Russian-style natsbat

Recruitment of volunteers for the war in Ukraine is taking place throughout the country through various channels as part of a coordinated campaign of covert mobilization. People are invited to join private military companies (including directly in penal colonies), as well as various units of the “DPR” and “LPR” and, in fact, the official power structures: units and formations of the Armed Forces, Rosgvardia and the country’s Battle Army Reserve (BARS) subordinate to the Ministry of Defense.

Apart from this, another mechanism for attracting manpower is the creation of volunteer battalions in the constituent entities of the Russian Federation. Russian propaganda has firmly attached the expressions “national” or “nationalist battalion” (natsbat) and “volunteer battalion” (dobrobat) to the Ukrainian paramilitary units that emerged during the initial war in Donbas with pro-Russian separatists. In particular, these included the Azov, Donbass, Aidar, Dnipro and other battalions created on a territorial basis and manned, among others, by members of right-wing political movements and football ultras. They were called National Battalions because of the widespread nationalist and, in some cases, neo-fascist views among the battalion personnel and commanders. In any case, there have long been no Natsbat in Ukraine. The notorious Azov battalion and the other volunteer battalions have been transformed into regular military units and integrated into the Ukrainian security forces - the Ukrainian armed forces and the National Guard - or simply disbanded. But now the National Battalions are popping up like mushrooms after the rain in the Russian regions.

In Russia, a natsbat, or national battalion, has a slightly different meaning: it is a military unit formed from volunteers in any national autonomy on the principles of ethnic homogeneity or common origin. Volunteer battalions are also formed in “Russian” entities, i.e. ordinary oblasts and krais, but even there the ideological foundation is based on compatriotism and an appeal to a common regional identity. It is assumed that one or even several battalions will appear in each of the 85 subjects. According to The Insider’s calculations, at least 44 Russian regions, including 12 national subjects, have already created such units or announced the recruitment of volunteers for them. A total of 73 local battalions are known, including 23 in the national subjects.

All the battalions of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation use “name” names and clear territorial affiliation on an ethnic or compatriot basis.

For example, the tasks of the Tiger battalion, which is being recruited in Primorsky Krai, have been described by the local governor Oleg Kozhemyako as assistance to fellow servicemen involved in the war. The battalion is being formed with the help of officers of the 155^th separate guards marine brigade (155BPM) stationed in Vladivostok.

Battalions of constituent entities of the Russian Federation are formed on ethnic or compatriot basis

The set of symbolic images and historical narratives used to form regional battalions is extremely curious. For example, the Yakut battalion is called Bootur in honour of the mythical ancestor of all Yakuts. The “Toyan” battalion from the Tomsk region was named after a prince of the Eushtin Tatars who lived on the banks of the Tom River in the 17^th century.

One of the battalions assembled in the Republic of Mordovia was named after the Mordovian hero Siyazhar. In neighbouring Mari El three battalions are named after defenders of the Mari land: Iden, Poltysh and Akpatr. Poltysh is a real historical personage, a Mari prince who defended his native land from the Russian troops of Tsar Ivan the Terrible.

In Bashkortostan, a different path is followed and the memory of the Great Patriotic War and the Chechen war is recalled. One of the Bashkir battalions was named after General Minigali Shaimuratov, a newly minted WWII hero, and another was named after Alexander Dostavalov, a participant in the second Chechen war.

In the “Russian” entities, the names for the battalions are mostly related to local toponymy and history. In Kirov Oblast, the historical name of the region Vyatka for the battalion was modified to “Vyatka”. In the Khabarovsk region, the battalion “Baron Korff” refers to the first governor of the Amur region, Baron Andrei Korff. In St Petersburg, the battalions bear the region’s iconic names “Kronstadt”, “Neva” and “Pavlovsk”.

In the Chuvash battalion “Atӑl” (translated as “Volga”), one of the requirements for candidates is knowledge of the Chuvash language.

Tatar squads “Alga” (Tatar for “forward”) and “Timer” (translated as “iron”) are referred to in the local media as national battalions.

