[LINK] "Putin’s International Brigades"

[rfmcdonald]

Alexander Litoy's Open Democracy article looks at the demographics of the volunteers who have come to eastern Ukraine to fight for separatists (generally anti-American, commonly far-right Europeans, often Serbs and Hungarians).

Foreign volunteers also figure prominently in Russian media propaganda; and separatist websites are full of interviews with them. Not that they necessarily get to fight. ‘They can’t wait to get to the front line, but it’s unlikely they’ll be sent there,’ began a story on Russia’s main news channel, about two young Spaniards who had come to support the separatists. ‘We’ve got enough fighters of our own, and they’re more use behind the lines. Let them watch and remember, so that when they go back home to Spain they’ll be able to tell people what Kyiv is doing to south-east Ukraine’. It is certainly true that few foreigners’ names have been on the lists of the dead, and prisoners.

This propaganda campaign has worked well. ‘He said how terrible it was to see the faces of children and old people who were hostages of the crisis, who had nowhere to go, nowhere to hide when the Ukrainian army started shelling Lugansk,’ another news channel reported of an interview given to the pro-Kremlin Vzglyad [The Viewpoint] newspaper by one of the Spanish volunteers. ‘“I was struck by the courage and determination of these people,” he said. “They are very serious about their dream of becoming Novorossiya and freeing themselves from the oppression of the illegitimate Fascist government in Kyiv.”’

Some foreigners do, however, get to the front. Many of the Serbs, for example, are veterans of the conflicts in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. And Vladimir Antyufeyev, the former KGB head in Transnistria (the breakaway state between Ukraine and its eastern neighbour Moldova), has helped set up the DNR’s Special Forces; and the self-styled republic feels a close solidarity with this and the other pro-Russian unrecognised states that were previously part of the USSR – South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

In fact, people from all over the world have made a pilgrimage to fight for the Donetsk-Lugansk separatists: from Serbia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Italy, Spain, France, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Israel, other ex-Soviet states, and even Brazil, Australia, and the USA – an unexpected bonus for Novorossiya’s propaganda machine. Andrei Rodkin, head of Russia’s diplomatic mission in Novorossiya, told me he had no accurate figures about their numbers, but it was clear that they made up only a small percentage of the fighters, although their presence is important for the locals’ morale.

‘Back in June the concept arose – spontaneously, and partly out of responses to questions from journalists – a concept of a new anti-fascist International Brigade,’ Rodkin explained. ‘The recovery of the Russian world is obvious to everyone, so it’s clear why volunteers have been arriving from other countries in the Orthodox, Russian language orbit. But Spanish people aren’t part of that world, and nor are anti-fascists from France or Italy.’