For him and thousands of other unrecognized, so-called veterans of the Kremlin-fomented conflict in eastern Ukraine, there is little, if any, glory beyond the battlefields of a war that grinds into a fourth year, with no end in sight.

No Official Recognition

These Russian vets didn’t return to a hero’s welcome. Most bear permanent scars, both physically and mentally, and with no veterans benefits and few jobs available they struggle to make ends meet. Moreover, infighting among different groups of them over ideology, strategy, and legacy, has kept them from uniting as a more influential voice.

They include the Union of Volunteers of Donbas, a group headed by Aleksandr Borodai, the former leader of the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic.” The group is closely tied to the Kremlin through Vladislav Surkov, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s point man on the conflict, and seen by some volunteers as being elitist. I spoke with some members of the group in a village outside Kaluga, where they were participating in war games on July 30.

Another is the Public Movement of Novorossia, an organization headed by Igor “Strelkov” Girkin, a Russian who commanded separatist forces in the first months of the war but is viewed by many volunteers as a traitor for retreating and relinquishing territory in Ukraine to Kiev. Girkin, who was eventually recalled to Moscow by the Kremlin, didn’t respond to a request for an interview.

Kamayev does what he can to help by running Veterans of Novorossia, a St. Petersburg-based NGO whose name (“New Russia”) draws on an imperial-era term denoting large parts of today’s southern and eastern Ukraine. His deputy, 41-year-old Denis Shchinkorenko, fought in arguably the bloodiest action of the Ukrainian war—the battle for Ilovaysk.

They assist Russian volunteers who fight or fought in eastern Ukraine, many of whom are frustrated and disappointed with the uncertainty of their future, Kamayev says. My interviews with more than a dozen other fighters in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kaluga, supported that assessment, and illustrated how the thousands of Russians who fought in Ukraine find it difficult to readjust to daily life and now exist on the fringes of society.

They get no official state support of any kind. Kamayev lives on a measly state pension that he gets not for military service, but “for being an invalid—like if I had been hit by a passing trolleybus.” It’s a sick irony, he suggested, that those who make it back from Ukraine in one piece have to struggle to get by.

The volunteers feel left out, perhaps because they were never really recognized in the first place. While Putin has not dismissed the possibility that some Russians might volunteer to fight in Ukraine, he has denied supplying them with arms and the Kremlin has officially refused to acknowledge their role.