As Russians fight for Ukraine, Kyiv is faced with a new dilemma

Kyiv, Ukraine – Next to the coffin containing the body of Daniil Maznik, many of his camouflage-clad, battle-tested comrades-in-arms were crying.

“He was a brave fighter, a devout Christian, a trustworthy comrade,” Maznik’s commander Denis Kapustin said in tears at a farewell ceremony last weekend at Kiev’s historic Baikove cemetery.

Maznik, a bearded and burly 29-year-old, was killed in one of the most daring and brutal military operations of the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine.

On June 1, he was part of four small military units that entered the Western Russian region of Belgorod to attack Shebekino, a town of 40,000 inhabitants, and to take the village of Novaya Tavolzhanka.

They clashed with border guards and military personnel and were supported by Ukrainian drone strikes and heavy, indiscriminate artillery fire, including banned cluster munitions, Russian officials claimed.

As they continued, tens of thousands of civilians fled Belgorod in panic, and Novaya Tavolzhanka briefly became Russia’s first and only territory beyond Moscow’s control.

Maznik led the takeover of a border post, hijacked an armored vehicle and captured a soldier before being mowed down by gunfire on June 3, Kapustin said.

The farewell ceremony in a cavernous funeral home would have resembled thousands of similar rituals held across Ukraine over the past 16 months.

But some things made it look ominously different.

Some of the stern, sombre uniformed men wore carefully adjusted masks, hats and sunglasses to avoid being recognized.

No one agreed to be interviewed by Al Jazeera, saying they were “directed” not to talk to the media.

And not a single Ukrainian official showed up to deliver a eulogy or place flowers on the coffin.

Because Maznik, whose nickname was Shaiba (Puck), was a Russian national and part of the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC), a small military unit founded by fugitive ultra-nationalists.

They said they were supported by The Freedom of Russia Legion, made up of Russian POWs who switched sides, and groups of volunteers from neighboring Poland and Belarus.

In February 2022, the Kremlin planned a triumphant blitzkrieg to overthrow the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

In the words of the Kremlin, the aim of Russia’s “special military operation” was to “liberate” Ukraine from Zelenskyy’s “neo-Nazi junta”.

At the time, the mere idea of ​​the RVC and its allies taking the war to Russia in three raids – in March, late May and early June – seemed unlikely.

The measure would have allowed Kiev to use the raids to trumpet how faltering and weak Moscow’s war effort is, and how Russian officials have failed to protect border regions despite hefty defense budgets.

But that didn’t happen.

Instead, Kiev views the RVC as an independent political force with which the Kremlin should negotiate directly.

“We are observing the course of hostilities and once again urge the Moscow regime to cease firing in the Belgorod region, immediately start talks with the RVC and stop senseless bloodshed,” tweeted Zelenskyy’s aide Mykhailo Podolyak on June 5.

“This is a battle of the Russian Goliath against the Russian David,” he wrote, concluding that “Ukraine is not taking part in the conflict.”

Analysts say Ukraine prefers to keep its support for the RVC with intelligence information, artillery fire and drone strikes secret – albeit an open one.

“Kiev distances itself from RVC raids in Russia because Ukraine is not officially conducting a military offensive on Russian territory,” David Gendelman, an independent military analyst told Al Jazeera.

“Although everyone understands that during a war no one would let them carry out such operations on their territory, and in reality they are coordinated with Ukrainian intelligence,” he said.

For him, the controversial past of the founders of the RVC is not the reason why Ukraine is so reluctant to admit its support for the unit.

“Kyiv would equally distance themselves from them, even if their past was not ultra-right, but something else – red, white or striped,” he said.

One reason is Ukraine’s heavy dependence on Western aid; Western countries have repeatedly warned that the advanced weapons they supply can only be used on Ukrainian territory.

But the RVC had at least four explosive-resistant tactical vehicles supplied by the United States and Poland, as well as rifles made in Belgium and the Czech Republic, the Washington Post reported. reported on June 3.

Two days later, Belgium said it objected to its use on Russian territory.

“There are extremely strict rules regarding Belgian and other European weapons,” Prime Minister Alexander De Croo told Le Soir newspaper. “We have asked the Ukrainians to explain the situation.”

Far-right ideologies

Slain RVC fighter Maznik spent years in the Russian army and used his experience to “turn a small group of desperate Russian boys into a full-fledged military unit,” Kapustin said in his eulogy.

“Shaiba gave six years of his life to the Russian army, knew all the injustices and rottenness of this machine from the inside and fought it passionately alongside us,” Kapustin said.

Russian media claimed that Maznik was convicted of fraud in Moscow and fled to Ukraine, abandoning his wife and child.

His commanding officer Kapustin, a 39-year-old with bulging muscles and multiple tattoos who prefers to be called White Rex, is much more outspoken.

Kapustin was born in Russia, but spent his formative years in Germany, where he said he was a “street kid, a skinhead, smashed faces.”

He participated in and staged bare-knuckle boxing fights, and German police characterized him as “one of the most influential” far-right activists in Europe.

He moved back to Russia and then fled to Ukraine in 2017. Germany is said to have revoked his residence permit.

In Kiev, he opened The White Rex clothing store that sells clothes with “Slavic solar symbols” resembling swastikas and other insignia used in Nazi Germany.

Today, Kapustin is wanted in Russia for allegedly organizing a botched assassination attempt on pro-Kremlin magnate Konstantin Malofeev, whose Tsargrad TV channel is one of the loudest pro-war media outlets.

Russian authorities also blacklisted the RVC as a “terrorist organization” and arrested several men who tried to join it.

Earlier this month, Moscow police conducted three dozen house searches of alleged supporters of RVC, the news website SOTA reported.

Kapustin fueled the fire by saying that the RVC wants to overthrow the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“The collapse of Russia allows us to return home,” he told a news conference in October. “We will facilitate the complete and absolute collapse of the Russian political order.”

His words and deeds could become perfect fodder for Russia’s vocal supporters.

“I think it would be a sin [in Russia] not to take full advantage of the far-right, radical background of the creators of the RVC,” Vyacheslav Likhachev, a Kyiv-based expert on far-right and ultra-nationalist groups, told Al Jazeera.

Pro-war Russian commentators, however, chose not to play this card – because the success of the RVC and its allies only underscores how unprepared Moscow’s armed forces and regional authorities are in dealing with their incursions.

“Most likely it is related to the unwillingness of Russian propagandists to draw attention to the fact that groups of Russian nationals are not simply waging war against [the Kremlin] as part of the Ukrainian armed forces, but they are very successful in conducting independent operations on Russian territory,” said Likhachev.