarian missions. The Ukrainian website Stopterror reported that the “Raccoons” were also engaged in the sale of military ammunition (Stopterror 2015). By June 2015, fourteen E.N.O.T Corp “business trips” had been reported.
The group has been conducting its own elementary military and survival training courses since April 2015. It has involved members of another nationalist militant group namely the Guerilla Assault Reconnaissance Group (Diversionno-shturmovaia razvedyvatel’naia gruppa, DShRG) “Rusich,” under the leadership of Aleksei Milchakov (also known as Serb or Fritz), in this effort.Footnote 7 Ivan Petrovsky (Ian) is another famous Rusich member.
The first group of Rusich members arrived in Donbas on June 22, 2014. Along with two other groups, Ratibor and Project Mayhem, the group joined a special unit of the LNR’s People’s Militia: the Batman Quick Response Group, under the leadership of Alexander “Batman” Bednov. As part of the Batman Group, the Rusich militants took part in battles for the Lugansk and Donetsk airports, as well as many others, in 2014. (A group of St. Petersburg nationalists—among them Kirill Rimkus and Dmitry Deineko—also fought in the ranks of the Batman Group, and the famous ultra-nationalist site Sputnik and Pogrom called on its readers to join.)
In late March 2015, after redeployment to the DNR, the Rusich soldiers fought in the First Separate Infantry Brigade (1SOBR) of the Viking First Mechanized Infantry Battalion (1MSB) of the Slavic Corps. They subsequently became part of the 4th Territorial Defense Battalion of LNR (formerly Prizrak), commanded by Mozgovoi. The Rusich fighters, infamous for their abuse of captured Ukrainian soldiers (Dokaz 2015), left the LNR in late summer 2015.
Of course, the war strongly affected the Other Russia (Drugaia Rossiia) party,Footnote 8 which saw it as a chance to expand their activities (Azar Reference Azar2017). The separatist uprising in Donbas could have been interpreted as a prototype of revolutionary events not only in Ukraine, but also in Russia, corresponding with the idea—introduced by the National Bolsheviks in the early 2000s—of importing the revolution to Russia from the near abroad (the “Second Russia” project). From the beginning of Euromaidan in Kiev in 2013, the party supported the Anti-Maidan faction. Starting in early May 2014, Limonov’s followers, in collaboration with the dobrovolets.org website, forged the Interbrigades (Interbrigady) movement, which claims to have brought over 2,000 volunteers to the battlefields (of course, this is a serious exaggeration, typical of the National Bolsheviks); they also managed collection and delivery of humanitarian aid to the militia and the populations of the DNR/LNR.
However, the revolutionary scenario did not come to pass. No revolution has been imported; on the contrary, the National Bolsheviks were even prevented from engaging in political activities in the separatist republics. Sergei “Fomich” Fomchenkov, a member of the Other Russia Executive Committee, failed in his effort to establish a new branch of the party in Donbas. His successor, Simon Verdiian, had more success in this regard in early 2015, but it proved to be short-lived. The Interbrigades never became a separate unit; groups of National Bolsheviks fought in the Mongoose (Mangust) squadron from October 2014, but they were not exclusively to be found there. The National Bolsheviks who fought in eastern Ukraine include Kirill Unchuk, who had previously spent three years in prison for taking part in the nationalist riots on Manezhnaya Square on December 11, 2010. We should also mention writer Zakhar Prilepin, one of the party leaders, who, in the fall of 2016, became a political instructor in a DNR Army battalion in the regiment of DNR Leader Alexander Zakharchenko (Snob 2017)—while spending almost all his time in Russia, of course. However, according to Limonov, Prilepin’s role in the party leadership is purely formal, and his activity in the DNR has nothing to do with the party (Azar 2017).
According to spokesman Alexander Averin, almost all volunteers had left Donbas by 2016, but some remained (Azar Reference Azar2017). (Averin himself was arrested with illegal weapons near the border in April 2018.) Several National Bolsheviks were also killed in the hostilities.
