World
As Russians fight for Ukraine, Kyiv is faced with a new dilemma
![As Russians fight for Ukraine, Kyiv is faced with a new dilemma As Russians fight for Ukraine, Kyiv is faced with a new dilemma](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Many-RVC-fighters-hide-their-identities-because-they-fear-for-the-families-and-friends-they-left-behind-in-Russia-1686824339.jpg?resize=1920,1080)
Kyiv, Ukraine – Standing next to the coffin with the body of Daniil Maznik, many of his camouflage-clad, battle-tested brothers-in-arms wept.
“He was a brave warrior, a pious Christian, a trustworthy comrade,” Denis Kapustin, Maznik’s commanding officer, said through tears during a farewell ceremony last weekend at the historic Baikove cemetery in Kyiv.
Maznik, a bearded and burly 29-year-old, was killed during one of the most audacious and brazen military operations of the continuing Russia-Ukraine war.
On June 1, he was part of four small military units that crossed into the western Russian region of Belgorod to attack Shebekino, a city of 40,000, and seize the village of Novaya Tavolzhanka.
They clashed with border guards and servicemen and were backed by Ukrainian drone attacks and heavy, indiscriminate artillery fire that included banned cluster munitions, Russian officials claimed.
As they moved forward, tens of thousands of civilians fled Belgorod in panic, and Novaya Tavolzhanka briefly became Russia’s first and only area Moscow did not control.
Maznik led the takeover of a border checkpoint, hijacked an armoured vehicle and captured a serviceman before being mowed down by gunfire on June 3, Kapustin said.
The farewell ceremony held inside a cavernous funeral parlour would have resembled thousands of similar rituals held throughout Ukraine in the past 16 months.
But some things made it look ominously different.
Some of the stern, gloomy men in uniforms wore carefully adjusted masks, hats and sunglasses to avoid being recognised.
None agreed to be interviewed by Al Jazeera, saying they had been “instructed” not to talk to the media.
And not a single Ukrainian official showed up to deliver a eulogy or put flowers on the coffin.
Because Maznik, whose nickname was Shaiba (Puck), was a Russian national and part of the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC), a small military unit founded by fugitive ultranationalists.
They said they were backed by The Freedom of Russia Legion made up of Russian prisoners of war who switched sides, and groups of volunteers from neighbouring Poland and Belarus.
In February 2022, the Kremlin planned a triumphant blitzkrieg to topple Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government.
In the words of the Kremlin, the purpose of Russia’s “special military operation” was to “liberate” Ukraine from Zelenskyy’s “neo-Nazi junta”.
Back then, the very idea that the RVC and its allies would bring the war home to Russia during three raids – in March, late May and early June – would have seemed improbable.
By that measure, Kyiv could have used the raids to trumpet how faltering and feeble Moscow’s war effort is, and how Russian officials failed to protect border regions despite hefty defence budgets.
But it did not.
Instead, Kyiv considers the RVC an independent political force the Kremlin should negotiate with directly.
“We’re observing the course of hostilities and once again urge the Moscow regime to cease fire in the Belgorod region, immediately start talks with the RVC and stop meaningless bloodshed,” Zelenskyy’s aide Mykhailo Podolyak tweeted on June 5.
“This is a fight of the Russian Goliath against the Russian David,” he wrote, concluding that “Ukraine doesn’t take part in the conflict.”
Analysts say that Ukraine prefers to keep its backing of the RVC with intelligence information, artillery fire and drone attacks a secret – albeit an open one.
“Kyiv is distancing itself from the RVC’s raids into Russia because officially, Ukraine doesn’t wage any military offensive on Russian territory,” David Gendelman, an independent military analyst told Al Jazeera.
“Although everyone understands that no one would let them conduct such operations on their territory during a war, and in reality they are coordinated with Ukrainian intelligence,” he said.
To him, the controversial past of the RVC’s founders is not the reason why Ukraine is so reluctant to admit its backing of the unit.
“Kyiv would equally distance itself from them even if their past was not ultra-right but anything else – red, white or striped,” he said.
One of the reasons is Ukraine’s heavy reliance on Western aid; Western nations have repeatedly warned that the advanced weaponry they provide can only be used on Ukrainian territory.
But the RVC had at least four tactical vehicles that can withstand explosives and were supplied by the United States and Poland, as well as rifles made in Belgium and the Czech Republic, the Washington Post reported on June 3.
Two days later, Belgium said it objects to their use on Russian territory.
“There are extremely strict rules regarding Belgian and other European weapons,” Prime Minister Alexander De Croo told the Le Soir newspaper. “We asked the Ukrainians to explain the situation.”
