The video began circulating in early August, mainly on Telegram channels known for Russian nationalist and pro-war sentiments. An echoing woman's voice narrates as pixelated, sepia-toned images of Russia's 1990s economic chaos morph into imperial and church symbols, and St. Basil's Cathedral on Red Square.
"Dear compatriots living outside Russia, we are reaching out to you," the narrator intones. "Your time has come to become a hero and enter history! Write to us and we will help you defend your right to life, freedom, and the future. We will help you defend the Motherland!"
"Respectfully, the Military Intelligence of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation," the video concludes, directing views to a recruitment bot -- an automated program within Telegram.
For months, Western intelligence and law enforcement officials have warned of an alarming trend: random people -- "freelancers," "proxies," "disposable agents" -- recruited, usually via Telegram, usually unwittingly, to perform various surreptitious, sometimes destructive tasks like surveillance, arson, sabotage, and spreading disinformation.
The agencies doing the recruiting and hiring, authorities say, are often directly or indirectly linked to Russia. That includes "The Military Intelligence of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation," known widely as GRU.
"We're seeing an increasing number of [people] who we would describe as 'proxies' being recruited by foreign intelligence services," Commander Dominic Murphy, of Britain's Metropolitan Police, said in a September 18 statement announcing the arrest of two men who had allegedly been recruited to set fire to a Ukrainian-linked warehouse.
The men were allegedly recruited, police said, by the Wagner Group, the semi-defunct Russian mercenary company whose operations are now largely controlled by the Defense Ministry.
Behind the Defend The Motherland video and a related recruitment bot is a unit affiliated with the GRU known as the Melodiya Intelligence Center. The center was responsible for a similar recruiting bot in 2024 that included the fictitious Eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings movies.
The man behind the Defend The Motherland video and the recruitments bots is the deputy head of Melodiya. He's also a notorious Russian neo-Nazi blogger and mercenary who has fought in Ukraine, celebrated Adolf Hitler's birthday, called for castrating Ukrainians, and described warfare as a sexual experience.
"When a man goes to war, it's a sexual desire," the man, Yevgeny Rasskazov, said in a video interview broadcast in 2021, about six months before Russia's all-out invasion of Ukraine. "It's about as lustful as wanting a woman. When you kill [an enemy], you savor the fact that his wife is left a widow. You savor how they cry as a family, how he comes home in a coffin. And you get an erection!"
From Wagner's Ashes
In October 2023, Lieutenant General Vladimir Alekseyev, the GRU's No. 2 official, handed out medals to men who had fought in the battle to capture the Ukrainian stronghold of Bakhmut. Mercenaries -- and freed prison inmates -- fighting with Wagner Group played a key role in capturing the city some five months earlier.
Among those receiving awards, according to a video on Telegram, was Mikhail Turkanov, a former mixed marital arts fighter and hardcore fan of the St. Petersburg soccer team Zenit. Turkanov is also a veteran of a GRU-linked entity called Espanola, a right-wing organization formed in 2022 that grew out of extremist soccer fan clubs known as "ultras."
Espanola's members, many of whom are former soccer ultras, embrace Nazi symbolism: the brigade's number is 88, which signifies a Nazi salute, the eighth letter of the alphabet twice, HH for Heil Hitler. Turkanov himself was fined in 2019 for publicly displaying swastika tattoos and the Nazi-coded slogan "14/88."
Public displays of Nazi symbols are illegal in Russia.
Espanola members have also been killed fighting in the Ukraine war.
Espanola is nominally independent, but is in fact part of the Volunteer Corps, a loose-knit, shadowy web of unofficial militias, volunteer organizations, and paramilitary units with interlinking ties to each other -- and to GRU itself.
Some of the entities include parts of the Wagner Group, which was largely dismantled following death of its founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, with its remnants incorporated into the Defense Ministry or elsewhere.
Much of the recruiting and coordinating for these groups is conducted by Redut, a secretive company set up by the GRU in the months leading up to Prigozhin's death in August 2023.
Alekseyev, the GRU general, has been called one of the founders of Wagner. He has also been credited with conceiving the Redut recruitment system.
In early 2024, officials in Espanola established a semi-clandestine group called Melodiya employing communications specialists, cyber-intelligence officers, and others. Its deputy chief is Rasskazov, who uses the nom de guerre Topaz.