Nationalist neo-pagans visited the theater of military operations as well. Follower of the Slavic Native Faith (Rodnover) Igor “Vedun” Orzhentsov participated in the conflict from the summer of 2014 and served as Deputy Commander for public relations of the Leshiy Special Purpose Battalion and the head of the Lugansk office of the ANNA NEWS agency. During the conflict, he became known for his reporting and interviews, in which he talked about the “crimes of the Ukrainian junta” and military operations, as well as recruiting volunteers. Andrei Afanasiev (also known as Cheslav Osmomysl) from the Dazhdbog Land community accompanied humanitarian aid to the southeast of Ukraine in the summer of 2014, then served in an armed formation in Donetsk from July to December 2014. In May 2015, he created Phoenix (Feniks), a 20-people Rodnover detachment, as part of Prizrak.
The National Liberation Movement (Natsional’no-osvoboditelnoe dvizhenie; NOD), which, in contrast to all the above-listed groups, is pro-Kremlin and led by United Russia State Duma deputy Evgenii Fedorov,Footnote 9 also engaged in recruitment. In the summer of 2014, the Samara branch of the NOD sent volunteers from the region to join the people’s militia of the self-proclaimed DNR, carrying the slogan “Homeland! Freedom! Putin!” and a portrait of Tsar Nicholas II (Alperovich and Yudina Reference Alperovich, Yudina and Verkhovsky2015, 23).
In general, attitude toward the Kremlin did not determine whether or not a group would participate in the war on the side of the separatists. The dead pro-separatist fighters include Sergei Markov, a Petrozavodsk activist from the banned national-Stalinist People’s Militia Named for Minin and Pozharsky (Narodnoe opolchenie imeni Minina i Pozharskogo; NOMP),Footnote 10 and Alexander Proselkov, the leader of the Rostov branch of Dugin’s Eurasian Youth Union (Evraziiskii soiuz molodezhi; ESM).
It is important to note that isolated members of organizations that generally did not support the “Russian Spring” took part in the fighting. For example, Sergei Vorobiev, the leader of the Korolyov branch of the Movement against Illegal Immigration (Dvizhenie protiv nelegalnoi immigratsii; DPNI)Footnote 11 died fighting on the side of the separatists, although leaders of the “Russians” movement, created primarily on the basis of the DPNI, held an emphatically pro-Kiev position.
In addition to direct participation in hostilities, some nationalists were engaged in recruiting and sending volunteers to the war, as well as collecting humanitarian aid—both literal aid and military ammunition. For example, the Russian Choice (Russkii vybor) movement, founded in May 2014 by Alexei Khudiakov, the former leader of the anti-immigrant Moscow Shield (Shchit Moskvy),Footnote 12 as an initiative to collect aid, also had connections with the Central Cossack Army.Footnote 13 Khudiakov was even appointed advisor to the DNR First Deputy Prime Minister and head of the DNR State Committee for Humanitarian Support. The movement participated in sending volunteer fighters, other volunteers, and medical units to Donbas. The National Democratic Party (NDP) was also involved in collecting humanitarian aid.Footnote 14
The nationalists who fought in the war were a diverse group and pursued different goals. Some of them fought for the unification of ethnic Slavic lands; others were loyal to the imperial vision and fought for the expansion of existing Russia; still others defended certain ideas of their own (such as the Orthodox faith) and fought against the non-spiritual West; and a fourth group wanted to develop in Donbas the skills needed to create the “proper” Russian state and then disseminate them (Laruelle Reference Laruelle2015; Suslov Reference Suslov2017, 202–221). None of them achieved their goals; these were failures that they could blame not only external enemies, but also the DNR/LNR leadership and Kremlin policies.
Almost all Russian nationalist groups had returned to Russia by early 2016, although a small number of fighters stayed behind. The trajectories of these groups and individual veterans have diverged widely since their return.
Military Training
Activists from various organizations returned from Donbas to Russia with experience of combat (occasionally armed combat). Some of them continue to engage in military training, hoping that their skills will be needed for the future “white revolution” or “national revolution” in Russia or for a new war beyond Russia’s borders. In addition, nationalist political groups and organizations organize military and sport activities and training camps, seeing these events as possible ways of enlarging their bases. Against a backdrop of general militarization in society that accompanied the Ukrainian events, the demand for military training has risen sharply, and those who have returned from the war have partly found their places in such initiatives.
