Siberian Battalion: where these men come from and what they say about home

Updated July 30, 2026

The Siberian Battalion — Sibbat, as the channel calls it — is recruited from people out of Siberia, the Far East and the national republics, from the places that appear least often in the Moscow news. Its make-up is different from the two neighboring units: nineteen peoples and four religions. I have 39 interviews; this page is about what makes these conversations different from all the others.

Where these men come from

The main difference between Sibbat and the RVC and the Legion is its make-up. There are almost no people like this in the other two, while here they are the majority: Uzbeks, Tatars, Tuvans, Bashkirs — nineteen peoples in one battalion. This is not an ethnographic detail. A man whose home has its own language and its own faith explains both the war and his own decision differently from a resident of Moscow.

The same goes for faith: Muslims, Orthodox Christians, Catholics and Buddhists serve in one unit. Nobody there is asked about faith or nationality, and everyone carries out the same tasks alongside the rest. Neither of the other two units has a make-up like that, and on that count Sibbat stands apart.

The first thing you hear almost immediately: in these accounts russia stops being one whole. A man says not “in our country” but “in our town”, and the distance to Moscow in his words is not measured in kilometers.

The second is what the war looks like from there. A draft notice, a contract and the money it brings mean something entirely different in a small town than in the capital, and the decision to go or not to go is taken there for different reasons.

This is not my conclusion and it is not sociology: it is what recurs in conversations I recorded myself and which are openly available. Anyone can listen and hear their own thing in them.

What I ask about in Sibbat

About home. What the place is called, what people live on there, what became of his classmates, which of them came back and in what state. A man has that conversation more willingly than a conversation about politics, and he says more in it.

About what he counts as his own — language, republic, kin, faith. For some of the men that turns out to be the main explanation of why they are here.

About going back: whether he considers it possible to return home at all one day, and what would have to happen for that.

What I do not conclude from these conversations

I talk to people who came over. That is not a cross-section of a society but its most untypical edge: people who did what almost nobody does.

So these recordings cannot be used to judge Siberia, or its inhabitants, or “what people there really think”. They can only be used to judge the people speaking on them. Anyone who starts quoting these episodes as the opinion of a region will be wrong — and I say so in advance, so that there is no shrugging about it later.