On January 9, the Russian Volunteer Corps, a unit fighting on Ukraine’s side, sent what amounted to an ultimatum to the Anti-Corruption Foundation. In a letter addressed, among others, to Yulia Navalnaya and Maria Pevchikh, RDK representatives proposed a meeting to launch what they called a full dialogue with the forces they consider genuinely anti-war. That same evening, Pevchikh rejected what she described as “unity for the sake of unity.”
The trigger was the scandal around the staged death of RDK commander Denis Kapustin. He was declared dead on December 27, then reappeared alive on January 1 and told HUR chief Kyrylo Budanov that the “death” had been part of a special operation that allegedly secured half a million dollars supposedly allocated by Russian security services for his assassination. After that, former Navalny штаб chief Leonid Volkov sharply criticized Kapustin and the Ukrainian leadership in private messages.
“And yes, I have a poor view of neo-Nazis. Even a tactical alliance with them seems to me a major mistake,” Volkov later wrote publicly.
The RDK accused Volkov of working for the Kremlin and said it had informed opposition figures as well as Ukrainian and European politicians. In Lithuania, where Volkov lives, migration authorities contacted state security bodies: his residence permit could be reviewed if the messages are deemed a threat to national security.
According to sociologist Nikolai Mitrokhin, the RDK emerged in 2022 within the HUR system as a structure for Russian far-right volunteers willing to fight for Ukraine. In his view, it became the most visible of these formations, but it was also deployed to the most dangerous sections of the front and suffered heavy losses.
Sources interviewed by the publication say the RDK’s political ambitions are tied above all to an effort to gain legitimacy among Russian political exiles and in Europe. At the same time, the unit’s right-conservative and far-right symbolism, along with earlier scandals involving its fighters, sharply limits its chances of broad acceptance. Mitrokhin believes the RDK is unlikely to be preserved in its current form in peacetime.