Let us first discuss members of the RNE, an organization that has been preparing for “Time X” since 1993. As far as we know, at least some RNE supporters have not yet left the war zone. They were definitely there as recently as September 2016: on September 9, 2016, the RNE VKontakte group published a photo of humanitarian aid being escorted to the LNR by RNE fighters. Recruitment to the RNE military units continues, directed personally by Alexander Barkashov. A post from April 21, 2016 on his VKontakte page reads, “The war is not over. We recruit volunteers for the protection of Novorossiya-Donbas from the pro-American, Ukro-Banderite aggression” (VKontakte 2018a). A practically identical statement can be found on the pages of other RNE members, such as Sviatoslav Andreev.
Another militaristic organization is the RID, or, more precisely, the RID’s militant wing: the Imperial Legion (IL) and Reserve. Since returning home, both clubs have continued their training camps and military training sessions. Military training is conducted in several areas: the fundamentals of martial art, combat survival, tactical and fire training, hand-to-hand combat, knife fighting, mixed fighting (hand-to-hand combat, mixed style), assault battle, and airsoft. The IL VKontakte page (VKontakte 2018b) indicates that military training classes are attended by about 20 or, at most, 30 people at a time.
The leader of both clubs, Denis Gariev, conducts the Guerilla (Partizan) military training that includes combat tactics in urban or forest environments, shooting, air and sapper training, and training in military topography, survival skills, and communications. Based on the photographs, we conclude that the Partizan classes comprise no more than 10–15 people. The Partizan training gained media fame after a June 2017 report (Fontanka.ru 2017b) that the Swedish nationalists charged with the Gothenburg explosions had been trained in Russia.Footnote 15
E.N.O.T. Corp. has been offering basic military training and survival courses since April 2015 (for example, a course characteristically called “Sniping,” “Easter Military Patriotic Camp,” and the “Ice Campaign” game, among others). Photos on social networks suggest that the courses are attended by about 10–20 people. Special attention is paid to training school-age youths. Notably, the tradition of these training initiatives began in 2012, when they were organized by Bright Rus’, whose members later became part of E.N.O.T. Corp. The “Raccoons” have also involved members of Aleksei Milchakov’s Rusich in organizing and teaching these courses.
E.N.O.T. Corp., together with Reserve and the Nonprofit Enterprise to Promote Revival of the Cossacks, also arranges military-patriotic gatherings for Orthodox teenagers in honor of Saint Righteous Grand Duke Dmitri Donskoi. These events can reportedly attract hundreds of participants (E.N.O.T. Corp. 2016).
The activities of E.N.O.T. and Rusich in Belarus gained notoriety in May 2016 after Belarusian schoolchildren from Vitebsk, Tolochin, and Drutsk visited military sports camps in Russia, where famous Russian neo-Nazis served as their instructors. This trip triggered a wave of fierce indignation in the country; even the official state newspaper Sovetskaia Belorussiia criticized these camps as being organized “by Nazis and fascists” (Sovetskaia Belorussiia 2016).
E.N.O.T. Corp. also includes an analytical department that collects information, allegedly to identify and prevent fraud surrounding humanitarian aid. Its VKontakte page is compiling “Lists of Enemies of the People.” The department’s leader, Roman Telenkevich (also known as Roma Vodianoy), is a member of the Board of the Donbas Volunteers Union (Soiuz Dobrovol’tsev Donbasa; SDD),Footnote 16 created by Alexander Borodai on October 10, 2015, and directs its Military and Patriotic Education Committee. The SDD sells military equipment through its Partizan project. The Volunteer (Dobrovolets) military-patriotic camp, affiliated with SDD, offers military training courses.
