Who are the Russian Volunteer Corps and the Freedom of Russia Legion

Espreso found out who the members of the RDC and Freedom of Russia are, as well as what their goals are.

RDC: from creation to military operations

"The Russian Volunteer Corps is a military unit formed from Russian emigrants living in Ukraine. Its members claim that they are fighting on the side of Ukraine and are even a military unit of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. 

Photo: gettyimages

The RDC was formed in August 2022 to protect Ukraine from Russian invasion. According to open source information, it is part of the International Legion of the Ukrainian territorial defense forces. Members of the corps are representatives of Russian ethnic immigrants. The Russian Freedom Legion, on the other hand, is made up of former members of the Russian Armed Forces and other Russians who have sided with Ukraine.

In the summer of 2022, the RDC was assigned to the 1st Company of the 98th Battalion of the Azov Tank Corps, and in November 2022, a call for volunteers to join the RDC and other national units within the Armed Forces of Ukraine was announced in 9 Russian regions. 

According to statements on the RDC's official pages, at the beginning of this year, fighters of this unit, as part of a special unit of the Defence Intelligence of Ukraine, conducted a successful operation in Nova Kakhovka, during which at least 12 Russian occupiers, an APC-82A were destroyed and a prisoner was captured. It is said that thanks to this raid, intelligence received accurate data on the number, composition and location of enemy reserves. 

Since then, there has been an increasing focus on the RDC and their activities. The Sushany incident, which occurred on March 2, 2023, and involved an attack on the village of Sushany in Russia’s Bryansk region, has been attributed to them. On April 6 of this year, another RDC raid occurred in the village of Sluchovsk. Towards the end of May, significant activity was observed in the Belgorod region. The RDC, together with the Freedom of Russia Legion, claimed responsibility for all these events. Ukraine's Main Directorate of Intelligence confirmed that the Russians were conducting an operation in the Belgorod region with the aim of establishing a "security strip" to protect Ukrainian civilians. At the time, Andriy Yusov, a representative of Ukrainian intelligence, stated that the events in the Belgorod region constituted an "internal conflict within the Russian Federation" and were part of the Russians' struggle against Putin's internal occupation.

On June 1, the RDC announced a new raid in the direction of Shebekino. Later, there were reports of fighting near the Shebekino border crossing, and the head of the region said that the town had been shelled with a Grad MLRS.

RDC’s commander 

The commander of the Russian Volunteer Corps is Denis Nikitin, also known as Denis Kapustin, aka White Rex. He is currently on Russia's federal wanted list as a "member of a terrorist organization." In mid-March, Rosfinmonitoring, the main financial intelligence unit in Russia, added Kapustin to the register of terrorists and extremists.

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Kapustin was born in Moscow in 1984. At the age of 17, he moved to Cologne. According to the German weekly Der Spiegel, Kapustin has a permanent residence permit in Germany. He is known there as Denis Nikitin.

In 2017, he came to Ukraine, opened the White Rex clothing chain, took part in MMA fights, and trained with Azov fighters. According to Reuters, he has "frequently described himself as a nationalist fighting for a Russia that belongs to ethnic Russians" though "has rejected the neo-Nazi and white supremacist characterisations."

Freedom of Russia Legion: Russian soldiers who sided with Ukraine

The Freedom of Russia Legion is a Russian legion within the Ukrainian Armed Forces, formed in March 2022 to defend Ukraine from Russian invasion. It is a part of the International Legion of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The legion is composed of former members of the Russian armed forces and other Russians or Belarusians who have sided with Ukraine. The legion uses a white, blue, and white flag on its chevrons instead of the official white, blue, and red flag of the Russian Federation.

Photo: gettyimages

The Legion began to form on March 11, 2022, and was formed from a company of the Russian army - more than 100 people who voluntarily defected to the Ukrainian side. On February 27, with the help of SBU officers, the Russian military defected to Ukraine in order, according to the company commander, to "protect Ukrainians from real fascists." He called on his countrymen, soldiers in Putin's army, to join the ranks of the Freedom of Russia Legion in order to save their own people and country "from humiliation and destruction."

The first volunteers of the Freedom of Russia Legion began individual preliminary training in late March. In particular, the Legion's personnel, under the guidance of instructors from the Armed Forces of Ukraine, studied the features of the NLAW portable anti-tank missile.

On July 29, 2022, the Legion formed the second battalion, and in October, the Legion received its own artillery and began to form the third battalion. At that time, the unit participated in the defense of Bakhmut, Donetsk region. 

On May 22, 2023, together with the Russian Volunteer Corps, the Freedom of Russia Legion conducted reconnaissance operations in the Belgorod region. On June 7, members of the Freedom of Russia Legion announced that they considered Crimea to be a temporarily occupied part of Ukraine.

One of the well-known representatives of the legion is ex-Gazprom employee Igor Volobuev. He is a Russian of Ukrainian descent. Volobuev was born in Okhtyrka, Sumy region. He moved to Russia in the late 1980s, where he studied and worked. He was a vice president of Gazprombank and a longtime head of the press service of Russian Gazprom. In early March, when the full-scale invasion began, he fled to Ukraine. In June 2022, he joined the Freedom of Russia Legion.

In an interview with Denys Kazanskyi, he said that back in 2014 he decided to move to Ukraine after the occupation of Crimea.

"What happened is a threat not only to Ukraine but to the whole world. My friends and acquaintances from Okhtyrka told me that they never want to hear that I come from Okhtyrka and that they are ashamed of me."

Ilya Bogdanov: from the FSB to the Right Sector and the RDC

Ilya Bogdanov, a former Right Sector fighter, a Russian who was granted Ukrainian citizenship, also appears in the video of the raid in the Belgorod region. He is currently a member of the Russian Volunteer Corps. He underwent several surgeries due to injuries in combat. 

Until 2014, Bogdanov lived and worked in Russia. He studied at the Khabarovsk Border Institute of the FSB. He worked as an operations officer at the FSB Border Guard Department, and later at the FSB Border Guard Department of Primorsky Krai, where he served as a state inspector. He was promoted to the rank of senior lieutenant.

Photo: gettyimages

According to Bogdanov himself, in the summer of 2014, he came from Russia to Ukraine to fight as a volunteer against Putin's aggression.

At first, Bogdanov fought as part of the Donbas battalion, and later in the Right Sector Ukrainian Volunteer Corps. After participating in the war, he was granted Ukrainian citizenship.

Bogdanov survived 3 assassination attempts. In November 2016, he was kidnapped, but during an attempt to take him to Russia, the fighter was released during a special operation by the SBU. A few days before the abduction, the former FSB officer said that he was making the final preparations for the opening of a Korean food restaurant. In July 2017, he did open a Korean restaurant in Kyiv called Pian-Se Bar, later renamed Pian-Se REST. It is also known that Bogdanov is involved in the promotion of Pizza Veterano, a pizzeria created by former 2014 anti terrorist operation soldiers.

After the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he underwent several surgical operations, and after recovery, he joined the Russian Volunteer Corps and fought in its ranks. As he said in an interview with Channel 5, "I realized that the war in Donbas would not end easily, because it was very different from the others. And if earlier the war was more localized, now it is going on everywhere," he said.

• On June 7, the RDC announced that it had been in control of Nova Tavolzhanka, Russia’s Belgorod region, for a week.

• On June 4, the RDC and Legion commanders recorded a video with 2 captured Russian soldiers in which they addressed the governor of the Belgorod region, Vyacheslav Gladkov. They asked him to come and take the captured. The head of the region did not come to the meeting, and the captured soldiers were transferred to the exchange fund of Ukraine.