If the incursion into the Russian region of Belgorod has shown anything, it is the porosity of a border that could be assumed to be closely guarded, especially if it is true, as the Kyiv Post published, that the pro-Ukrainian Russian commandos broke in with two tanks, an armored troop transport and nine other vehicles.
The troops defending Ukraine include foreigners from the International Legion (with a conflicting record for some time), while anti-Putin Chechens, Georgians and Belarusians have their own units. Two groups of Russians are known, the Russian Volunteer Corps (CVR) and the Russian Freedom Legion (LLR). This would have already formed in March 2022, just after the invasion began, and the first, last summer. According to some sources, both signed the so-called Irpin Declaration on August 4, allying themselves with an almost unknown group inside Russia called the National Republican Army (ENR), whose spokesperson is former Russian parliamentarian Iliá Ponomariov, exiled in Ukraine. That August, Ponomariov claimed responsibility for the ENR murder in Moscow of Daria Duguina, daughter of the ideologue Alexander Dugin.
This conglomerate makes sense of these groups' claim (notorious in a video released by LLR) that they are fighting to rid Russia of Putin, which makes them highly susceptible to the supervision of Ukrainian intelligence. The LLR is backed by the former vice president of the Russian bank Gazprombank, Igor Volobuiev.
Thus, after the brief and limited (although bloody, with two dead and three wounded, including a child) raid on March 2 in two towns in the Briansk region, the CVR leader, Denis Kapustin, told the Financial Times that the operation was agreed with the Ukrainian authorities, otherwise they would not even have been able to cross the border.
Kapustin, who goes by the name Denis Nikitin and the nickname Rex for his clothing brand, White Rex, is a well-known member of the international far-right galaxy, connected to neo-Nazis in mid-Europe and US supremacists. Emigrating to Germany, he ended up in the Ukraine, where before the war he organized combats of combined martial arts and was associated with the ultra Azov Battalion. Moscow considers him involved in an assassination attempt on the Russian oligarch Konstantin Maloféiev on behalf of Ukraine and in a sabotage in Volgograd in August 2022. Another of the notorious members of the CVR is Alexéi Levkin, whose Telegram channel is full of Nazi symbology of esoteric cut.
Would these data provide arguments for Putin's old discourse on the denazification of Ukraine? Leaving aside the presence of Russian neo-Nazis in the rebel ranks of Donbass already in 2014 and the very origin of the Wagner Group – at the hands of Commander Dmitri Utkin, an admirer of the Third Reich – that matters little anymore.