Of course, all kinds of Cossack associations also engage in perfecting their combat skills. For example, Cossack nationalists from the Stanitsa Severo-Slavianskaya squad in St. Petersburg conduct various military training courses, where they teach shooting, knife-fighting skills, industrial mountaineering, and military cartography. We have no information regarding squad members’ participation in the Donbas hostilities, but activists from the Rusich group cooperate with them.
Individual nationalists not associated with any known nationalist organization also teach combat skills. For example, since returning from the war, Sergei Atamanets from Tomsk has been teaching knife-fighting in his hometown.
Despite the fact that military training courses and combat training became much more popular among nationalists with the onset of the conflict in Ukraine, their popularity has shown no signs of increasing in the last two years. Rather, it can be said that the excitement around the militarized groups was declining by the end of 2017. After all, the expectations of new external campaigns in defense of the “Russian World,” triggered by the war in the Donbas, failed to materialize. The expected internal political upheaval that might create a demand for trained groups of fighters—a typical expectation on the part of the opposition, including its nationalist sector, and one that had been intensified by the war—also never came to pass.
Nevertheless, the combat training continues. Apparently the groups involved in this activity have sufficient resources and motivation to keep it going. Meanwhile, the authorities continue to turn a blind eye to these activities, which are at the very least questionable from a legal standpoint.
A New War
Former participants in the military operations in Donbas are not confined to conducting combat training classes. Individual militants who had fought in Donbas proceeded to apply their skills to the Syrian theater.
For example, two members of the militant group Project Mayhem,Footnote 17 Maksim Vaganov and Maksim “Normann” Peresvet, left Donbas in September 2015 and went to Syria. Maksim Peresvet, who fought in the Ratibor, Rusich, Batman, and Moskoviia units and collaborated with the People’s Council and the Crimean paramilitary organization Sable (Sobol), died on September 22, 2016 after an encounter with a land mine on the bank of the Euphrates River near the city of Kobani (Cont 2016).
We also know of Cossacks who went to Syria from Donbas. Roman Zabolotnyi, a Don Army fighter, was captured by ISIS and died (Novaia Gazeta 2017). Soldiers of the PMC Wagner noted skeptically the presence of Cossacks in Syria: “This is what Cossacks have—ranks, awards; they love this stuff. But they don’t know how to fight… Cossacks make up these fairy tales for themselves—for example, that they are going to study Orthodox Christianity under extreme conditions” (Pravda TV.ru 2017).
Rodnover Igor Orzhentsev was also in Syria from fall 2015, presumably reporting from the front for ANNA NEWS. In September 2016, the news agency called him a volunteer (Orzhentsov Reference Orzhentsov2016), but as of early 2018, Orzhentsov is no longer mentioned on its site.
RNE and Rusich activists may also have joined the new war. Rusich members reported that some of their comrades went to “the next war” in Syria. In particular, Aleksei Milchakov was identified by journalists (Fontanka.ru 2017a) in a photo taken with PMC Wagner fighters on a base located at the Hayan factory in the Syrian governorate of Homs.
In November 2015, a photo in which Piotr Barkashov and Mikhail Batkovich of the RNE posed in camouflage uniforms with a Syrian emblem on their sleeves against the background of the Russian military intelligence emblem was shared on the Internet. However, experts doubt their presence in Syria. As researcher Ruslan Leviev of the Conflict Intelligence Team explained to an author of this article, “Many Donbas militiamen made such photos with Syrian patches and flags while in the Donbas. Just for fun…” (Natalia Yudina, personal communication with Ruslan Leviev, April 17, 2018). He added that movements like E.N.O.T. Corp. and Rusich are not qualified to serve as mercenaries in the war in Syria, because their “training is at the level of ordinary patriotic clubs, and, of course, does not even come close to the kind of training received by the Wagner people.”
The number of militant nationalists who went to war in Syria is likely quite small, but their presence is beyond doubt, and, as far as we know, they all had prior experience in the war in eastern Ukraine.
