Notorious former football hooligan Denis Nikitin runs a controversial unit actively engaged alongside Ukraine forces
enis Nikitin arrived for an interview at a Kyiv restaurant with a pistol strapped to his side and flanked by two armed bodyguards. It would not have been a surprising sight in wartimeBefore Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine last year, Nikitin was known as a notorious Russian nationalist, who built links between far-right groups across“If we had met 10 years ago on the outskirts of Luton we might have had a fight.
But RDK are complicated allies for Ukraine. Many of its members have far-right views. Nikitin, who grew up in Russia and Germany, has been banned from the Schengen zone since 2019 and has a reputation as one of Europe’s most notorious neo-Nazis. He goes by the name White Rex, also the name of a brand of clothing he set up that uses far-right imagery.in Marseille in 2016.
The restaurant where Nikitin set the meeting seemed an incongruous venue for such a discussion, as young Kyivites ordered Korean lunch sets. As he discoursed about the Third Reich over the periodic growl of a smoothie-making machine, two Scandinavian diplomats sat at the next table, discussing strengthening democratic institutions and minority rights in Ukraine. Neither table appeared to notice the discussions going on close by.
Nikitin said RDK “can rely on Ukrainian intelligence, on the Ukrainian military infrastructure” while the fighters are inside Ukraine, but once they cross into Russia, they are on their own. There is a danger that by backing RDK, Kyiv feeds persistent Russian propaganda tropes about Ukraine being a haven for Nazis, even if RDK make up a minuscule fraction of Ukraine’s fighting forces, and even though there are more far-right people fighting on Russia’s side in the war. Some of them are Nikitin’s former friends from the football hooligan scene. “Now they write me death threats. They call me traitor, I call them traitors. They say I betrayed our homeland.
Nikitin said there were many applications from people inside Russia who want to join RDK but have not yet been able to travel. Anastasia Sergeeva of Civic Council, a Warsaw-based organisation working to help bring Russian fighters into Ukraine, said there were “several hundred” outstanding applications from Russians keen to fight on the side of Ukraine.
A Ukrainian official source said there were at least two men claiming to want to fight for Ukraine who were identified as “known Russian operatives” after arriving in Ukraine and are now in jail in the country. Conscience described himself as having traditional views. He said he had never attended protests in Russia but had long been disgusted with Putin’s system. He was horrified by the war in Ukraine.“A lot of people in Russia are against this war, but they tend to say: ‘Yeah I don’t like it, but what can I do?’ And I thought: ‘Fuck this, I’m going to go there and start killing those bastards,’” he said.
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