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One of the anti-Kremlin groups responsible for armed attacks into Russia this week, the Russian Volunteer Corps, is led by far-right extremists described by German officials and humanitarian groups, including the Anti-Defamation League, as neo-Nazis. .
The Volunteer Corps, made up of Vladimir V. Putin’s war-fighting Russians, has no public ties to the Ukrainian Army. But the group’s claim to be fighting for the cause of Ukraine has created an uncomfortable situation for the government in Kyiv. Russian President Vladimir V. Putin falsely claimed that his country’s fight against the Nazis was a pretext for an invasion of his country, a regular theme of Kremlin propaganda.
The corps commander – Denis Kapustin, who has long used the alias Denis Nikitin, but usually goes by the military call sign, White Rex – is a Russian citizen who moved to Germany in the early 2000s. He was associated with a violent group of soccer fans and later became, according to officials in the German state of Rhine-Westphalia, “one of the most influential activists” in the neo-Nazi splinter of the mixed martial arts scene.
They have been banned from entering Europe’s 27-country Schengen zone without a visa.
The Volunteer Corps, known by its Russian initials RDK, also claimed credit for two incidents in the Russian border region of Bryansk in March and April. Ukrainian authorities have publicly denied any role in fighting on the Russian border.
The Russian Volunteer Corps is one of two groups of Russian fighters that carried out a cross-border offensive in the Belgorod region of southern Russia that began on Monday, engaging Russian forces in two days of fighting. The aim of the attack, the group said, was to force Russia to send soldiers from areas under its control in Ukraine to defend its border, as Ukraine prepared a counterattack.
The second group is the Free Russia Legion, which operates under the umbrella of the Ukrainian International Legion, a force that includes American and British volunteers, as well as Belarusians, Georgians and others. It is supervised by the Armed Forces of Ukraine and commanded by Ukrainian officers. Several hundred Russian fighters have been sent to the front lines in eastern Ukraine, officials said.
At a joint news conference with the Free Russia Legion on Wednesday, Mr. Kapustin said his group was not under the control of the Ukrainian Army, but the military had supported the fighters with information, gasoline, food and medical supplies, along with the evacuation of wounded personnel. These claims cannot be independently verified.
Andriy Chernyak, a representative of Ukraine’s military intelligence service, said that he had no information about the material support that the Ukrainian military could provide to RDK members, but said that “Ukraine always supports everyone who is ready to fight the Putin regime.”
“People come to Ukraine and say they want to help us fight Putin’s regime, so of course we allow it, the same as any other person from a foreign country,” Mr. Chernyak said.
Ukraine called the attack an “internal Russian crisis” because the group’s members were Russians themselves, and the episode was aimed at the Ukrainian military to try to force Russia to send back troops from the front lines to defend its borders.
Michael Colborne, a researcher at Bellingcat who reports on the international far-right, said he hesitated to call the Russian Volunteer Corps a military unit.
“They are largely a far-right neo-Nazi group of exiles who have carried out these attacks into Russian-held territory who appear to be more concerned about creating social media content than anything else,” Mr Colborne said.
Several other members of the Russian Volunteer Corps who were photographed during the border raid also generally embraced neo-Nazi views. One man, Aleksandr Skachkov, was arrested by the Security Service of Ukraine in 2020 for selling a Russian translation of the white supremacist manifesto of the shooter in Christchurch, New Zealand, who killed 51 mosque worshipers in 2019.
Another, Aleksei Levkin, who made a selfie video with the RDK symbol, is the founder of a group called Wotanjugend that started in Russia but later moved to Ukraine. Mr. Levkin also organized the National Socialist Black Metal Festival, which began in Moscow in 2012 but was held in Kyiv from 2014 to 2019.
Pictures posted online by fighters earlier this week of volunteer corps members posing in front of captured Russian gear show some fighters wearing Nazi-style patches and gear. One patch depicts a Hooded member of the Ku Klux Klan and the other shows the Black Sun, a symbol with a strong connection to Nazi Germany.
Mr Colborne said the image of Mr Kapustin and his fighters could undermine Ukraine’s defenses by making allies wary that they might support far-right armed groups.
“I am worried that something like this could affect Ukraine because this is not an ambiguous person,” he said. “These are not unknown people, and they are not helping Ukraine practically.”
Thomas Gibbons-Neff contributed reports from London and Oleg Matsnev from Berlin.
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