In the conditionally “Russian” regions there are also proposals to create ethnically homogenous units

And there are proposals to create ethnically homogeneous units in the conditionally “Russian” regions as well. For example, in the Perm region, in addition to the Parma and Molot battalions, which absorb all local residents, there are plans to create a battalion of ethnic Uzbeks (!) called ’Amir Timur’. The initiative was proposed by the Central Asian Society of Uzbeks of the Perm Region, but it has yet to gain support. Moreover, the government of Uzbekistan has promised to prosecute all its citizens who will go to fight in Ukraine for mercenarism.

Separate regional battalions are initially created with a species specificity different from conventional motorized rifle units. In the Kursk region, the Seim battalion (the name of the local river) is claimed as an auxiliary logistic unit. Tank battalions are being created in Perm Krai (“Molot”) and Nizhny Novgorod Oblast (Kuzma Minin battalion). The Ulyanovsk Region is recruiting volunteers for the Sviyaga engineer battalion and the Simbirsk howitzer-artillery battalion.

Some regions prefer not to get involved with volunteers. For example, the Arkhangelsk Region has taken under patronage the active motorized rifle battalion of the 200^th Independent Motorized Rifle Brigade of the 14^th Army Corps of the Northern Fleet which is manned predominantly by natives of the region. The battalion was given the honorary name of Arkhangelsky.

Some regions prefer not to get involved with volunteers

And in some places ethnic homogeneous units in the form of companies and platoons emerge under the umbrella of BARS units. Volunteers from Tuva in particular are fighting in these units, and the head of the republic, Vladislav Khovalyg, willingly shares with the public the fantastic details of their feats of arms. According to him, almost all the Tuvalians are awarded state decorations and in the intervals between combat missions they entertain their comrades-in-arms with Tuvan throat singing, reciting poems, and playing the guitar and accordion.

There is a separate story about the Chechen volunteer battalion “Akhmat”. Anyone who wants to join it, including people with a criminal record, is recruited there, and sometimes Chechens who have done wrong by the head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, are forcibly incorporated. The combat skills of the members of this unit are questionable, in contrast to their outstanding talents in shooting TikTok videos and torturing prisoners of war.

Meanwhile, the Akhmat battalion is built on the principles of ethnic segregation. In the first wave of attack there are usually fighters of non-Chechen origin, and ethnic Chechens form the second echelon.

At the same time Kadyrov has created four full-fledged national battalions, not of volunteers, but of regular members of the Chechen security forces, totalling 1,800 men. In total, Kadyrov claims that Chechnya has trained 9,000 fighters to be sent to Ukraine, with a further 10,000 in reserve.

On the whole, judging by open data, recruitment to the Russian National Battalions is fiddling. The battalion’s authorized strength is 400 to 600 people, but a significant number of regions have initially set the bar low at 200-300 people. Despite enormous (by the standards of the Russian regions) salaries at the level of 200 thousand rubles per month and lump-sum payments from local budgets of 200-300 thousand rubles, only Cossack units, Tuvan, Ossetian and Chechen volunteers, as well as several companies from other regions are still present in the combat zone.

Recruitment of people into the Russian national battalions is going on with a hitch

History has already had examples where the formation of the armed forces on the basis of ethnic homogeneity has led to the disintegration of the state. For example, the Polish legions of the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, after the collapse of the country in 1918, became the basis of the army of independent Poland, which was created on its ruins. Russia after the February revolution in 1917 had an extremely unsuccessful experience of the Ukrainisation of parts of the army and navy.

Obviously, even today the national armed forces, financed from local budgets, manned by natives of one region and emphasizing their national or regional identity with a special set of symbols and values, can relatively easily be “switched” from participation in war for the “unity of Ukrainians and Russians” to the unfair position of their own ethnic group/subject in a super-centralized Russian Federation. And the preconditions for this are in place; local anti-war movements are actively developing in the regions.

Anti-war ethnic movements

Vladimir Putin likes to mention not only the unity of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples, but also the unity of the peoples within Russia. However, not all representatives of the ethno-national (and some “Russian”) entities of the Russian Federation support the war he has unleashed and want to take part in it.

Buryatia

The first ethnic anti-war initiative in Russia was the Free Buryatia Foundation. The organisation provides legal support to contractors who do not want to fight and denounces ethnic racism and xenophobia in Russia.

