Dmitry Demushkin, a far-right Russian nationalist, has revealed details of how he was invited by the then Russian Deputy Prime Minister, Dmitry Rogozin, to gather nationalists to fight in Ukraine. Demushkin says he was initially approached by Rogozin in February 2014 and promised that he personally would be made ‘mayor’ of one of the cities in Donbas. There is no independent proof that such negotiations took place, however the machinations he describes fit very closely with those exposed by the ‘Glazyev Tapes’. These were intercepted calls between Russian President Vladimir Putin’s senior advisor Sergei Glazyev and various pro-Russian individuals in Crimea and other parts of Ukraine from Feb. 27 to March 3, 2014. There is also evidence that other neo-Nazi and/or far-right activists were sent to Donbas. Neo-Nazi sadist Alexei Milchakov, for example, made it quite clear in a 2015 skype interview, that he, neo-Nazi comrade Yan Petrovsky and other fighters had all received money for their services. Journalist Denis Kazansky first reported (and re-broadcast) Demushkin’s incriminating allegations made during an interview given to opposition politician and blogger Lyubov Sobol on Aug. 24. This was not, in fact, the first time that Demushkin had spoken of the role played by Rogozin and the Russian enforcement bodies in 2014. In a May interview for Anton Krasovsky’s program ‘Antonyms’, he also linked his prosecution and imprisonment shortly afterwards with his refusal to cooperate over Donbas. The following summarizes his account in both interviews.
