A growing number of Russian men disgruntled by Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine have turned their back on their own country to join Kyiv’s forces in the bloody conflict.
The Ukrainian military has formed a special unit, dubbed the Siberian Battalion, to accommodate Russian defectors willing to take up arms against their former homeland.
“I was disillusioned with my own people,” said a member of the battalion who goes by the military call sign Karabas. “That is why I wanted to come here…and fight for a free Ukraine.”
“I didn’t want to be part of Putin’s Russia or of Russia in general anymore,” he added. “I don’t believe that Russia as the empire that it is right now can become free.”
Unlike other volunteer units in Ukraine that have Russian nationals in their ranks, including the Freedom of Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps, the Siberian Battalion is officially part of the regular Ukrainian army.
The battalion was created six months ago and now numbers a few dozen fighters. Ukrainian military brass are hopeful more will follow — and based on applications that have come in so far, they are aiming to have a 300-man-strong unit of Russian fighters.
Karabas speculated that “there must be tens, hundreds of thousands of” other Russians like him, willing to fight side-by-side with Ukrainians.
“I think we should have a lot more [Russian fighters],” he said.
Prospective troops are put through extensive security checks, which sometimes take up to a year, before they are offered training and sent to the front lines in eastern Ukraine, which has seen some of the fiercest fighting of the war.
The unit has already been deployed near the city of Avdiivka in the Russian-held Donetsk region, which Moscow’s forces have long struggled to recapture.
Karabas, who lived in Moscow at the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022, said he was so shocked by the images coming from Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine — and dismayed by his countrymen’s blind support of Putin — that he was inspired to defect.
But would take the Russian volunteer nearly a year to join the Siberian Battalion.
Karabas packed his bags and traveled first to Armenia, where he connected with Ukrainians living there and mastered the language so that he would never have to speak Russian again.
He eventually made his way to Ukraine, where his documents were scrutinized and he was questioned at length about his motives.
Volunteers like Karabas – many of them hailing from ethnic communities in Russia’s far east, which historically have been plagued by poverty and racism — hope that a Ukrainian victory in the war would bring them closer to breaking Moscow’s stranglehold over their region.
“I felt this was a necessity,” battalion member with the call sign Grifin said of his decision to join the fight on Ukraine’s side. “I was about to go crazy, because I felt like an outcast, and it wasn’t pleasant at all.”
Grifin said he experienced a moment of “psychological relief” only when he learned that he would be allowed to be part of the foreign battalion.
Another Russian fighter, who goes by the call sign Holod, which means “cold” in Russian, said he ultimately wants to see Putin’s regime toppled — even as the Russian leader signaled this week his intention to seek reelection for another six-year term.
“When this happens, we can talk about victory,” he said. “Russia will at least cease to be a source of sudden aggression.”
With Post wires