Far-right ideologies
Killed RVC fighter Maznik spent years in the Russian military – and used his experience to “transform a small band of desperate Russian guys into a full-fledged military unit,” Kapustin said in his eulogy.
“Shaiba gave six years of his life to the Russian army, knew all the injustices and rot of this machine from inside and passionately fought against it next to us,” Kapustin said.
Russian media claimed that Maznik had been convicted of fraud in Moscow and fled to Ukraine, abandoning his wife and child.
His commander Kapustin, a 39-year-old with bulging muscles and several tattoos who prefers to be called White Rex, is far more outspoken.
Kapustin was born in Russia but spent his formative years in Germany, where he said he was a “street boy, a skinhead, smashed faces.”
He took part in and organised bare-knuckle boxing fights, and German police characterised him as “one of the most influential” far-right activists in Europe.
He moved back to Russia and then fled to Ukraine in 2017. Germany reportedly cancelled his residency permit.
In Kyiv, he opened The White Rex clothing store that sells attire with “Slavic solar symbols” that resemble swastikas and other insignia used in Nazi Germany.
These days, Kapustin is wanted in Russia for allegedly organising a failed assassination attempt on pro-Kremlin tycoon Konstantin Malofeev, whose Tsargrad television channel is one of the loudest pro-war media outlets.
Russian authorities also blacklisted the RVC as a “terrorist organisation” and arrested several men who tried to join it.
Earlier this month, Moscow police conducted three dozen searches of RVC’s alleged supporters, the SOTA news website reported.
Kapustin fanned the flames by saying the RVC wants to topple Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government.
“Russia’s collapse will allow us to return home,” he told a news conference in October. “We will facilitate the complete and absolute breakdown of Russia’s political order.”
His words and actions could become perfect fodder for Russia’s vocal supporters.
“I think it would be a sin [in Russia] not to use fully the far-right, radical background of the RVC’s creators,” Vyacheslav Likhachev, a Kyiv-based expert on far-right and ultranationalist groups, told Al Jazeera.
However, pro-war Russian commentators opted not to play this card – because the success of the RVC and its allies only underpins how unprepared Moscow’s armed forces and regional authorities are in dealing with their incursions.
“Most likely, it’s related to the unwillingness of Russian propagandists to attract attention to the fact that groups of Russian nationals don’t just wage a war against [the Kremlin] as part of Ukrainian armed forces, but are very successful in conducting independent operations on Russian territory,” Likhachev said.
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World
Asif Kapadia on Taking Aim at the Rich and Powerful in Dystopian Docudrama ‘2073’: ‘If I Don’t Work Again, at Least I Made This Movie’
![Asif Kapadia on Taking Aim at the Rich and Powerful in Dystopian Docudrama ‘2073’: ‘If I Don’t Work Again, at Least I Made This Movie’ Asif Kapadia on Taking Aim at the Rich and Powerful in Dystopian Docudrama ‘2073’: ‘If I Don’t Work Again, at Least I Made This Movie’](https://variety.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/2073_Reel_01_V_009741_STATIC_WIDE_GOLDEN_GATE_BRIDGE_WILDFIRES_RED_SK_4828.jpg?w=1000&h=563&crop=1)
Asif Kapadia sees a future vision of the world where “chairwoman” Ivanka Trump is celebrating her 30th year as leader of a nightmarish fascist police state that was once America, a land mostly reduced to rubble following an unknown “catastrophe” that occurred in 2036.
“It’s kind of a joke, but it’s also not a joke,” says the British filmmaker of mentioning Donald Trump’s daughter in “2073,” his chilling docudrama about the dystopia humanity is potentially hurtling towards and the very real and very contemporary factors concerning politics, the environment, corruption, race and technology that he says are propelling us in that direction.
“Because if you look at American politics, you have certain families that just keep being in power — the number of people that have come from a tiny gene pool is insane,” he says.
While the inclusion of Ivanka may be a little splash of humor, the rest of “2073” — which comes backed by Neon, Double Agent and Film4 and is world premiering in Venice on Tuesday — offers little else to be tickled by. The film is what Kapadia says is his response to the world — and the entertainment industry — having got to a “place where people cannot say anything” that criticizes the status quo or those in power without risking losing their jobs or worse.
