In a suburban park in St. Petersburg on a sunny late-spring day, singers in traditional Russian costume perform for families as pop music blares in the background. Men in black are patrolling the scene, watching from the edges. Some are armed with pistols. Others wear bulletproof vests and patches bearing the Russian imperial flag or Orthodox icons.
Most sport logos on their caps and T-shirts of the medieval Prince Alexander Nevsky. The logo is a black silhouette on a white background — a symbol of patriotism and Orthodox faith, and the official emblem of Russia’s largest far-right movement, called Russkaya Obshchina (RO), meaning “Russian community.”
“I want law and order in our country,” says one of the men in his 30s, disguised by dark sunglasses and a black cap, who asks to remain anonymous. “A lot of men went to war, so Russkaya Obshchina was created to maintain order here. We are helping the police,” he tells New Lines. Coordinating the group is Sergey Ognerubov, commander of the local district’s volunteer patrol — a civilian force which, under a 2014 law, allows regular citizens to assist the police in maintaining public order, although with limited authority.
Ognerubov’s first encounter with members of RO took place about a year ago, after elderly women in his area called him, concerned about the masked men patrolling their neighborhood.
He went to investigate.
“They were good guys from different professions,” he recalls. “But they’re not lawyers. … I told them, we live in a rule-of-law state. If you want to do this, you need to respect the law.”
Since then, Ognerubov has started integrating RO members into the district volunteer patrol, asking them to submit official applications and complete a probationary period.
More than three years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the country’s far-right landscape is evolving, as the state increasingly seeks to co-opt and control such activism, with RO serving as a prime example of the strategy. The group promotes “traditional values,” supports the war and carries out law enforcement activities — sometimes alongside police, sometimes independently — effectively creating a parallel policing structure with unofficial state backing. Critics warn that empowering a far-right group in this role risks inflaming ethnic tensions in a multiethnic, multireligious country like Russia and could ultimately destabilize the very state RO purports to defend.
Founded in 2020 by anti-abortion activist Evgeny Chesnokov, former Omsk City Council Deputy Speaker Andrey Tkachuk and TV journalist Andrey Afanasyev, RO claims its goal is “uniting Russian people” (“yedinenie russkikh lyudey”) based on “the principle of mutual support.” Crucially, it uses the word “russky,” meaning ethnic Russians, as opposed to “rossiysky,” which refers to all citizens of Russia of any ethnicity and is the word used in the country’s full name, the Russian Federation.
They sport patches with Prince Nevsky because of his role in defending early Russian lands against foreign attacks, mostly Swedish and Teutonic invasions, in the 13th century.
The network has over 140 chapters in cities across Russia and a large social media presence, with more than 1.2 million YouTube subscribers, over 650,000 Telegram followers and hundreds of thousands more on VKontakte, the Russian version of Facebook.
The group is closely aligned with the state’s promotion of Russian conventional beliefs, customs and culture, as well as Orthodox Christianity, while also disseminating anti-abortion and anti-migration propaganda.
Its channels regularly publish video reports of raids conducted together with police, aimed at uncovering illegal migrants across the country, especially from Central Asia, who make up a large part of Russia’s low-wage workforce.
The organization even operates an app for “mutual help,” allowing users to request assistance from nearby RO members in everyday situations.
In one video published on the group’s social media, a mother thanks RO for helping to find her teenage son who got lost. In another, they catch a man of Central Asian appearance who they say sexually harassed an underage girl and handed him over to the police.
According to the organization, it is mainly funded through volunteer donations and the sale of branded clothing.
RO entered the spotlight with the start of the war in Ukraine, when it became involved in supporting the Russian war effort. RO volunteers often do the state’s bidding, collect humanitarian aid and military supplies and provide assistance to veterans.
Many members view themselves as protecting Russia’s “domestic front” from internal threats, which they mainly identify in what they see as uncontrolled migration from predominantly Muslim Central Asian countries.
“People are afraid to go out — in shopping malls and in those neighborhoods with a high concentration of migrants,” says Andrey Tkachuk, RO’s co-founder, in a phone interview with New Lines. “The more of them there are, the higher the number of crimes on the streets,” he continued, without providing evidence for the claim.
