Our commander asked us to conduct a Preliminary Sweep

The armed conflict in eastern Ukraine effectively ended in the autumn of 2015. Most of the Russian citizens who poured into the Donbas as volunteers have since returned home. Officially, there's no one to thank them for their service. These returned former combatants of Ukraine's two self-proclaimed separatist republics are more and more often falling into a life of crime, and their past deeds haven't proved to be much help.

There's only one record of a Russian court finding someone's service in Donetsk to qualify as a mitigating circumstance. (He'd been caught driving under the influence of alcohol.) For many of these former volunteers, it does not even cross their minds that they were, in fact, part of illegal militias fighting in a foreign country. In a special report for Meduza, journalist Georgy Pereborshchikov has collected stories from some of the Russians who fought in the Donbas. Before the war, I rented a small grocery store outside St. Petersburg with another guy. I ran a business there.

I went to the Donbas in July 2014—to defend our Russian world from attacks by the West, of course. It was necessary to meet the enemy at our borders. My blood began to boil after the events at the House of Trade Unions in Odessa. It brought to mind the words of Vladimir Vysotsky's “Ballad of Struggle”: “If you don't fight the villain, or the executioner, then in life you stood for nothing, and were about nothing.”

In August 2014, I swore an oath to the Donetsk People's Republic [DNR]. I served in a reconnaissance and sabotage team, the “Kalmius” special detachment. [The Kalmius is a one of two rivers flowing through the Ukrainian city of Mariupol. This suggests that his team was part of the coordinated separatist effort to capture Mariupol.] Then I was stationed elsewhere. I was together with several other soldiers. They said they were from the GRU [Russian Military Intelligence]. The commander of my reconnaissance team said he was from there, too.

There was support from Russia, certainly. First, it was from volunteers and patriotic organizations. Later, of course, a fair amount supplies began to come in. At first, weapons had to be seized. Then, brand new ones began to arrive, even still coated in [protective] grease. In the DNR, there were very big problems in terms of organization and coordination. Many were killed due to stupidity and incompetence.

On August 24, 2014, there was an attack on a small town called Yelenovka. For two days, we were on full alert. Then they told us we had to breakthrough to the south. Eighty percent of our guys had never been under fire—they had no experience. Only our group and two others were equipped with automatic weapons and adequate supplies. The rest of the men were left with carbines [short-barrelled rifles] practically from the second world war. There were even people in tracksuits.