Victory or death?
They are running straight into enemy fire, ready to lay
down their lives to take territory the motherland needs.
This is just a game of course, but re-enactments like this have
become hugely popular in Russia, not just because people are interested
in history, but because they want to show they are proud of their
country and its military record.
With perfect replica kit and weapons they are restaging part of the
Winter War of 1939 to 1940 between the Soviet Union and Finland.
This is the original battle ground north of St Petersberg
and the same time of year.
The Fins massively outnumbered the Russians and held the line.
Eventually they were overwhelmed and Finland forced to hand over
a huge swathe of land.
Today's re-enactors aren't too bothered by the rights and wrongs
of the war, even though most historians say Moscow provoked it.
The majority of Russians now, they want to look back without guilt
and celebrate their country's past.
TRANSLATION: In the last few years people have
become more and more patriotic and want the know about their history
and they don't just want to read about it, they want to live it.
But they know Russia is being accused again of provoking war,
of grabbing land again from a European neighbour.
More than a thousand kilometres south of St Petersberg in Ukraine,
pro-Russian separatists, backed by the Kremlin, have been battling the
Ukranian army for almost 9 months.
Nearly 5,000 people have already been killed.
While these re-enactors use dummy guns, patriotism is pushing other
Russians to fight for real.
In the centre of St Petersberg I am meeting
a member of the force which until now has remained in the shadows.
He doesn't want to give his name and is leaving his family to join the
Ukrainian rebels as a volunteer.
I am going to defend Russian people, Russian nation.
Simple civilians who live in the Ukraine...
We have lived there for several hundred years, defend the people,
their families, their culture the language and the orthodox region.
Eastern Ukraine, where he is heading, is a region where most
people speak Russian, not Ukrainian.
Some but not all consider themselves ethnically Russian.
The uprising last year was against a new unelected interim
government, which many in the east felt was dominated by politicians
from the other Ukrainian-speaking end of the country.
But the rebels quickly acquired heavy weaponry that many
intelligence experts believe can only have come from Russia.
Though the Kremlin denies it.
Meanwhile, fresh graves began to appear in Russian cemeteries of
young soldiers killed in Ukraine.
Russian human rights groups believe thousands of regular
troops have been sent there.
But Dima is not a soldier, he is a science graduate working
as an odd job man.
He has chosen to risk his life in Ukraine.
Are you a volunteer?
You are not being sent by the state?
No.
I am a volunteer.
I pay my own money for my equipment.
I am not sent by Putin or Kremlin or the state.
This is the online recruitment poster he responded to.
It led him eventually to this anonymous block of flats on
the outskirts of the St Petersberg.
No Western journalist has been here before.
It is the secret base of a group that trains the volunteers.
They are called the Russian Imperial Movement and they want to
restore the 19th century Russian empire using modern weapons.
They say they have sent more than 100 volunteers to Ukraine,
some without any previous military experience, some hardened former
officers of the Russian army.
This man fought for Russia against the Chechans.
Later he became a security guard as a railway station.
Later he became a security guard at a railway station.
Though he likes to describe himself as a Kossack.
TRANSLATION: In this room we do hand to hand combat, military acrobatics
and fighting with a knife.
In the room next door, there is a shooting range.
But they don't just train here - they also pray.
This man believes it was a miracle that saved his life after
he was shot by a Ukrainian soldier during recent fighting there.
TRANSLATION: The bullet hit me here, in the shoulder.
It went straight through my passport.
It was in this pocket.
You can see it is drenched in blood.
Inside it, was this icon.
That is what saved my life.
The bullet shattered my bone.
The doctors thought I would either lose
my arm or simply bleed to death.
It is unprecedented to be allowed to film here but even so they didn't
want to show us the actual training.
Some men are afraid of being identified by the Ukrainians, others
fear what the Russian authorities may think of their actions.
Are the nationalists based here useful to the Kremlin?
Or are they potentially dangerous loose cannons?
TRANSLATION: We don't get any support.
But no-one tries to stop us operating either.
But there are a lot of things we are not allowed to do
because if our organisation had too many official rules there might be
something in them that could be used to accuse us of extremism.
Extremists is certainly what many Russians would call
the ragged collection of far right groups that marched through Moscow
last year in support of new Russia.
Although they are small in numbers, they have gradually become more
influential.
Their hero is a man who strikes many poses - this
colonel, a secret service agent, a passionate historical re-enactor.
Above all, like many nationalists, he likes replaying the Russian civil
war that followed the 1917 communist revolution, imagining himself
as a dashing czarist officer and relishing the slaughter of Reds.
Of course, the Reds won in the end.
And the czarists lost.
But last year in eastern Ukraine a unit of nationalist volunteers led
by him seized their chance to make their dreams of empire come true.
They took over the key strategic town of Slovansk.
He said in a recent interview that he pressed
the trigger to start the war.
It is in his footsteps that Dima is now following.
He is leaving for Ukraine in the morning.
