Danylo Yugoslavsky hated Vladimir Putin for a long time. He works in technology and says he spent several years protesting against fair elections in Russia before leaving his home country in 2017 in desperation for the cause, Reuters reported in an extensive report cited by News.ro.

Yugoslavia eventually settled in Spain. Yet he never suspected that his desire to see Vladimir Putin overthrown would one day lead him to join a far-right paramilitary group founded by a former football hooligan known as White Rex and become embroiled in the war in Ukraine.

“When the first rocket hit Kyiv, everything changed for me,” the 29-year-old told Reuters in Warsaw in January, before moving to Ukraine to join the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC), a unit made up of Russians who are fighting against their country alongside Ukrainian forces.

RVC was founded by a native of Moscow, Denys Kapustin, also known as Denys Nikitin or under the pseudonym White Rex. The monitoring project Antifascist Europe says he is a neo-Nazi and white supremacist.

Nikitin, who declined to be interviewed by Reuters, has often described himself as a nationalist fighting for ethnic Russian Russia, although he has rejected the neo-Nazi and white supremacist characterizations.

Instead, Yugoslavskyi says he is not a fan of far-right views and, on the contrary, considers himself a left-wing pacifist, but insists that the need to defeat Putin outweighs any political context.

Max Smith, who crossed Ukraine from Yugoslavia, never held a weapon before joining the RVC. The 35-year-old Russian man, who has worked in construction in Western Europe in recent years, admits that his relatives called him a Nazi and told him to pray to God for forgiveness when he tattooed the coat of arms of Ukraine on the sign. support of the conquered nation.

“I was completely disconnected from the life I had,” he says. “Personal life and war are two incompatible things. I came here to devote myself completely to the war,” he said in April.

What are the Russians who are fighting against Putin saying

The accounts of Yugoslavskyi, Smith and two other Russians who joined the fight against their government show how anti-Putin activists are directing civilian fighters in Ukraine’s favor as Kyiv prepares to launch a counteroffensive.

The presence of far-right Russian groups on both sides of the conflict is also a sign of an ideological split in Russia’s ultra-nationalist movement, says political scientist Mark Galeotti, head of London-based consultancy Mayak Intelligence and author of several books on the Russian military.

Groups seeking to restore Russia’s historic power are pitted against other groups, such as the RVC, which opposes Putin’s invasion and wants a smaller but ethnically Russian state, he explained.

“Some believe that their business is Ukraine’s struggle against the Russian evil empire. And there are some who believe that fighting for the homeland is their business,” says Galeotti, citing the Rusichi Group and the ENOT Corps among far-right paramilitary groups fighting on Russia’s side.

Complicated wartime alliances confound one of Putin’s justifications for the invasion, which is that Ukraine must be freed of neo-Nazis — a demand rejected by Kyiv and the West, which accuses Moscow of imperialistic territorial ambitions.

The Kremlin, which has said Russia’s elections are fair and honest, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the activities and recruitment of RVC or far-right groups fighting on Russia’s side.

Reuters says it was unable to reach Rusici Group or ENOT for comment.

How citizens of Russia fight on the side of Ukraine

So far, Russia has had little visible opposition to the war in Ukraine, where laws have been tightened to suppress dissent.

RVC made headlines in March when it claimed responsibility for a raid on Russian territory that Putin condemned as an act of terrorism and said the militants involved opened fire on civilians in a car, including children.

The governor of the border region reported that two people were killed and an 11-year-old boy was injured as a result of the attack. A senior RVC member named Volodymyr, who goes by the fighting nickname Cardinal, told Reuters in February that the unit had up to 200 fighters, but Reuters could not independently verify that figure.

However, this is only part of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers and volunteers who are fighting in Ukraine, and thousands of foreigners who have come to fight against Russian forces.

Yugoslavskyi and Smith said they crossed into Ukraine from Poland after responding to a recruitment call posted on YouTube by the Civic Council, an anti-Putin activist group based in the Polish capital that recruits fighters for the RVC.

According to them, when they arrived in Kyiv, the Ukrainian army conducted a polygraph test, they passed a psychological examination and underwent more than two months of basic military training.

When Reuters spoke to the two men again by phone and online in early April, they expected to be heading to the front soon: Yugoslavski as a field paramedic and Smith as a drone operator.

Denys Sokolov, co-founder of the Civic Council, confirmed that they had been sent to the front last month, adding that in the meantime Yugoslavsky had been wounded in the leg but was recovering. Sokolov, who is Russian, says the organization he heads in Warsaw, the Civic Council, does not support any far-right ideology and aims to recruit any fighter willing to defend Ukraine.

He stated that his goals coincided with those of the RVC only in that he wanted to remove Putin and seek the breakup of Russia from its current imperial form.

“A Russian nationalist is not a Russian fascist,” Sokolov emphasized in an interview with Reuters from his office in Warsaw, referring to members of the RVC.

“We have a common enemy and we must unite,” he said.

Foreign Legion of Ukraine

Reuters says it cannot determine how RVC coordinates with Ukrainian forces or receives orders.

Ukraine’s military intelligence service HUR told Reuters the unit was linked to the International Legion, a foreign military unit created after the invasion that includes fighters from dozens of countries.

A representative of the Legion, however, stated that it is not related to the RVC.

The Civic Council works with a Ukrainian mediator in Warsaw. He told Reuters that he works in the Ukrainian army and helps prepare documents for foreign volunteers. He accompanies them to the border to facilitate their passage.

The middleman declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter, but Reuters has seen a document from the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine that legitimizes him and attests to his role in recruiting volunteers who are asking the Polish authorities to support him.

According to Sokolov, RVC fighters regularly received salaries from the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine. The Ministry of Defense in Kyiv did not respond to a request to comment on the salaries of the RVC, the intermediary or the document seen.

The Embassy of Ukraine in Poland and the Polish government also did not respond to requests for comment on the activities of the Civic Council and RVC.

“White Rex” and “Black Sun”

Nikitin founded RVC last August. On its Telegram channel, the unit says it wants to see today’s Russia break up into various ethnic states, leaving a Russian state in which Russians would be the dominant ethnic group.

The movement has the symbolism of the anti-communist Russian Liberation Army, which fought under the command of the Nazis during World War II.

Nikitin, who moved to Ukraine in 2017, has lived in European countries for the past two decades after leaving his native Russia with his family in 2001.

The founder of RVC, who is in his 30s, organized mixed martial arts tournaments in far-right circles and participated in hooliganism in Russian and German football, which led to the cancellation of his residence permit in Germany.

He also launched his own clothing brand, White Rex, with the Black Sun logo, which is favored by neo-Nazi groups.

Volodymyr, nicknamed “Cardinal”, a member of the RVC, calls himself the ideologist of the unit. He claims that there is no hatred for other ethnic peoples in the group.

“We want to preserve not only our identity, but also that of others. We do not say that we want to exterminate other peoples, but we believe that imperialism is destructive for everyone,” he explained.

“The current Russian Federation is the Soviet Union that has not disintegrated and is about to disintegrate. We would like to create a Russian national state,” he claims.