Denis Nikitin arrived for an interview at a Kyiv restaurant flanked by two armed bodyguards and with a pistol strapped to his side. It would not have been a surprising sight in wartime Ukraine but for one detail: Nikitin is Russian.
Before Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine last year, Nikitin was a notorious Russian nationalist, who built links between far-right groups across Europe and was once a major figure on Russia’s football hooliganism scene. These days, Nikitin runs the Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK, to use its Russian abbreviation), a controversial unit of Russian citizens that fights alongside the Ukrainian army.
RDK, along with another group of Russians fighting on Kyiv’s side, performed several cross-border raids this year, briefly seizing villages inside Russia before retreating to Ukraine.
