Not all Russians are with Putin. Several armed groups made up of Russian residents have organized to battle the warfare, however alongside Ukraine. For weeks they’ve been attacking the Russian Federation day by day and calling for a preferred rebellion against the Russian president.
Armed groups of Russian volunteers are attacking Russian territory, particularly Kursk and Belgorod. Their actions are coordinated with the launches of drones by the Ukrainian Army. The assaults have pressured the Kremlin to take motion and have already restricted entry to a number of cities in Belgorod and are evacuating hundreds of kids.
The Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK), the Russian Freedom Legion and the Siberian Battalion are the three Russian factions that have joined Ukraine. It’s not the first time. In 2023, the three groups already carried out armed incursions into Russian territories close to Ukraine.
Unfortunately, peaceable protest doesn’t work and extra and extra individuals assume that the solely method out is weapons.”
“Unfortunately peaceable protest doesn’t work and extra and extra individuals assume that the solely method out is weapons“stated the chief of the Siberian Battalion, recognized by the pseudonym Kholod, per week in the past at a press convention of the three groups organized in kyiv.
Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK)
It is a paramilitary unit based in August 2022, throughout the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It’s shaped by ethnic Russian fighters, together with Russian residents, who’re united primarily by their opposition to Putin. Their mission, they are saying, is to “liberate” their homeland. Described as far-right, the Russian Federation considers the RDK a terrorist group.
According to Anastasia Sergeeva, worldwide secretary and co-founder of the Civil Council of Ukraine, the RDK is a division inside the International Legion of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. It’s not, declared to France Internationala non-public navy firm – like the Wagner Group – nor a partisan motion.
Some of its members are recognized to be Russian neo-Nazis, together with its present chief, Denis Nikitin, whom the Kremlin considers a terrorist. This is a Russian far-right activist, former hooligan soccer and has even been described as a neo-Nazi. In 2001, when he was 17, his household moved to Germany. Later, in Switzerland, he offered fight coaching to members of the far-right Swiss Nationalist Party.
Since 2018 he has lived in Ukraine; She was even a member of the Azov Battalion, one other far-right paramilitary group. Already in the warfare, in 2023 he attacked the Bryansk Oblast with a number of members of the CVR. On May 22, 2023, as head of the RDK, he was concerned in the assault on Belgorod Oblast, a cross-border incursion into Russia’s Belgorod area. In November, A Moscow navy courtroom sentenced him to life imprisonment. in absentia.
According to the RDK, inside its ranks former mercenaries of the Wagner Group are concerned. “Former Wagner fighters already participated in our ranks in the areas of Avdivka and Liman – on Ukrainian territory – and, in fact, they’ve additionally participated in the navy operation that we carried out on Russian territory,” Nikitin confirmed.
Russian Freedom Legion
It is a bunch created in March 2022 with deserters from the Russian Armed Forces who have been preventing in Ukraine. There are additionally some Belarusians and Russians with no connection to the armed forces. According to Ukrainian Independent Information Agency (UNIAN), this legion was shaped from an organization of the Russian military (greater than 100 individuals), who abandoned voluntarily to the Ukrainian facet to “shield Ukrainians from actual fascists.”
It defends “the preservation of a united and indivisible Russia inside the 1991 borders”
Its members use the white-blue-white flag, that of the Russian opposition (as an alternative of the official white-blue-red flag of Russia) and their goals are overthrow the Putin regime and “the battle for the New Russia.” Its chief is Aleksei Baranovski,
Russia’s Freedom Legion fights against Putin, but in addition opposes separatism and defends “the preservation of a united and indivisible Russia inside the 1991 borders,” in accordance with messages revealed on its official Telegram channel. They take into account that “the Russian individuals are the most humiliated and disadvantaged of all the peoples of the Russian Federation.”
Siberian Battalion
Members of this unit embrace ethnic Russians, Yakuts and Buryats, who They see Ukraine’s victory as a chance to achieve independence or broad autonomy from Russia. The battalion makes use of the flag of Siberia, a two-tone horizontal white and inexperienced flag.
The unit fought in the Battle of Avdíivka. On 12 March 2024, the unit participated in a raid on the Russian Kursk and Belgorod Oblasts. The Siberian Battalion doesn’t recruit Russian prisoners of warfare.
The battalion commander is Vladislav Ammosov and is of Yakut ethnicity. In truth, helps the secession of the Sakha Republic, referred to as by the independentists as Yakutia. Ammosov claims to have labored in the Russian Armed Forces’ GRU international navy intelligence company for 15 years. He fought in the first and second Chechen warfare.