“Since 2015, we have had a ’fighting Putin’s Buryats’ plume behind us, which has been engineered by the Kremlin, among others,” says Alexandra Garmazhapova, head of the foundation. - And we realised that we needed to express our position, that we don’t agree with this war. We made several anti-war videos, and each time there were more of us - this is how the foundation was formed. Relatives of Buryat (and later not only Buryat) contract servicemen started writing to us asking for help in breaking our contracts. This was back in March. And we urgently had to look for lawyers. It was obvious that to turn around and say, “Guys, we just wanted to shoot one anti-war video, and then you can take it from there” would have been pretty irresponsible. At first, we thought that there were a few of them, then dozens. As a result more than 500 people have turned to us for advice. Recently we managed to return 150 contract soldiers who refused to fight back to Buryatia".

Kalmykia

Soon after the outbreak of hostilities, an anti-war movement emerged in Kalmykia, whose members also started by recording a video: they spoke out against the war, recalled the persecution of Kalmyks in the USSR and the oppression of ethnic minorities in modern Russia, and urged their fellow countrymen not to participate in military operations in Ukraine.

“The way the Kremlin is using Russia’s national minorities is a manipulation,” believes Dorzhi Mandzhiev, deputy head of the Yabloko party in the republic of Kalmykia and organiser of the anti-war movement Kalmyks Against the War. - So far at least 12 people from Kalmykia have died in the war, but for three hundred thousand people of Kalmykia it is a big figure. What did they die for? For the ambitions of the dictator and of this regime? Not a single life of a Russian is worth it. Our movement was created in order that we together could influence the situation in our region at least, so that Kalmyks would not go to this murderous war and genocide, so that they would understand that the Kremlin has brought us to the point that people are ready to give their lives and body parts for some small crumbs from the bar table. With an average wage of $200 a month the Commissariat is beckoning and giving a 300 thousand roubles allowance to the military. This is madness, but people have been driven into such despair that they are ready to give up their lives and leave their families.

Manjiyev is convinced that the anti-war movement is only the starting point from which the further struggle for federalisation will begin: “This war was the impetus for the self-consciousness of the peoples. That is, the Kremlin only uses us when it needs to. It turns out that when there is a war”we are all brothers“, and in our free time”you are churks“and”we only rent to Slavs". The Kremlin considers us just meat to be used on the front line. Ukrainians were also called brothers. But you don’t do that to brothers. I think that in the future all this will develop into self-consciousness of the national republics - we will demand from the Kremlin real federalization, not just on paper. If this issue is not resolved, it may end in a civil war.

Let’s demand real federalization from the Kremlin; otherwise the matter might end in a civil war.

Tuva

An anti-war movement of its own has also appeared in Tyva. Activists not only tell the truth about the war, but also help soldiers return home from Ukraine. In June, nine soldiers from the Tuvan brigade, who were on assignment in Kyrgyzstan and were preparing to be sent to Ukraine, were able to terminate their contracts early and return to Tyva with the help of members of the movement.

“The need to find a community of anti-war Tuvinian like-minded people arose for many of us when the war started. But finding such people was a non-trivial task,” a New Tyva activist told The Insider. - It all started when one of the future co-founders of our movement started looking through the comments on anti-war Instagram posts by Asians of Russia. She found those who condemned the war and, if it was clear that it was someone from Tyva, she wrote them personal messages. This formed a small core of people who were not indifferent and wanted to act. The creation of the organization was also spurred on by several events: the news about the death of the co-founder’s nephew, statistics about the large number of Tuvinians killed in the war, and radio intercepts of Tuvan communicators, which made it clear that they were being used on the front line because of their different language. The development of the organisation was also greatly helped by Eres Kara-Sal, a deputy from Tyva. Thanks to his publicly expressed anti-war stance and several interviews, more Tuvinians have signed up for us. Above all, we try to persuade our fellow countrymen not to support this war through assistance in cancelling military contracts, direct communication with contract servicemen and their families and, of course, informing them about the real state of affairs in the war. The members of the movement are mainly from Tyva, but we help not only Tuvan contract servicemen but anyone who applies. It has happened more than once that some Tuvinian soldiers turn to us for help to terminate their contract and return home, and with them, for example, some of their Russian comrades-in-arms. We don’t refuse to help anyone.