Ksenya, a volunteer with RO who only gave her first name, disagrees with accusations that she belongs to a nationalist organization.
“We are for the friendship among peoples, for mutual respect,” says the woman, who volunteers at a military hospital as part of RO. Her brother is fighting at the front in Ukraine. “Not only should Russians respect other cultures, but other cultures should respect ours,” she adds.
The woman is attending a patriotic gathering of volunteer groups supporting the front line on Kronstadt Island, a historic naval base and fortress near St. Petersburg.
Children wearing RO T-shirts are running around amid handcrafted camouflage nets ready to be shipped to the front line.
According to Sergey Zudnev, a long-bearded, middle-aged RO member who curates the religious side of the organization, values — not ethnicity — are what matter in the organization.
“Whoever is Russian in the soul and wants to contribute is welcome to join,” he says.
His arm is bandaged from a recent brawl with a Central Asian taxi driver, which ended with both being detained by the police — an incident he now regrets.
Zudnev says he briefly left the group when an increasing number of RO members, mainly soldiers coming back from the front lines, began embracing paganism, valuing it for its celebration of the natural world and warrior ethos. He believes Orthodox Christianity is what prevents RO from “turning fascist.” Every Sunday, he leads RO members to church for religious services.
Other members hold a more exclusive view of the RO.
“Russia has always been a multinational country, but we have our own community and we defend it. It’s called Russkaya Obshchina. Only Russians are members. No one else, only ours,” says Artur, 36, a bulky RO member and soccer hooligan with prior convictions for robbery and extortion.
Now, he participates in police raids against migrants as part of what he calls “RO special forces.”
“They are too many,” he says about migrants. “If they behaved nicely, there would be no problems. But they rape our girls, our kids. That’s why we are pounding them here.”
In post-Soviet Russia, the relationship between far-right and neo-Nazi movements and the government has long been complex.
In the early 2010s, such groups often took part in opposition politics and nationalist rallies.
That dynamic changed dramatically after the 2014 Maidan Revolution in Ukraine, when Ukrainian nationalist groups played a key role in toppling the pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych. In response, the Kremlin relied on Russian far-right movements as proxies to fuel the armed uprising in eastern Ukraine, while simultaneously cracking down on them at home — effectively pushing them out of formal politics.
After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the relationship shifted again.
With the Kremlin seeking ideological support from the general population, RO became instrumental in channeling grassroots nationalism in support of traditional values, patriotism and opposition to the West.
“Given the difficult political domestic situation, authorities need a movement from below to show, ‘Look, they support us, our ideas are spreading,’” says Vera Alperovich, a researcher at Sova Center, a Russian nongovernmental organization that monitors nationalism and xenophobia.
According to the opposition media outlet Meduza, RO is curated directly by Russia’s domestic security service, the FSB.
As Alperovich notes, RO’s positions are largely aligned with the government, though in a more radical form. Investigative Committee head Alexander Bastrykin, known for his hard-line views on migration, is informally regarded as a patron of the group, though neither he nor the Kremlin have publicly commented on its activities.
“If the government says we need to increase birth rates and remove abortions from free health care, RO fights for a total ban on abortions. If the government says migrant children must pass Russian language exams, RO argues those who fail should be denied education and better deported.”
Following the March 2024 Crocus City Hall attack in Moscow — carried out by Tajik citizens affiliated with the Islamic State group — anti-migrant sentiment in Russia surged, both among the public and in official rhetoric.
Since then, stricter migration laws were introduced, including QR code requirements for people coming from countries with visa-free regimes with Russia (with the exception of Belarus), and a geolocation tracking system for migrants in Moscow.
Karimdzhon Yorov, a Tajik-born activist who provides legal assistance to Central Asian citizens in Russia, has noted a surge in both the frequency and toughness of police raids targeting migrants. He believes RO serves as a tool to redirect growing public tension amid the prolonged war in Ukraine. “A scapegoat had to be found,” he says. “The most convenient targets are migrants.”
For RO co-founder Tkachuk, even tougher measures against migrants are needed. “We have no control over the people who arrive. They can violate migration laws and no measures are taken against them until we take matters into our own hands — finding them and turning them over to law enforcement.”
