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General TikTok and his Neo-Nazi freak RFE/RL breaks down the story behind a bizarre video featuring Apti Alaudinov and Alexey Milchakov

Source: RFE/RL Kavkaz Realii

Earlier this week, the public face of Chechnya’s “Akhmat” special forces unit and one of Russia’s most notorious neo-Nazi leaders appeared together in a bizarre five-and-a-half-minute video shared online. Apti Alaudinov did most of the talking, speaking of common cause and mutual respect, while Alexey Milchakov remarked how no one was “intimidated by anyone else” into attending the meeting — an awkward interjection that has only encouraged the perception that he was pressured to attend. Alaudinov and Milchakov make for strange bedfellows, but observers argue that both sides had reasons to stage a joint publicity stunt. RFE/RL’s Semyon Reshetilov recently reported on the background of the meeting, and Meduza summarizes his findings below.

Though many foreign readers might assume that Moscow’s military intervention in eastern Ukraine in 2014 marks the triumph of Russian nationalism, the state authorities hurried to dismantle the grassroots nationalist movements of that era. New groups have since emerged, albeit under the Kremlin’s control. The movement’s agenda, meanwhile, has remained consistently pro-imperialist and anti-migrant. 

“The Kremlin is still searching for a somewhat coherent, unifying idea,” one analyst told RFE/RL, suggesting that “Alaudinov and his handlers” apparently thought it promising to demonstrate unity between Christians and Muslims (though Milchakov, who is a pagan, is hardly the ideal vessel for this message). 

Multiple sources told RFE/RL that Milchakov is widely considered an outcast even among Russian nationalists. “[His] defining trait is not that he is a Nazi, but that he is a maniac who publicly slaughtered puppies and claimed to get sexual gratification from murder,” said Sergey Zhavoronkov, a board member at the Liberal Mission Foundation. In late 2011, at the age of 20, Milchakov gained nationwide notoriety when he published footage showing him killing and then eating a puppy. Animal rights activists pressured state prosecutors to investigate the matter, but Milchakov was never held responsible. 

“This young man most likely has a personality disorder,” Mikhail Vinogradov, a forensic psychiatrist and head of the Center for Legal and Psychological Assistance in Extreme Situations, told RFE/RL. 

Just a few years after the puppy video, Milchakov joined Russia’s proxy forces fighting in Luhansk. In the Donbas, he adopted the nom de guerre “The Serb,” though he didn’t yet walk back the fascist ideology that had earned him his first nickname, “Fritz.” “I’m a Nazi. I won’t go into details — nationalist, patriot, imperialist — [but] I say it directly: I am a Nazi,” Milchakov told the nationalist media outlet Sputnik & Pogrom in 2014. (Nine years later, Milchakov would claim that his remarks about Nazism were taken out of context.”)

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When Moscow agreed in the 2015 Minsk Protocols to freeze its proxy war in eastern Ukraine, Milchakov decided to ply his new trade as a mercenary, reportedly serving with Wagner Group in Syria. Once Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Milchakov returned to the Donbas. In the conflict, his “Rusich” neo-Nazi paramilitary unit is accused of numerous war crimes, including looting, mutilating prisoners, and executions — atrocities that earned him a “reputation for extreme brutality,” the U.S. Treasury explained in September 2022 when naming Milchakov in new sanctions.

Rusich’s offenses are so egregious that a member of Russia’s own parliament petitioned federal police in July 2022 to investigate the group’s reported war crimes against prisoners. In September 2022, Telegram blocked Rusich’s channel after it incited readers to brutal killings of unarmed people. 

Historian and sociologist Nikolai Mitrokhin told RFE/RL that Milchakov is an pariah even among Russian nationalists, and his paramilitary group appears to be hurting for new recruits. “There aren’t many people willing to fight under a commander with unstable mental behavior, and funding has been an issue for a long time,” Mitrokhin explained.

Why would Apti Alaudinov, the commander of Chechnya’s best-known special forces unit, seek the company of someone like Alexey Milchakov? RFE/RL’s Semyon Reshetilov points out that the neo-Nazi leader has remained a visible media figure, despite being almost universally despised. 

Alaudinov thrives on media attention, and meeting with Milchakov was a means of provoking a “significant public reaction,” one analyst told RFE/RL, noting that the Chechen commander disappeared from national news broadcasts after border guards failed to make quick work of Ukraine’s incursion force in the Kursk region (where Alaudinov’s men currently operate). 

The same analyst compared the Milchakov video to Alaudinov’s involvement in a separate scandal involving a reality TV star, the founder of a Russian nationalist men’s movement, and allegations that the “Akhmat” unit is comprised of “TikTok troops” who spend more time promoting themselves on social media than engaging in actual combat. “Alaudinov is finding different media platforms and trying to demonstrate his usefulness,” explained RFE/RL’s source.