Aggressive Political Actions
Aggressive actions against opponents, which have become more popular in Russia in recent years (Yudina 2018), could have received significant support from frustrated returnees trained in combat warfare, including nationalists. As far as we can tell, not only the segment of the opposition that opposed the “Russian Spring,” but also the political leadership was concerned about the potential for this to happen. The appearance of new groups similar to the pro-Kremlin NOD and S.E.R.B., which are already known for their political hooliganism, or even more aggressive and massive ones, might have been expected.
However, these fears did not materialize. A subset of nationalist veterans merely joined the above-mentioned groups on a permanent or temporary basis.
It is probably necessary to distinguish pro-Russian political refugees from Ukraine from actual combat veterans, who, in turn, can be broken down into Ukrainian or Russian citizens. Refugees include former titushki (civilian thugs hired by the authorities to harass protesters), who are inclined to violence but with no real combat experience. Veterans with Ukrainian citizenship have very limited freedom of action, since the Russian authorities disapprove of their activity; they face the threat of extradition to Ukraine based on requests related to their actual or alleged criminal activities during the war. (We have no reliable information on any actual cases of militants who have been extradited.) Veterans with Russian passports are less constrained, but Russian authorities made it clear back in 2015 that they have no interest in developing any kind of mass aggressive grassroots support—presumably because they are afraid, reasonably enough, that they could easily lose control over such a movement. Former volunteers, especially those who previously belonged to political organizations (usually nationalist ones), likely understand that they could face a serious crackdown for initiating any violent actions not coordinated with the authorities.
S.E.R.B.Footnote 18 (OVD-info 2016) enjoys the greatest leeway for hooliganism. For example, Ukrainian citizen Aleksandr “Sviatoi” [Holyman] Petrunko, who was in charge of the takeover of the Kharkiv City Administration building in the spring of 2014, is now an activist of this group. In addition to S.E.R.B., Petrunko also belongs to the Svetoch Center for Museum Pedagogy, volunteers for “From Moscow Schools—to Novorossiya Schools,” and was registered as an assistant to Municipal Deputy Igor Brumel (Sholademi Reference Sholademi2014). (Brumel ceased to be a deputy in the fall of 2017.) On September 26, 2016, Petrunko was arrested and incarcerated for seven days for splashing urine on photographs at the Jock Sturges exhibition in the Lumiere Brothers gallery.
Former volunteer fighters are only rarely seen at collective aggressive actions, favoring the ones that are not overly violent and clearly seeking to avoid serious problems with the police. For example, Mikhail Polynkov, the coordinator of the Russian Volunteer project, participated in disrupting the screening of the movie Bullet’s Flight, directed by Beata Bubenets (which showed the conflict in Ukraine from the perspective of the Aidar Battalion), on December 10, 2017 (Kalashnikov Reference Kalashnikov2017). Sergei Bogomolov, a former guard of Prizrak commander Aleksey Mozgovoi, who returned from the war in 2015, took part in the attack against an exhibition in the Sakharov Center in September 2016 (Grani.ru 2016). When Donbas veterans besieged yet another exhibition in the same center on May 1, 2018, their group included Cossacks, members of the Donbas Volunteers Union, and Igor Mangushev, one of the former leaders of the Bright Rus’ and now a member of the E.N.O.T. Corps (Galperovich Reference Galperovich2018). Other ex-fighters, including RID supporters, also distributed invitations to join the action at the Sakharov Center.
Prior to the onset of the Ukrainian events—that is, in 2013—anti-immigrant and other aggressive raids enjoyed great popularity among the nationalists. Later, with the weakening of the Russian nationalist movement, this practice began to fade away. Now, young E.N.O.T. Corp. activists (so-called mladoenots [young raccoons]) continue the traditions of Bright Rus’, which created the “raccoons,” in conducting raids on migrant homes (YouTube 2016b). However, we must recognize that the scale of that activity does not mean a return to 2013, nor does it contradict the general decline in raiding activity.
To some extent, the political hooliganism traditional of the National Bolsheviks also relates to the discussion in this article. It could have reappeared with the return of the National Bolsheviks from the war or even transformed into more severe forms, especially since the Other Russia party now condemns the ruling powers for “betraying Donbas” and once again considers itself in opposition.