You have not been in the army, never fought before?
You have just had a very basic week-long training.
Aren't you nervous?
Worried?
TRANSLATION: Yes, I have never - I have not been to the army,
I have only basic knowledge.
I understand I am not a professional warrior,
but I'm part of national militia.
National militia, yeah.
I feel I am a part of the Russian people who my ancestors -
who are before me, part of people who are already there.
So, I am like a flood with them, with my brothers.
Hundreds of volunteers have gone to Ukraine in the past year.
Maybe more than a thousand.
And I'm now following them into the war zone.
Unlike them, I have travelled via Ukrainian government-held territory,
passing the last regular army men near a checkpoint before arriving
eventually in the besieged rebel stronghold of Donetsk.
They are appealing for local men to join the fight
against the Ukrainian State.
No reference here to Russian support.
Donetsk has proclaimed itself the capital of an independent republic,
though it is recognised officially by no-one, not even Russia.
But I found Russian volunteers helping to guard the city
from a possible government attack.
These two, just a few minutes from the centre.
TRANSLATION: Someone called about children
at a school who are really scared.
There has been shooting there, so I want to find out what's happening.
And the further we go, the more eerily empty
the streets become and the shops were hit by Ukrainian army shells.
TRANSLATION: This happens every day.
There are lots of places like this in town.
We are almost at the bridge, 350 metres further on.
Beyond that is the territory of hell.
Misha is from near Moscow.
The other man is from a southern city in Russia.
Both are ready, they say, for a fight.
TRANSLATION: We are expecting them to storm Donetsk at any time.
There are lots of heavy weapons and tanks.
As soon as they come we will knock them out.
Back at their barracks, Misha is in command of a combined
unit of local and militia men.
They won't tell us how many Russians there are here
but certainly the Russians are among the best-educated,
the most highly motivated and they believe they are here to
stiffen up the local resistance.
Some don't want to say where they are from, but this man can't wait
to show his Russian passport.
TRANSLATION: I've nothing to hide.
I am proud to be here.
It is an austeere but exciting life he's chosen to replace his
previous life in a funeral agency.
Before he managed bereavements, now he's gained the power
of life and death himself.
TRANSLATION: I picked up a gun for the first time
in my life two months ago.
This is a Kalashanokov, a masterpiece of my nation.
The best firearm in the world.
Anyone can master it in a couple of days.
And I'm from a military family, so war didn't cause me any moral
difficulties.
He, like one of his heroes, Hamlet, is given to musings.
And a skull crops up on his unit's insignia.
Pirates they may be but they say they are helping the defenceless
and helping restore order in a city now awash with guns where ordinary
people are at the mercy of looters.
This house was attacked by rogue elements from the rebel forces.
One was shot and wounded in an ambush with Mischa's men.
You can still see the blood.
The family is frightened.
The attackers came as part of a quarrel with her son.
TRANSLATION: They threatened us.
They said either you give us the car or we will kill your son.
The people who have come to power here think we are not really human.
They want to wipe us out.
TRANSLATION: Stop, stop.
Mischa shuts her up because she seems to be criticising
the rebel authorities.
It is hard to know what she or any other ordinary people here think.
There are too many armed men around, but she realises what she's meant
to say.
The message - locals are grateful to the volunteer militia and the rebel
republics can enforce law and order, though, most of the outside world
thinks their existence is illegal.
All this shows how Russians are involved on many levels.
They are not just fighting for the rebel authorities,
trying to defend them, they are also trying to legitimise them.
TRANSLATION: Europe and the US say Russia is causing chaos here.
Russia is not to blame.
Russia needs a neighbouring state that's
legitimately formed, a legal state.
If the young state shows itself in a bad light, treats
its citizens badly and behaves badly on the international stage,
then Russia won't be pleased.
It will walk away from here.
But among the many abuses by both sides in this conflict,
there have been some committed by Russian volunteers themselves.
This colonel, the nationalist icon, flouted the rules of war last summer
when he publicly paraded Ukrainian prisoners and humiliated them.
I've come to the town he seized last April.
For nearly three months till the Ukrainians retook it,
this was his personal fieftime.
He ordered executions for alleged looting.
There were arbitrary detentions and disappearances.
And other Christians say that they were singled out for persecution
by the Russian Orthodox rebels.
This is a Protestant church serving a small but very active minority.
Rebel tanks used the yard as a firing position.
While Orthodox priests reconsecrated the building for their own use.
The pastor says four young activists from his congregation
were taken away by the rebels.
TRANSLATION: Armed men got into the car with them and drove off.
They haven't been seen alive since.
We know they were severely beaten, by radicals and by locals.
First, they were taken to the police station, then to the fire
station where they were tortured.
They bodies show signs of torture.
Then it seems that they were released, put back into their cars,
and then they were shot.
And the car was burnt.
It's still not clear exactly who's guilty for the four men's deaths.
Some theng they were killed as part of a local feud,
not for their faith.
