"We're still waiting for an adequate answer from our government." Mr Okkert allows a brief sneer to cross his face.
"We've been used like this for many centuries," he said.īut what does he expect from Mr Putin in return? He led Cossacks into Crimea and is convinced he will be asked to go into other parts of Ukraine too. He is a combat veteran of Russian conflicts in Georgia, Chechnya and Nagorno-Karabakh.Ĭlose to the Patriots' Sports Club where his Cossack disciples work out and learn martial arts, his offices house an impressive collection of swords and automatic weapons. In Rostov-on-Don, a city of one million people and home to a vast helicopter factory, the Cossack revival is being driven by Timor Okkert, the local ataman. "We are ready to go in whenever the time comes to protect our people," said Andrei Lovlenski, the ataman of the Taganrog Cossacks.
Such tenderness is in sharp contrast to what they have planned, the details of which they won't share, in the neighbouring Ukrainian region of Donetsk. They are gentle with their horses, ride with light hands and are freely affectionate towards their mounts - kissing and cuddling them like beloved children. When many sided with the White Russians against the Bolsheviks in the early part of the last century, though, they were crushed by the Soviet rulers who snuffed out any potential threats to the Party's hegemony. The Don Cossacks ruled a vast Host on both sides of the River Don for centuries and were given a degree of autonomy from central government. Their warlike tendencies and citizen cavalry meant their regiments became a celebrated part of Tsarist imperial life. On the outskirts of Taganrog, a few miles from the border with Ukraine, Cossacks demonstrated how they were reviving the tradition of horsemanship which was central to the Cossacks' culture. He spoke with passion about how he wished he had been able to help the Serbs fight in the former Yugoslavia and of how they were bilked of the province of Kosovo, which won its independence after a civil war with Serbia and Nato bombardment of Serb forces. They also turned up with an armoured personnel carrier - or a "mini-tank", as they called it. He says that when the Cossacks invaded Crimea, they brought their own weapons or picked them up from local authorities when they arrived. Mr Sushkov is not so much a bear of a man as a man who looks like he ate a bear, and the meal was a little wanting. You need to be religious and of good character to be a Cossack," he confided. "You have to have great personal discipline. They serve under a death's head insignia and volunteered to help with Russia's invasion of Crimea. They also admit being close to other hard-line Slav nationalists, Serbs in particular.Įarlier this month, Alexei Sushkov was responsible for hosting a group of black-bearded Chetniks, Serb militia, in Sevastopol. COVID: More than 100 British tourists refused entry to Austria after coronavirus rules website mix-up