After the collapse of their hopes to establish a party branch in Donetsk and Lugansk, the National Bolsheviks tried to be more active in domestic politics. On January 25, 2016, Eduard Limonov became a founder of Igor Strelkov’s January 25 Committee (K25),Footnote 19 but, due to contradictions within K25, he left it in May 2016, and his party returned to political isolation—its habitual position since late 2011.
Young Other Russia activists continue to carry out the trademark National-Bolshevik political hooliganism. On November 5, 2016, they attacked the Consulate General of Ukraine in St. Petersburg. They threw smoke grenades and beef bones at the consulate, chanting “Eat bones, not people!” Donbas war veteran Igor “Maks” Shchuka tried to set fire to the Yeltsin center in Yekaterinburg on the night of November 7, 2017; he was convicted for this in February 2018 and sentenced to a year of correctional labor (SOVA Center 2018). However, the overall level of National-Bolshevik activity is not even comparable to previous years.
Starting New Projects and Returning to Old Ones
Soldiers returning from Donbas have also tried to find their place in civilian life. They have become involved in a wide range of activities at home, of which we will discuss the political ones here.
The youngest and most active segment continues to participate in traditional nationalist rallies, including those unrelated to the issue of Ukraine. For example, the Project Mayhem activists who have remained in Russia actively participate in the annual alternative Russian March for right-wing radicals at Oktiabrskoe Pole.Footnote 20 Unlike the competing—and, until 2017, the biggest—march of Russian nationalists, which takes place in Liublino, it is supportive of the “Russian Spring.” They also cooperate with the Sputnik and PogromFootnote 21 website and support Igor Strelkov’s January 25 Committee (K25).Footnote 22 They have also been seen at rallies against migrants, communists, and pagan nationalists. Nevertheless, the rhetoric of Project Mayhem clearly indicates its members’ disappointment: “All the sacrifices were in vain. We failed to understand it right away. While we were fighting at the battlefront, our enemy defeated us on the political front” (VKontakte 2015b).
Rodnover Andrei Afanasiev (Cheslav Osmomysl) also participates in marches and rallies; he is active in Novosibirsk, where he returned in 2015 (VKontakte 2015c). In 2017, he participated in the Russian March, walking with other Rodnovers in the NDP column.
Some war veterans have tried to get into local government. It is worth noting that the veterans who were personally involved in armed combat do not seek power, but their various assistants do. Dmitry Kraskov of the NDP became one of the main actors of the “Moscow and the Muscovites” coalition of municipal deputies in 2017 and ran for office with the A Just Russia (Spravedlivaia Rossiia) party in Southern Medvedkovo District. Aleksei Khudiakov ran for the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation as a candidate for the Capital Cossack Association “Promoting Revival of Traditions and Unification of the Cossacks” in the midst of the Donbas events in 2014. Both men lost their respective elections.
Members of the Cossack National Guard of the Great Don Army, under the leadership of Nikolai Kozitsyn, were left out of public life. Cossacks who have returned to Russia are providing private security, including for local chapels, churches, and schools. They also conduct officer camps. Their ataman regularly records video interviews and military-patriotic addresses.
The Russian Choice movement has likewise found itself on the sidelines. Its activists’ last trip to southeastern Ukraine took place in early May 2016. The website of the organization has not been updated since mid-2016, and its VKontakte page has added very little information since the fall of 2016. As of early 2018, the organization’s leader, Aleksei Khudiakov, has apparently also withdrawn from political activity, judging by his personal webpage.
Khudiakov is far from the only such case. Many veterans have either left politics completely or have limited their participation to statements on social networks. Examples include RNE activists Aleksandr Grushin from St. Petersburg and Sergei Akulin from Altai.
Like any community of veterans, the Donbas veterans’ community has to address two specific tasks: helping fellow veterans in need and promoting the importance of their deeds in the eyes of society.