There are many other accounts of protestant activists being arrested,
tortured and even threatened with death by rebels in Ukraine.
The wider question now is what right the Russian fighters had to be
in Ukraine in the first place and who they were representing?
Were the Russian volunteers who spearheaded the takeover
of this town just agents of the Kremlin, or were they pursuing their
own independent agenda to defend Russians or simply to provoke a war?
The truth may lie inbetween, that the interests of the Russian
state and of radical nationalist groups coinsided.
But wreckage scattered over the Ukrainian countryside in July
changed the whole situation.
Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 crashed in rebel-held territory with the
death of all 298 people onboard.
Much of the outside world said Russia was ultimately to blame
for shooting it down.
Soon afterwards, the colonel, then defence minister of the Donetsk
Republic, returned to Moscow.
He was recalled perhaps by Kremlin leaders who wanted to increasingly
distance themselves from the insurgency.
Back in Donetsk, I'm visiting the self proclaimed
republic's new Supreme Court.
But the chairman turns out to be another Russian volunteer, a
retired senior lawyer from Moscow's elite Investigation Police.
He thinks it's unlikely the colonel, whom Ukraine has charged with
terrorism, or other Russian fight, could ever face trial
as war criminals.
TRANSLATION: The militia here did not represent any country,
so international law may not apply to them.
Were these fighters combatants and international law covered them,
is an open question.
The Donetsk People's Republic has not signed any
international conventions.
It was said publicly many times now that the colonel started
the war here.
That must be a crime, surely?
TRANSLATION: He came here legally, out of an ordinary, noble,
human desire to help his brothers in a territory that needed to fight
the war machine they were facing.
It's true many ordinary citizens in eastern Ukraine did support
the uprising, some now want the war to end.
But for the Russian volunteers, the struggle was never just about
defending the rights of people here.
It was about defending Russia itself.
And that's still their dream.
For some, war-ravaged Donetsk has a mystical significance.
It's their Jerusalem.
TRANSLATION: Why do I say Donetsk is Jerusalem?
Because what's happening here is a holy war of the Russian people,
for its own future, for its own ideals, for its children.
And its great country.
We are not hurting local civilians.
We are not committing any crimes.
We are fighting for our future and for the great idea I've been
talking about.
The empire was overthrown nearly a century ago.
Yet its ambitions still cast a long shadow over Russia's
neighbours and some can't come to terms with its loss.
This man is head of a movement originally founded
by officers who were defeated after the 1917 revolution.
Officers whose earlier victories commemorated at this St Petersburg
church helped make Russia great.
He fought in Ukraine last summer as the right-hand man,
following he believes in those imperial traditions.
TRANSLATION: In the form of the brigade that was commanded,
we restored the traditions of the Russian Imperial Army.
We created a Russian Christian army where drunkenness was banned,
there was no looting, no crime.
That's a fantasy, of course.
As I've discovered on this journey.
But there's a very powerful man who shares much
of the nationalists' thinking.
Over the past year, Vladimir Putin has started borrowing
more and more of their rhetoric.
In his annual speech to MPs, he described Crimea, part of the
Ukraine that the Kremlin annexed last year, as Russia's Jerusalem.
What's hard to work out is how far Putin is encouraging the wild
forces of nationalism and how far he's trying to rein them in.
They insist they're independent.
TRANSLATION: We cross the border illegally at our own risk.
No-one sent us and we aren't mercenaries.
Wore a volunteer movement in the Russian tradition and none of us got
money for being part of this war.
All civil wars begin with voluntary movements.
In this case, we have done nothing new.
We acted as our consciences dictated.
Because if states don't do things, people do them themselves.
That's democratic.
But you're playing with fire?
I'm a military man.
So it's my profession to play with fire.
The fire that he and avengers like him helped start in Ukraine,
is still raging.
It's reduced parts of what were modern European towns
and cities to rubble.
These are the ruins of Donetsk Airport today.
Less than three years after it was beautifully rebuilt to welcome
the European Football Championship.
And on the front line, a surprisingly innocent young man I
last met in St Petersburg.
Then he wouldn't show his face.
I didn't think we'd ever get to speak again.
Why not?
You didn't expect I would survive.
After many failed attempts, I've got through to him.
The first-time volunteer fighter.
He and his comrades were sent straight into the thick of battle.
What's frightening was to see some bombed houses.
I don't know if people survived there.
The houses were bombed by artillery and destroyed.
Every such house is someone's life.
Many, many families had to run away, to change everything in their life.
But for all the horror, he's even more convinced that he was right
to come, proud now to be seen.
Why should we cover our faces if we fight for freedom of our nation?
I think many of my friends will fight till victory.
Because Russians, they don't start the war,
but they fight until victory.
He once seemed indistinguishable from all his friends.
Like others, he tried out various modern
fashions, till he began to dream of a past that can never be restored.
But imperial dreams are dangerous.
And the longer they live on the harder it will be to solve
Ukraine's ever-bloodier conflict.