Rusich, the Russian group that boasts of putting Azov to flight

Rusich, the Russian unit that flaunts its war record

With the battle for Bakhmut as a backdrop, one name is once again circulating insistently in Russian military propaganda circles: Rusich, the reconnaissance and sabotage detachment founded in 2014 that, by its own account, presents itself as the nightmare of the Azov Regiment. The piece that has revived the conversation reviews its record with militant enthusiasm: from Donetsk airport to Palmyra, from Libya to Congo. And it does so by mixing data, videos and a generous dose of epic that should be separated from the spin. Because the issue is not whether they exist—they do—but what exactly is being celebrated when they are put on a pedestal.

The thesis is simple: a decade of combat, modern equipment and an extraordinary tolerance for risk. The counterpoint arrives just as quickly. A unit being effective does not make it admirable, and much of the exchange stops right there, on the border between military performance and savagery.

What Rusich is and when it was created

The unit appeared in 2014, in the first phase of the conflict in eastern Ukraine. Its composition was heterogeneous from the outset: Russian pan-Slavist far-right volunteers, alongside members from Norway, Poland, Italy and Bulgaria. At the time they were, by their own account, “inexperienced kids.” Today they present themselves as a professionalized force, with a presence on several fronts and a structure that, according to the account, has been expanding inside Russia: training centers in St Petersburg, affiliated gyms, its own clothing line and links to ultra fan groups.

One of its best-known faces is Alexei Milchakov. He is described as a pan-Slavist and pro-Slavic leader, far from the neo-Bolshevik profile used to label other Russian fighters. He is not, it is stressed, someone to whom that label can be applied—the label that, it is claimed, is usually used to designate his Russian enemies.

From Donetsk to Palmyra: the record they display

The period 2014-2016 saw the fiercest fighting, including at Donetsk airport. The most widely circulated action is an ambush of an enemy column that was captured on video and is credited with some 80 casualties from Aidar and Azov. It is the material the unit uses as its calling card and which its detractors regard, above all, as an audiovisual product.

Then comes the lull on the Ukrainian front and the leap abroad: Libya, Congo and Syria. There they are placed in the campaign against the self-proclaimed Sarracinic State and in the liberation of Palmyra. As a detail of military folklore, it is recalled that one of its fighters survived a 7.62 bullet lodged in his throat.

The uncomfortable record: cruelty, past and bans

Milchakov carries a past he himself says he regrets: as a teenager he ate a dog in Siberia, an episode he has recounted in interviews with remorse. More serious is what is attributed to him on the front: cruel practices with prisoners, described in lavish detail in his own side’s propaganda and which are not appropriate to reproduce here. On that basis it is maintained that he avoids leaving fighters from volunteer battalions alive, unlike the treatment he gives regular or mobilized soldiers. The accusation circulates without independent verification and no conviction for those acts is on record.

A Norwegian member of the unit was prosecuted in 2017 and banned from entering the Schengen area. Much of the group is today on sanctions lists.

Why they are credited with effectiveness

The technical argument is that they operate without heavy logistics: small groups able to remain motionless in position for days until the target appears, and to reach where conventional units cannot. Their equipment and experience are compared, without embarrassment, with those of some Western special operations forces, and it is repeated that none surrender: a Rusich always keeps a grenade. The contrast held up is the surrender of the Azov Regiment in Mariupol.

Useful psychopaths or a burden to their own side

Here the consensus breaks. One current holds that anyone who enjoys killing is, by definition, a problem: psychopaths should not be soldiers, some write, with nostalgia for a time when “there was honor in arms.” Another goes further and denies them even military utility: terror tactics that at first cause routs end up producing last-ditch defenses when the enemy understands that surrender does not save lives. The Syrian experience is cited as a counterexample. The result, it is argued, is more pavor and also more of their own casualties.

And a third group points to the obvious political contradiction: a campaign sold as denazification and backed by units formed on the far right. Russia tolerating that, they say, makes it equal in barbarism to what it claims to fight.

Fleeing Rusich or well-framed propaganda?

The claim that Azov avoids contact rests on videos and on the unit’s own account. Skeptics respond that many of those images are staged and that elite units usually show up after the shooting is over. The response is blunt: in the recorded ambush there is no one there, just a camera, and the convoy passes.

The deadlock is there and it is not moving. From the outside there is no way to measure how much of the Rusich legend is operational capability and how much is well-framed photography, or to separate a real combat record from the machinery that sells it.