by PUBLIUS
KYIV—Few figures emerging from Russia’s war on Ukraine embody its contradictions more than the man known as Denis Yevgenyevich Kapustin, better known by his nom-de-guerre White Rex.
Long before Russia launched its full-scale invasion, White Rex had already become one of the Kremlin’s most controversial opponents, not because he embraced liberal democracy or joined the Russian opposition in exile, but because he arrived at the conclusion that Vladimir Putin’s Russia was destroying the very nation it claimed to defend.
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“Russia as a multiethnic empire will crumble. And in the moment of crisis, we will come in and I will not stop before Moscow. We will free Russia.”
Once associated with Russia’s nationalist scene and effectively shut out of much of Europe after being banned from the Schengen Area, he eventually found a new home in Ukraine, where he established the Russian Volunteer Corps, which today is a Ukrainian military unit composed out of predominantly Russian nationals, fighting alongside Ukrainian special operations units.
For many Western observers, that paradox is difficult to grasp. For Moscow, it is politically dangerous. A Russian nationalist who fights for Ukraine undermines one of the Kremlin’s central narratives—that every opponent of Putin is either a Western puppet or a traitor devoid of patriotic conviction. Putin always tried to portray himself, often to the domestic and to the foreign right-wing audience in the West, as some kind of savior of the European civilization. But Rex maintains that nothing could be further from the truth.
The danger Moscow sees in him is not theoretical.
White Rex had not merely survived his assassination—he had made Moscow finance his resurrection.
