The Free Russian Legion, Russian soldiers fighting for Ukraine

DONBASS REGION.- The soldier kneels in the snow, points the missile launcher and fires in the direction of the Russian troops positioned just over a kilometer away. He fires from a Ukrainian position and resembles the rest of the Ukrainian soldiers fighting south of the city of Bakhmut, one of the most brutal scenes of this war.

But neither he nor his comrades are Ukrainians. They are soldiers from an all-Russian military unit fighting for Ukraine and killing their own compatriots.

They are Russians who took up arms to fight their country for various reasons: moral outrage at the invasion, a desire to defend their adopted homeland of Ukraine, or a visceral rejection of Russian President Vladimir Putin. And they earned the trust of Ukrainian commanders to take their place among the forces bitterly fighting the Russian military.

“A real Russian does not start such an aggressive war, rape children or kill women and old people,” says a Russian fighter whose nom de guerre is Caesar, listing the atrocities committed by Russian soldiers that led him to abandon his hometown, St. Petersburg, and to fight for the Ukraine. “That’s why I have no remorse. I do my job and I killed a lot of them.”

Nearly a year into the war, that unit called the Free Russia Legion has gone largely unnoticed, in part to protect soldiers from Russian retaliation, but also because of the reluctance of Ukrainian military forces to highlight the efforts of soldiers. whose homeland has done so much damage to Ukraine. Several hundred of them are concentrated in the area around Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine. They are always grouped with their compatriots, but under the supervision of Ukrainian officers.

When interviewed, some soldiers of Russian origin comment that when the invasion of Russian troops began they were already living in Ukraine, and that they felt the moral obligation to defend their adopted country. Others, in some cases with no military experience, crossed from Russia into Ukraine at the start of the war, feeling that the Kremlin invasion was profoundly unfair.

“We didn’t come to prove anything,” says a soldier whose nom de guerre is Zaza. “We came to help Ukraine achieve the full withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukrainian territory and the future ‘deputinization’ of Russia.”

At the start of the war, Ukrainian law prohibited Russian citizens from serving in the armed forces. It was only in August that laws were passed allowing the Free Russian Legion to join the fight legally, according to Andriy Yusov, a spokesman for Ukraine’s military intelligence service.

“There were many Russians who, due to a matter of principle, could not sit idly by and looked for a way to join the ranks of the Ukrainian defense,” says Yusov, to explain what motivated the creation of this military unit. “All the legionnaires came with an immense desire to stop Putin’s horde and free Russia from the dictatorship.”

The group operates under the aegis of the Ukrainian International Legion, a fighting force that includes units made up of American and British volunteers, Belarusians, Georgians and other countries.

It’s not easy joining the Legion, Russian soldiers say. They have to apply and undergo a thorough background check that includes polygraph tests. Only then can they start basic training. As they have Russian passports, they are inevitably met with suspicion, as there have already been several attempts by Russian spies to infiltrate the unit.

The soldiers tell their relatives in Russia that they have a hard time understanding their decision. In his home country, reports of atrocities committed by Russian troops, such as the slaughter of civilians in Irpin and Bucha, in the Kiev suburbs, are dismissed as “foreign propaganda.”

“They don’t know the whole truth,” says a 32-year-old soldier who calls himself Miami, adding that his parents urged him to fight on the Russian side. “They tell them that bad people live here and they believe it. It doesn’t occur to them that the second largest army in the world can kill ordinary citizens.”

On the Eastern Front, the barrage of artillery never stops for long. Russian forces are hammering on Ukrainian positions to dislodge them from Bakhmut before launching the much-heralded offensive aimed at seizing the entire Donbass region.

In a Ukrainian position whose precise location cannot be revealed for security reasons, the ground shakes and artillery shells from both sides intersect in the clear sky. Russian forces have just launched a volley of BM-21 “Grad” rockets that swept the area, injuring several civilians, but missing the soldiers.

“They are attacking us from everywhere,” gasps one of the Russian soldiers fighting for Ukraine, seeking refuge in a cluster of small snow-covered huts.

The soldiers of the Free Russian Legion say their purpose remains strong, but some have already begun to think about the future beyond the immediate battle, even beyond the war in Ukraine.

“My task is not just to protect the people of Ukraine,” says Cesar, 50. “If I get out of this phase of the war alive and all Ukrainian territory is liberated, I will continue with my gun in my hand until the Kremlin regime is overthrown.”

Caesar, who earned a reputation as a wise and eccentric within the Legion, says he was once an avowed Russian nationalist. But he now believes that modern Russia went off the rails, especially after the invasion of Ukraine.

In the past, César was a member of the Russian Imperial Movement, declared a violent extremist group by the United States, but says he partly broke with the group because of his support for Russia’s 2014 annexation of the Crimean peninsula.

A Ukrainian military official tasked with monitoring the Free Russian Legion says Caesar “spent a lot of time looking for a path that was ideologically correct for him,” adding that Ukrainian officials found no reason to mistrust him.

Caesar, whose wife and four children moved to Ukraine last summer, believes he is not fighting fellow Russians, but rather “stateless scoundrels and murderers.”

“I am sitting in front of you, and I am the example of a Russian man, the man Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky wrote about. That’s the kind of man I am. I am not like them, who are not Russians”.

By Michael Schwirtz

Translation by Jaime Arrambide