And so “2073” says a lot, a whole lot. The film essentially lays the blame for the impending disaster — be it nuclear war, climate change or whatever it might be — at the foot of leaders, demagogues, tech billionaires and the 1% and what they’re doing to the planet and society. Alongside the Trumps, there’s the Murdochs, Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Xi Jinping, Mohammed Bin Salman, Narendra Modi, the Koch brothers, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel and many more, spliced alongside news clips and amateur footage from the last couple of decades showing examples of police brutality, rising fascism, the refugee crisis, mass detentions, bombings and wild fires.
Originally the project — which came about during lockdown (Kapadia put out a tweet asking for help and soon gathered a team of researchers from around the world) — was to be a “doc set in the future where everything from the future will be factual and created out of bits of the present.” But he soon decided to use his drama background to mix the two, creating a version of life in 2073 in which Samantha Morton plays a mute survivor besieged by nightmare visions of the past and living underground as surveillance drones patrol the surface.
This past is pieced together using “footage from around 60 different countries, which I made to look like one place,” says Kapadia. Some of footage is extremely recent. In the opening scenes revealing this earth-shattering catastrophe, we see clips of recent devastation in Gaza.
“Having been doing this for a while, if you feel like you’re onto something in a horrible way, the world comes into synch with the film,” he says. The war in Gaza, plus the rise of AI and the growing feeling that the next presidential election could be “the end of democracy in the U.S.” all began after he started making the film. “And then a few weeks ago in England we had all these riots.”
“2073” may seem like an unexpected feature from the Oscar-winning documentarian best-known for “Amy,” “Senna” and “Diego Maradona,” but he claims this trilogy of profiles all came about “by accident,” and were each infused with his previous experience in drama and fiction and were each made that way. “’Senna’ is an action movie, ‘Amy’ is a musical, a Bollywood film, and ‘Diego Maradona’ is a gangster film set in Naples,” he says.
But “2073” — an experimental dystopian thriller — still feels like a major key change for the director, a highly provocative and uncomfortable to watch feature with global themes that he hopes will make people realize that “what’s happening over there will get closer and closer and eventually come to you.”
As he notes: “And if you don’t think that’s a problem, then it’s just a movie. But if it is a problem, then you, me, us … we’ve got to do something.”
Kapadia is already among the most outspoken filmmakers on social media when it comes to discussing politics and especially in condemning Israel for the bloodshed in Gaza. While this hasn’t appeared to have hindered his career in the way it has others, he says “2073” — given the topics and the very powerful, very wealthy people it discusses — might.
“I’ve been lucky enough to have made films and in what I do I’ve been successful,” he explains. “So honestly, I went into this going, ‘I’m going to chuck it all in, I’m not going to be afraid to say what I see and if I don’t work again, fine, at least I made this movie.’ ”
World
Two U.S. soldiers ambushed, assaulted by mob of Turkish nationalists: 'Yankee, go home!'
![Two U.S. soldiers ambushed, assaulted by mob of Turkish nationalists: 'Yankee, go home!' Two U.S. soldiers ambushed, assaulted by mob of Turkish nationalists: 'Yankee, go home!'](https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2024/09/Copy-of-Right-inset-22.png)
A mob of Turkish nationalists attacked U.S. soldiers in western Turkey on Monday, resulting in the arrests of 15 people.
The incident took place in Izmir, which is located on Turkey’s Aegean coast. In a statement, the Izmir governor’s office said the assailants belonged to the Youth Union of Turkey, which is connected to the nationalist Vatan Party.
The governor said that the victims, who were assigned to the USS Wasp, were “physically attacked.” Video posted to social media showed soldiers in civilian clothing yelling for help as they were restrained by a group of anti-American men.
The footage also shows an attacker throwing a plastic bag onto the soldier’s head as the crowd chanted, “Yankee Go Home!”
ISRAEL SHARES DOSSIER SPELLING OUT ALLEGATIONS AGAINST 12 UN EMPLOYEES ALLEGEDLY INVOLVED IN HAMAS ATTACK
Soldiers assigned to the USS Wasp were attacked by Turkish nationalists, according to officials. (Getty Images/iStock)
Five U.S. soldiers intervened during the incident, and authorities eventually arrested all 15 of the men who attacked the soldiers.
The U.S. Embassy in Turkey confirmed the incident in a statement published to social media on Monday, and said that the soldiers are safe.
“We can confirm reports that U.S. service members embarked aboard the USS Wasp were the victims of an assault in İzmir today, and are now safe,” the embassy said.
