According to Ukrainian military expert Oleg Zhdanov, the legion has above all political significance: “It’s good for Ukraine if it can show that Russians also support democracy and freedom and are fighting on the right side,” he says. However, the Russian fighters “due to their small numbers do not have much influence” on the course of the war.
The legionnaires have different motivations for fighting Russia. For Tichiy (pictured below), a worker from the Russian industrial city of Togliatti, 800 kilometers southeast of Moscow, they are more personal than political: his wife – whom he met in Russia – is Ukrainian. “She wouldn’t have understood if we had stayed in Russia,” says the 40-year-old father of two, who was visiting Kyiv with his family at the time of the invasion.