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full screen Captain Vladislav Ammosov, 45. Photo: Private
Russian military Vladislav Ammosov does not hesitate.
The 45-year-old commander leads Russian volunteers in Ukraine in cross-border attacks.
– My goal is for Russia to fall apart, he says.
In recent days, fighting has been going on in Russia’s Belgorod and Kursk regions, which border Ukraine. Both defenders and attackers are Russians.
On Thursday, there were reports of continued fighting. Among other things, one person died and six were injured in a drone attack in the Russian city of Belgorod, which has 380,000 inhabitants, according to the exiled Russian newspaper Meduza.
Three units of Russian volunteer soldiers, fighting on the side of Ukraine, are fighting the Russian army in the area: the Russian Volunteer Corps with Nazi soldiers, the Russian Freedom Legion whose leader has a far-right background, and the Siberian Battalion, made up of soldiers from Russian minority peoples.
The commander of the Siberian battalion, Vladislav Ammosov, is himself a Yakutian from the Siberian National Republic of Yakutia. His goal is a free Yakutia:
– The sooner we start fighting for independence, the faster we will achieve it. That is why I am fighting on the side of Ukraine. My goal is for Russia to fall apart, he says to the exiled Russian newspaper Cholod.
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fullscreen January 1996. Vladislav Ammosov swears the military oath in Russia. Photo: Private
Not ready to die for Russia
After 15 years of employment in the Russian army, service during the second Chechen war and a job in the Russian military intelligence service GRU, he had enough. As a young man, he fully trusted the skills of the Russian army, but gradually he saw more and more of the reality:
– Commanders drank and shot their own soldiers when they were drunk. We had to disarm them.
One day when he was working in Moscow and his wife was about to give birth in Saint Petersburg, he had enough:
– When the paramedics arrived, they saw her face and decided that she was not Russian. Even though she had a Russian passport and status as an officer’s wife, they took her to a bad BB for migrants, not to the military medical academy hospital. Then I understood that Russia is not the country for which I am ready to die, says Ammosov to Cholod.
In 2015, he returned with his wife and three children to his home village of Mindagai in Siberian Yakutia, when he got a job as deputy administrative head of the municipality. He saw up close how the Russian state power sucked out the province, and the unemployment and decay that resulted.
In 2019, Ammosov started working in Poland instead, and was pleasantly surprised by life in the West:
– No soap, people didn’t stab each other, everyone was content with life, they weren’t filled with inner anger, he says.
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full screen On location in Ukrainian Kramatorsk in April 2023. Photo: Private
Leads the Russian Siberian Battalion
When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, he was soon there, receiving military training in the Ukrainian army and gathering soldiers from Russian minority peoples around him. In April 2023, he was sent to the front, and now he leads the Russian Siberian battalion.
His unit fights alongside soldiers from the Russian Freedom Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps, but is independent:
– Even the Russians who travel to Ukraine to fight as volunteers live in the “Russian world”: they are disrespectful to other people and subservient to the commanders. Together with like-minded people, we minority people decided to form the Siberian Battalion. I am convinced that we can overturn Russia completely, says Vladislav Ammosov.
His dream is that Yakutians from all over the world – USA, France, Germany – will move back to Yakutia when it becomes an independent country.