Like like-minded people from Kalmykia, the Tuvinians see the anti-war struggle as part of the federalisation movement: “We will continue our activities until the war is over. But we hope that after it, something bigger will be born of the movement. Something that will take Tyva to the path of democracy and help create the conditions for a true federalisation of Russia”.

Yakutia

In Yakutia, dissenters to the war have created the Sakha vs War community. Here’s what one of its organizers told The Insider:

"Members of our movement have an extremely negative attitude towards all military aggression by the Kremlin, both against sovereign states (Georgia, Syria, Ukraine) and within regions of Russia, referring to the Chechen wars for Ichkeria’s independence. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, back in 2014, activists in our movement have openly spoken out against the annexation of Crimea. Unfortunately, after the law on discrediting the armed forces was passed, we had to go underground and create an Instagram page, through which we actively communicate our point of view. There are talented and creative people living in our republic, thanks to whom tourism, IT, cinematography, art, science and sport were actively developing before the war. We are an ambitious and bright people. The war redrew our future and put a bloody cross on it.

The war has opened up many festering boils on the body of the Russian state: there is racism, and the imposition of imperialist values from Moscow, and the lack of the right to self-determination of the small peoples of Russia, and a centralized government which takes all the wealth of the regions to Moscow. Our task is to give a good shake to the Yakut information field, to draw attention to these and other long-standing issues and problems. We want to shake up the swamp from years of fear and silence. Our community has attracted the attention of many other anti-war movements and has now rallied around us all the opponents of war from Yakutia and other regions.

Signs of half-life

The economic crisis that followed the war is reinforcing separatist sentiments because the regions do not really understand why they should have to pay the price of Moscow’s suicidal policies. The regions are already facing a decline in industrial production, rising unemployment and falling budget revenues. On unemployment - the most explosive indicator - rather detailed estimates are available: the regions with large industrial clusters and export-oriented enterprises, such as Kurgan, Kaluga, Samara regions, the Komi Republic and Tatarstan, will suffer the most. But regions with weak undiversified economies and large state-financed sectors (North Caucasus republics, Tuva) will feel almost no decline in the labour market.

Ultimately, none of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation has so far exhibited a combination of all three worrying signs in terms of separatism: the creation of local volunteer battalions, a strong anti-war movement with an ethnic or regional component, and serious challenges to socio-economic stability.

But at least ten regions have two out of three signs. The Insider talked to Nikolai Petrov, a regionalist, about how the war and crisis could affect the regions and the country’s unity.

Nikolai Petrov, Russian political scientist and political geographer

Tuva, Buryatia, Kalmykia, Dagestan, North Ossetia and Ingushetia are all national republics that belong to the Fourth Russia, according to socio-economic regional development expert Natalia Zubarevich. They are national republics, and their behaviour does not fit the general patterns that work in most other Russian regions. They have been governed for years by ethnic elites, but now the situation is changing or has changed - as in Dagestan, where Moscow is replacing the local root elite with outsiders with little effect. But in reaction to the sanctions and the crisis, strangely enough, they may feel better dynamically, i.e. less affected by the negative effect of the sanctions than many other more developed regions than the capitals and large industrialised regions, simply because they are largely subsidised. This is purely budgetary. Although it is clear that eventually the negative effect will sooner or later also affect the financial and economic support that these republics receive from the federal centre.

Subsidised regions will feel better than industrialised ones in terms of dynamics

For many years, my colleagues and I have been ranking the socio-economic and political well-being of the regions from 2015 to 2020 based on a number of indicators - economic statistics, political dynamics, and protests. In socio-economic terms, we have assessed two categories of risks: short-term risks, which are related to the dynamics of household income, regional budget revenues and production dynamics; and medium-term risks, which are related to the dynamics of trade turnover, budget debts and investment dynamics, that is, what can lead to growing tensions in the short term and what can also lead to this in the medium term. In doing so, we assessed the socio-economic situation both in terms of households (income and trade turnover) and in terms of regions and regional budgets.