UN, HUMAN RIGHTS, MEDIA GROUPS RELY ON HAMAS DEATH TOLL IN ‘SYSTEMATIC DECEPTION’: EXPERT
![USS Wasp](https://a57.foxnews.com/static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2024/09/1200/675/GettyImages-2165869998.jpg?ve=1&tl=1)
Crew members stand aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Wasp (LHD-1) docked at Limassol Port, amid rising tensions in the Middle East, in Limassol, Cyprus, Sunday, August 11, 2024. (Danil Shamkin/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
“We thank Turkish authorities for their rapid response and ongoing investigation.”
In a statement obtained by Reuters, the Youth Union of Turkey said the attack was “deserved” and criticized U.S. support of Israel.
![Turkish protesters](https://a57.foxnews.com/static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2024/09/1200/675/GettyImages-1236122537.jpg?ve=1&tl=1)
Members of the Youth Union of Turkey (TGB) gather outside the U.S. Embassy to protest envoys of 10 countries over remarks on the Osman Kavala case in Ankara, Turkey on October 25, 2021. (Evrim Aydin/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
“U.S. soldiers who carry the blood of our soldiers and thousands of Palestinians on their hands cannot dirty our country,” the nationalists said. “Every time you step foot in these lands, we will meet you the way you deserve.”
Reuters contributed to this report.
World
Hamas says Gaza captives will return ‘in coffins’ if Israel continues raids
![Hamas says Gaza captives will return ‘in coffins’ if Israel continues raids Hamas says Gaza captives will return ‘in coffins’ if Israel continues raids](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/2024-09-02T102148Z_19022666_RC2AS9AEIBAY_RTRMADP_3_ISRAEL-PALESTINIANS-HOSTAGES-PROTEST-1725272723.jpg?resize=1920%2C1440)
Group’s armed wing Qassam Brigades issues statement, two days after bodies of six captives are recovered from a Gaza tunnel by Israeli forces.
The armed wing of the Palestinian group Hamas says captives held in Gaza would return to Israel “in coffins” if Israeli military pressure continues, warning that “new instructions” had been given to its fighters guarding the captives in case Israeli troops approach.
“[Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s insistence on freeing the captives through military pressure instead of reaching a deal means they will go back to their families in coffins. Their families have to choose between receiving them dead or alive,” Abu Obeida, spokesman for the Qassam Brigades, said in a statement on Monday, two days after the bodies of six captives were recovered by Israel.
“Netanyahu and the army are fully responsible for the death of the captives after they intentionally hindered any prisoners’ exchange deal,” it said.
The statement from the Qassam Brigades came shortly after Netanyahu said the six captives whose bodies were recovered from a tunnel in southern Gaza’s Rafah area had been “executed” by Hamas.
“I ask for your forgiveness for not bringing them back alive,” Netanyahu said during a televised news conference earlier on Monday as protests over the deaths continued for a second day in Israel.
“We were close, but we didn’t succeed. Hamas will pay a very heavy price for this,” he added.
Senior Hamas official Izzat al-Risheq said the six captives were killed in Israeli air strikes.
Meanwhile, protests in Israel over the deaths of the captives continued with angry demonstrators saying they could have been returned alive if Netanyahu’s government had signed a ceasefire with Hamas.
However, political analyst Akiva Eldar told Al Jazeera that a nationwide strike in Israel on Monday and rising public anger will not make a real difference to end the war in Gaza and free the captives.
“It seems that for Netanyahu, the alternative – which is his personal, political and personal life – is more important than the lives of the Israeli captives,” Eldar said, adding that despite a large number of protesters, “the Israeli right and radical right” who support the government “have the upper hand”.
“The government and the prime minister are now on the defensive,” Ori Goldberg, an expert on Israeli politics, told Al Jazeera. “This is about momentum now.”
Meanwhile, US President Joe Biden also said Netanyahu was not doing enough to secure a deal for the release of the captives.
Speaking to reporters at the White House on Monday, Biden was asked whether he thought Netanyahu was doing enough to reach a deal. Biden said, “No.” He did not elaborate.
Months of stop-start negotiations mediated by the United States, Qatar and Egypt have so far failed to reach an accord on a Gaza ceasefire proposal laid out by Biden in May.
Hamas wants an agreement to end the war and get Israeli forces out of Gaza while Netanyahu says the war can only end once Hamas is defeated.
Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli ambassador and government adviser, told Al Jazeera that it is Netanyahu who “absolutely has no interest in a hostage deal or ceasefire”.
“Those who are shocked and devastated and angered about what happened should not be surprised because this is exactly what the [Israeli] defence minister [Yoav Gallant] and all of us were warning would happen,” Pinkas said.
“His [Netanyahu’s] and only his reluctance to engage in a deal is what made all this happen.”
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