Disposable Agents
The recruitment campaign on the Telegram messaging app has alarmed Western and Ukrainian intelligence in part because of how difficult it is monitor and detect -- and how hard it is thwart potential plots.
"Don't become a disposable agent," German police said in an unusual statement earlier this month.
Created by GRU-linked units like Melodiya, the campaigns circulate in part because of allied or like-minded individuals and "influencers."
One example is Aleksei Zhivov, a Telegram blogger with more than 110,000 subscribers who is affiliated with Espanola. On November 26, 2024, after fans of a second-tier English soccer team invited Russia to fire nuclear missiles at their rivals, Zhivov amplified the post from X.
He posted a recruiting message, in English, asking people to join Espanola and included a link to the Eye of Sauron bot with the caption: "[Link] for those who want to help Russia on an ongoing basis."
Another example is a Spanish-language channel called Los Sombreros Blancos -- the White Hats -- with some 33,000 subscribers. The channel, which routinely posts anti-globalist, pro-Russian messages in Spanish, republished the Eye of Sauron post in February.
Los Sombreros Blancos is part of a network of around 200 ideologically similar websites and channels called Portal Kombat, a play on the name of a popular, gory video game. The network republishes material from Russian state media and pro-Kremlin Telegram channels in French, German, English, Spanish, and other languages including Romanian, which is dominant in Moldova.
Most of the websites purport to get their information from something called the Pravda Network, which routinely spreads anti-Western narratives.
Two Telegram channels, Selsky Rozum in Czech and Olej w Gwovie in Polish, were created on the same day, March 13, 2022. The channels have nearly identical avatars. Both posted the Eye of Sauron link on the same day, April 25, 2025, within minutes of each other, at about 2:10 p.m. Moscow time.
Another Telegram account that was quick to repost the Defend The Motherland video was that of Russell Bentley, an American who fought in Ukraine's Donbas alongside Russian paramilitaries as early as 2014, the first year of the war there. Known as the Donbas Cowboy, Bentley garnered a large online following on YouTube and elsewhere.
He was killed in Ukraine in April 2024. It's unclear who posthumously posted the video to Bentley's account.
Russia And Its Nazis
Born in Ukraine's Donetsk region, Rasskazov was radicalized in 2014, around the time Russia fomented a war in the Donbas -- the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine -- against government forces.
He joined a virulently right-wing paramilitary unit called Rusich headed by Aleksei Milchakov, a Russian who bragged openly about his Nazi sympathies and racist ideologies. Rusich and Milchakov himself have been credibly linked to atrocities in Ukraine and Syria, and they were designated a "global terrorist" organization by the United States in 2022.
Rasskazov rejoined the fighting in Ukraine, right after Russia launched the full-scale invasion in February 2022. "Right now, I've come to kill Ukrainians. That's basically it," he told an interviewer.
In recent years, Rasskazov has seemed to strike a softer tone in public appearances. He has participated in Russian parliament meetings on protection of the family, according to Novaya Gazeta -- in line with President Vladimir Putin's claim that Russia is a protector of what he calls traditional values.
This past February, Rasskazov and several members of Espanola spoke to students at a Moscow school, where "the veterans discussed with the children the importance of education, themes of love and the Motherland, and shared their life experiences and worldviews."
The number of the school where the speech took place was 88, the numeric code for the Nazi salute.
It's unclear whether Rasskazov produced or directed the videos himself.
A Conversation With 'GRU'
Clicking on the link in the Defend The Motherland Telegram post leads to a bot called GRU. Click on the bot and you're prompted to choose a preferred language, Russian or English, and complete a short questionnaire of name, address, occupation, and reasons for wanting to join.
An RFE/RL correspondent who identified himself as a resident of Riga submitted the questionnaire on a weekday evening. "Your message has been sent to the GRU," the bot responded, and a reply arrived within three minutes from what appeared to be a real person.
"Good evening. We're glad there are still Russian patriots left. How can you help us?" the person wrote.
Asked by RFE/RL what would be of interest, the person replied instantly: "Ukrainian fuel trucks. Do you know where to find them?"
The person then added: "At the [Riga] port. They are civilian. We need to know where they are and take a photo."
When the RFE/RL correspondent asked about payment, the person cursed and responded angrily.
"Piss off!" the person wrote. "Money is unnecessary. Love for your homeland should warm and feed you. You want money for photos, seriously? There are dozens like you in Riga alone. No one thought of asking for money for photos. Goodbye!"
That was the end of the conversation.