He believes there is a Western-orchestrated plan to replace Russia’s native population with migrants, aided by internal “traitors” within the country’s elite.
“They are open agents of the West here in Russia. We all know them, we understand who, what and why it’s being done. It’s all obvious to us,” he says, echoing the core narrative of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which frames immigration as a deliberate plot to undermine national identity.
Still, Tkachuk insists the group’s activities remain “outside politics.”
“We exclude the possibility of going against the government. We will never go to the barricades, organize revolutions or protests. That is not our prerogative — that would go against God’s will.” Instead, he says RO focuses on “mutual help and mutual defense.”
According to Alperovich from the Sova Center, RO’s declared political neutrality is likely part of an informal understanding with the authorities.
“They are concerned the authorities could stop tolerating them or dissolve them entirely at any moment,” she says.
While RO claims to avoid politics, critics argue that it is infiltrating power by creating a parallel system of law enforcement. In a recent video published on Telegram, the RO co-founder Chesnokov commented on unrest related to immigration crackdowns in California, suggesting similar events could occur in Russia. In the video, he urged followers to buy firearms and join city patrols.
“We need to be ready, coordinate and train,” he said, warning against the threat posed by “hordes of people who don’t want to have anything in common with Russian culture.”
While RO has largely enjoyed support from law enforcement, who involve its members in operations and actively respond to their reports of alleged “public order” violations, the group has at times shown signs of slipping out of control.
In May, RO members were involved in a deadly incident just northeast of St. Petersburg, in the city of Vsevolozhsk, during one of their raids.
As reported by local media, the members broke into an apartment and used a stun gun to pepper spray the tenant. A fire broke out during the altercation, resulting in the tenant’s death and injuries to a woman who jumped from a window.
RO claimed the door was already broken and alleged on its Telegram account that the fire was started by the tenants, reportedly linked to drug use. Five RO members are currently listed as witnesses in an investigation into death by negligence. In another case, three RO members were arrested by police after kidnapping a man, beating him in a forest and threatening to rape him with a club.
RO later said the men involved were still undergoing a “probation period.”
The group’s actions have increasingly raised concerns, especially among officials in Russia’s ethnic republics, including the North Caucasus, which has a large Muslim population.
Last year, Chechnya’s ombudsman, Mansur Soltaev, called for an investigation into RO, accusing the group of “inciting ethnic hatred” after receiving complaints from people from the North Caucasus who were arbitrarily stopped and asked to show identification documents. Ahmed Dudaev, an aide to Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, condemned members of the RO who were involved in the alleged “detention of Chechen children” in Moscow, calling them “Nazis.”
Kadyrov, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, wields significant autonomy in Chechnya and plays a central role in maintaining order across the volatile North Caucasus. Public clashes between his camp and nationalist groups like RO underscore the delicate power balance the Kremlin must navigate within Russia’s multinational landscape.
According to Alperovich, RO’s growing role in law enforcement is troubling, as it brings the risks of vigilantism.
“When ideologically driven people receive an official mandate, law enforcement stops protecting the law and instead protects the worldview of a group of nationalists — their sense of good and evil, right and wrong, and their framing of every unclear situation through an ideological lens.”
Ognerubov, the people’s volunteer patrol commander, remains unconcerned.
“Nazism is banned in Russia. If they were Nazis, they would be banned immediately so they can’t be Nazi and can’t be fascist either,” he says. “If they like the Alexander Nevsky symbol, let them wear it.”
He views violations by RO as isolated incidents and says he personally vets RO members who wish to join the patrol, who now make up the majority of new applicants.
He also expects a wave of new recruits after the war in Ukraine ends, as veterans return home.
“People who return from war suffer from psychological trauma, which manifests as a need to seek justice,” the commander explains. “The patrols will give them that opportunity.”
In a video shared by Ognerubov with New Lines, patrol members stationed on the front line send greetings back to Russia.
“A big hello to all Russian people!” says a masked soldier with a Christ icon on his vest and an RO flag behind him.
“Brothers and sisters, once we finish fighting here, we’ll come back and continue restoring order in our native city, St. Petersburg. Glory to Russia!”
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