The majority of the nationalists returning from the war complain of psychological and physical problems. Since the war was never legitimized, the state provides no assistance or benefits. Communist Party deputy Viacheslav Tetekin introduced to the Duma in December 2014 a bill that would have given militia fighters the status of veterans (Tumanov Reference Tumanov2015), but the draft was rejected. Franz Klintsevich, Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Defense Committee and Chairman of the Russian Union of Afghan Veterans, said that such a measure would have been “unrealistic” and “highly problematic” from a legal standpoint, despite his and other deputies’ personal wishes to the contrary (Vinokurova Reference Vinokurova2014).
Help with the transition back to civilian life is thus left in the hands of veterans’ organizations, but not the “old” ones that exist for the veterans of the Afghan and Chechen campaigns. In addition to Alexander Borodai’s SDD (perceived as “pro-Kremlin” and “para-governmental” and not supported by the majority of nationalists [Miller Reference Miller2017]), there is the RID, although it only assists its own veteran members. Imperial Legion opened the Novorossiya Museum on May 9, 2015; the museum’s activities later came to be coordinated by the Veterans of Novorossiya organization, established by IL in October 2015. In February 2016, Ruslan “Pastor” Starodubov and Andrei “Pepel” Kamaev, who lost a leg in the battle of Debaltsevo, opened the Northern Rus’ (Severnaia Rus’) “traditional and patriotic” goods store, supported by the Veterans of Novorossiya and the Reserve club. The store hires former combatants who were injured in the Donbas. Boris Voevodin works in a military equipment store, as does his brother Konstantin, a former staff member of the Thunder (Grom) special forces of the Federal Drug Control Service of the Russian Federation and Rusich fighter (Gonta Reference Gonta2015).
Inevitably, participation in ordinary criminal activity also becomes an option for any militants returning to civilian life. Reports of crimes (mostly armed violence) involving former volunteer fighters appear in the media from time to time. A surge in such crimes was recorded in 2015, primarily in the Southern Federal District, which shares a border with Donbas. According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the number of violent crimes in the Rostov Region increased by 23.4%, in Adygea by 19.2%, in Kalmykia and the Volgograd Region by 7.8%, and in the Krasnodar Region by 10.4% (Dergachev Reference Dergachev2015). However, we found no instances of specifically ultraright militants being involved in these criminal episodes.
Conclusion
The war in Ukraine, a seminal event, has changed the existing layout of the nationalist movement in general and provoked discord, dividing the nationalists into supporters and nonsupporters of the “Russian Spring” (Alperovich Reference Alperovich and Verkhovsky2014). Even among those who unequivocally supported Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the referendums in the Lugansk and Donetsk regions, there is no unity in views—a fact that has caused further fragmentation within the movement and its unprecedented weakening. However, we would like to emphasize that this weakening also had other, deeper reasons (Verkhovsky Reference Verkhovsky, Kolstø and Blakkisrud2018, 142–162).
There is no unity even among those who went to war to stand by their convictions. No consolidation of nationalist militants happened after their return. Nationalists returning from Donbas are divided—by their old and new ideological conflicts, by their vision for further strategy, and by their assessment of past events.
Assessing whether the fact of participation in the war, in and of itself, affected the relevance of the respective organizations in the overall right-wing radical movement is not so simple. The RNE has resurfaced, but Barkashov, with his tendency to self-isolation, is not in any hurry to convert their partly recovered prominence into something else. Other Russia, which was on the sidelines after breaking up with the rest of the opposition in December 2011, has reappeared on the media radar. The National Bolsheviks’ actions have been relatively energetic, especially since their departure from Donbas, but they never won over any allies and the party’s prospects remain questionable.
The RID was slightly reinvigorated by getting some “fresh blood” in the form of militant youngsters. The Moscow branch of the RID, previously inactive, became visible after its representatives appeared at the alternative Russian March in 2014. In general, with the outbreak of hostilities, the Russian Marches at Oktiabrskoe Pole became larger due to the presence of Novorossiya supporters, including those returning from the war. In 2017, the alternative march for the first time rallied more supporters than the “traditional” one (SOVA Center 2017). Of course, this result was achieved in the context of the overall dramatic decline in activity during 2015–2018, but it means that the importance of pro-Donbas groups has increased in comparison to the importance of anti-Donbas groups. To some extent, this was achieved at the expense of the authority of nationalist veterans, but the latter do not lead the rallies in this sector.