In the North Caucasus, household economic risks have always been high, and Dagestan has always been among the high-risk regions, because political risks there were combined with an active protest movement.

If we look at Russia’s regions in terms of the level of wages, say, last year, we see that Kalmykia, Dagestan, Ingushetia and North Ossetia are at the bottom of this rating. At the same time Kalmykia is the poorest region in terms of the level of salaries. Thus, 20% of the population there have salaries of less than 15 thousand a month. Next comes Dagestan which has roughly the same indicators as Ingushetia and Kalmykia. Things are a bit better in North Ossetia, even better in Tuva and Buryatia, but it depends on what we are looking at: in absolute value of wages Tuva and Buryatia look much more decent than the North Caucasus regions. But these are regions with northern premiums, and the consumer goods basket is much more expensive there. So when economists look at the ratio of income to the cost of the basket of goods and services, and at the proportion of the population below the poverty line, Tuva is the absolute champion, while Kalmykia and Ingushetia are very close behind. At the same time, Tuva is the only region where the ratio of income to the cost of the basket is less than one, i.e. the average level of income is not enough to provide a minimum set of goods and services. A third of the population lives below the poverty line. North Ossetia and Dagestan have a slightly better situation, but they are all below the Russian average.

In Tyva, even the average income level is not enough to provide a minimum set of goods and services.

We must understand that when we talk about Russian economic statistics, especially for the national republics, these figures are very inaccurate, especially the figures for the North Caucasus. That is, the stratification is large, the standard of living is generally low, but we should not absolutize the numbers that we see in the execution of Rosstat. We can say that all these regions are in a rather deplorable condition, but precisely because they did not thrive before the crisis and before the sanctions. For them, the impact of the crisis is now less noticeable and discernible than for regions such as Tatarstan, which were among the leaders, but today are losing a lot because of the sanctions and their consequences.

All the regions we are talking about are regions subsidised by the federal centre, and as such, they feel almost the same today as they felt yesterday or the day before. Their losses will be due to worsening socio-economic situation in the country as a whole, with budget cuts primarily for subsidies to the regions and assistance to regional budgets, although the North Caucasus has been and remains one of the very important priorities for the Kremlin.

However, we are talking about small regions and the population is largely rural, not urban. This means that there is some level of stability there as people are much less dependent on work of industrial enterprises and money that citizens can get for that work but much more on themselves and their own plots. Although these national regions are part of the Fourth Russia, typologically they are adjacent to the Third, which is the rural hinterland that is dependent on pensions. They, in turn, will continue to be indexed, but there is no dependence on the income of industrial enterprises, nor on the efficiency of their work, nor on the very fact that large industrial enterprises operate.

It is Moscow that provokes the conflicts leading to the splitting of the country

In each of these republics, even in the smallest Ingushetia, there are different clans whose interests are balanced in one way or another. In Daghestan, for example, representatives of major ethnic groups control the main spheres of the economy, and as soon as the balance starts to change, it will directly affect the interests of ethnic clans and through them the ethnic groups. And in the situation of Dagestan, where ethnic groups are compactly settled, this acquires a territorial dimension and may cause a social explosion like the one we saw in the republic in the past. It will be very difficult to maintain the balance, and any friction and alteration of the balance, any shifts in the interests of different ethnic clans will be a destabilizing factor in one way or another.

As for the situation with the split of the Russian Federation, this is not a one-off event, but a chain of actions and their consequences. The main problem, I think, should not be seen in the fact that some ethnic clans want to secede. The problem is that under the conditions of super-centralization, it is Moscow that can provoke the conflicts that will ultimately lead to the prospect of splitting the country. But not because anyone today wants and is able to advance slogans of secession from Russia, but because the Kremlin, by trying to manage the centrally shifting situation, distributing money and maintaining a balance of interests of ethnic groups or ignoring that balance, will lead to destabilization. Then a chain emerges - the interests of ethnic clans are violated, this can lead to serious protests on a variety of occasions, and if the response to these protests is not balanced and calibrated enough, it can lead to an increase, not a decrease, in conflict. Unfortunately, the Kremlin cannot react quickly and accurately because the situation is far less visible from Moscow than it is from within the region.

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Veaceslav Epureanu

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