Denis Kapustin pictured with members of the Russian Volunteer Corps paramilitary unit. Photo: Wikipedia
The founder and commander of the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC), a far-right paramilitary unit of Russian citizens fighting alongside the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), has been killed in action on the front line, the group announced on Saturday.
Denis Kapustin, 41, was killed by a Russian drone while carrying out a combat mission in Ukraine’s southeastern Zaporizhzhia region overnight on Saturday, the RVC said on its Telegram channel.
“We will definitely avenge you, Denis. Your legacy lives on”, the group wrote, adding that it would provide further details of the circumstances of Kapustin’s death in due course.
A former football hooligan and neo-Nazi activist from Moscow who spent much of his youth in Germany, Kapustin — also known as Denis Nikitin and by his nom de guerre White Rex — moved to Kyiv in 2017. Since 2019, he had been prohibited from entering Europe’s Schengen area over his involvement in far-right movements within Germany’s mixed martial arts scene.
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Kapustin founded the RVC to fight alongside Kyiv’s army.
The group, which is banned in Russia as a terrorist organisation, says its fighters hold “conservative views and traditionalist beliefs” and describes its mission as the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity within its 1991 borders and the overthrow of Vladimir Putin.
The Russian authorities have twice sentenced Kapustin to life imprisonment in absentia on treason and terrorism charges over his role in a 2023 raid by the RVC and other pro-Kyiv groups into Russia’s western Bryansk region. Later that year, he participated in a separate incursion into the neighbouring Belgorod region.
Russia’s FSB security service also accused him of involvement in a thwarted plot to assassinate ultranationalist Russian media magnate Konstantin Malofeyev, who runs the pro-Kremlin Tsargrad television channel.
In 2023, Kapustin denied that he was a neo-Nazi, saying that he held right-wing views but that “you’ll never find me raising my hand in a Hitler salute”.
The Siberian Battalion, another Russian paramilitary organisation fighting Kremlin forces alongside the AFU, called Kapustin’s death “a great loss for Ukraine and the Russian anti-war resistance”, while Ukraine’s Third Army Corps described him as a “brave warrior” who fought the “common enemy” alongside Ukrainian forces.