Attempts to create an at least somewhat influential political structure, based primarily on veteran activism or on the authority of the “war heroes,” have failed. Activists who wanted to maintain their loyalty to the authorities simply never had this opportunity, since the authorities stopped approving of organized grassroots support as early as 2015. The Anti-Maidan movement withered away at that point, while Borodai’s Volunteers Union steers clear of public political activity.
Some activists in the Volunteers’ Union, like other nationalist veterans, occasionally take part in aggressive actions against the opposition and independent initiatives. These actions are clearly controlled by the authorities. In addition, nationalist veterans obviously do not play a major role. Local violent attacks are carried out mainly by S.E.R.B, created by former Ukrainian titushki, but not by veterans of the war. Certain specially hired groups of people or pro-Kremlin groups that have no direct relation to the war are used at oppositional public actions for similar purposes. (For example, during the May 5, 2018 protest rally, this role was played by Cossacks recruited from various Cossack organizations and by the Young Guard of United Russia.) Veterans participateFootnote 23 (Mirotvorets 2018), but usually these participants do not come specifically from the Russian nationalist movement, and their numbers are small.
Even the main “Donbas hero,” Igor Strelkov, failed in his attempt to play an independent game. The January 25 Committee and other structures he had created turned out to be surprisingly passive, and Strelkov personally quickly squandered his popularity among the activists; even as early as 2016, a rally organized by Strelkov and the NDP at the Russian March was only able to attract 200 people (Alperovich and Yudina Reference Alperovich, Yudina and Verkhovsky2017, 19–21, 33–36).
Of course, the level of political repression in the country, which has gradually been increasing since the beginning of the Ukrainian war, gives all the groups an opportunity to shift the blame for their failures onto these repressions. Statistically, the ultraright activists in opposition to the “Russian Spring” face a much greater level of criminal prosecution (Alperovich and Yudina Reference Alperovich, Yudina and Verkhovsky2017, 16–19). However, no group escapes unaffected. A member of the Strelkov’s January 25 Committee became one of the few nationalists deprived of their liberty for a completely innocent publication (Memorial 2016). Even combat accomplishments do not provide full protection: Vladimir Kudryashov, an activist of the banned ultraright Attack (Ataka) association,Footnote 24 was brought from the battlefield straight to Moscow, where he was sentenced to a year in prison in 2015 for creating and leading the Attack (SOVA Center 2015).
In other words, the authorities show in every possible way that nationalist veterans and their sympathizers are more or less tolerated as a group, but no more than that, unless they are completely loyal to the Kremlin. The only backing provided by the authorities was the creation of structures controlled by Alexander Borodai to support loyal veterans and convene military training camps away from the general public. Evidently, these structures proved to be quite effective. Some, but not all, prominent nationalists participate in them; the rest view the quasi-governmental SDD with distrust.
On the other hand, the opposition groups with the greatest mobilization potential—whether leftist, liberal, or liberal-nationalist—definitely do not sympathize with “Russian Spring” supporters, especially militants, but tolerate nationalists with opposing views. Nationalist groups opposing the “Russian Spring,” even ones that are quite radical in their background, participate in opposition rallies, and many independent media outlets relay their views with some sympathy. A discussion of this rapprochement is outside the scope of this article, but it is important, since it de facto means that the Russian nationalist movement has not only suffered an order-of-magnitude decline on every available index compared to the prewar period, but also seems to be losing the sense of being a distinct movement. The organizations involved in the war have found themselves locked in a small political ghetto—or, more precisely, in several ghettoes—where they can feel more or less comfortable, but which are definitely not attractive to most potential newcomers, including Donbas veterans potentially looking to change their political positions and affiliations.
The majority of Donbas veterans remain politically passive or marginalized. Since the stability of this situation is questionable, both the authorities and the opposition consider these people extremely unpredictable, perhaps with good reason.
Disclosure.
Authors have nothing to disclose.
