The men left Siberia separately without telling anyone of their final destination. Their backgrounds were very different, but one thing united them – the desire to protect Ukraine and return to Russia to take up arms against President Putin’s regime.
Upon their arrival in Ukraine, they joined the Siberian Battalion, a newly formed part of the Ukrainian armed forces, which consists mainly of members of the Russian ethnic minorities beyond the Ural Mountains, far from Moscow.
“I could not stand by while such crimes were being committed against Ukraine and its people,” said Gennady, a native of Buryatia, a poor Siberian region 3,500 miles east of Moscow. “I left Russia on my 29th birthday and will only return home to a free Buryatia.”
The Kremlin has mobilized a disproportionately large number of troops from Siberia in an attempt to minimize casualties and discontent among residents of its largest and wealthiest cities. At least 1,200 soldiers from Buryatia died in the war, according to publicly available obituaries. The true figure is believed to be much higher. A Buryat soldier is 275 times more likely to be killed in Ukraine than a soldier from Moscow, an adviser to the Ukrainian president has said.
Like other members of the battalion, Gennady says he experienced discrimination and racism in Moscow, where Russian citizens of Asian appearance can hardly rent apartments and are often harassed by the police. “Russia considers me a second-class citizen,” he said. “We were colonized by the Russian Empire and our culture was Russified. Even my name, Gennady, is Russian.”
Tsarist Russia began conquering Siberia in the 16th century, later imprisoning critics such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the 19th-century writer, in its vast frozen territories. President Putin’s regime extracts vast amounts of oil, gas and diamonds from its land, but keeps the profits instead of building the region’s infrastructure. Buryatia, where many people practice Buddhism or shamanism, has an average monthly salary of just 44,000 rubles (£390). Many rural homes in Siberia still have no gas and people burn wood to keep warm in the harsh winters, when temperatures can drop to minus 50C.
“We came to Ukraine to help and gain experience in the struggle to liberate our homeland,” said another member of the Siberian battalion, who gave his call sign as Yakut. The former businessman traveled more than 5,000 miles from Yakutia, Russia’s vast ice kingdom, to fight for Ukraine. The recruits trained with a Ukrainian military instructor. None of the men had been to Ukraine before.
Alexandra Garmazhapova, head of the opposition Free Buryatia Foundation, accused the Kremlin of using ethnic Buryats as “cannon fodder” in Ukraine. “Moscow purposefully reduced the Siberian regions, including Buryatia, to poverty and then used them for its own interests,” she said, as quoted by The Times.
Gennady is unfazed by the prospect of fighting other Buryats on the battlefields of Ukraine. “They are enemies to me,” he said. “My advice to them is to run or surrender. Although most of his fellow recruits from Siberia wear masks to hide their identities when speaking to journalists, Gennady says he wants to be exposed for his involvement in the Ukrainian army .
“I’m tired of being afraid. I want other people in Buryatia to understand that they don’t need to be afraid,” he said.
The men, who traveled by circuitous routes that were complicated by the difficulty of reaching other European countries directly from Russia, were assisted on their journey by the Civic Council, a Russian dissident movement that recruits volunteers for Ukraine’s armed forces. The movement, created last year by exiled opposition figures, says its aim is to try to “wash away the blood of Bucha”, a reference to the town near Kiev where Russian soldiers massacred civilians last year.
Other Russians fighting for Ukraine include the Russian Volunteer Corps, a group of nationalists opposed to Putin, and the Freedom of Russia Legion, which is linked to Ilya Ponomarev, a former opposition lawmaker.
For now, there are tens, not hundreds, of fighters in the Siberian battalion. The numbers will grow as more recruits are screened, vetted and approved, the battalion’s Ukrainian spokesman said. Some are already on the front lines in eastern Ukraine.
“The problem is not that there are no Russians willing to join us. The problem is that Ukraine cannot process the large number of applications it receives,” he said. “We have to do a lot of checks to make sure the battalion isn’t infiltrated by Russian agents. We also have to make sure they meet the requirements of the Ukrainian armed forces, of course.”
One of the youngest recruits is a 19-year-old from the Khanty-Mansiysk region with the call sign Pepsi. He said that his mother still does not know that he is in Ukraine. “I decided to come as soon as the war started, but I was underage so I had to wait.”
But he and his fellow Siberians acknowledged that defeating Putin’s regime is a massive undertaking that some would describe as unrealistic. Putin, a former KGB officer, has been in power for almost 24 years and has ruthlessly crushed all domestic opposition.
“Yes, it is difficult. But we are only at the beginning of our journey,” said “The Poet,” another recruit from Buryatia. “We have an opportunity in Ukraine to create an armed resistance. Many people in Siberia think badly of Muscovites, that they have seized power and that they control all our resources. We just have to give them a little hope.”
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2023-11-10 19:51:00
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