When Dragan and a group of fellow Serbs arrived at Belgrade's Nikola Tesla Airport in June 2023, it was with documents testifying to months abroad working for a Russian construction company.
The truth, however, was very different: All were returning to their homeland from the battlefields of Ukraine, where they had fought in a Russian "Wolf" assault unit after brief combat training at military proving grounds outside Moscow.
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The group was the latest evidence of an underground system that provides international cover for tours of duty from the Balkans to the front lines of Russia's ongoing war on Ukraine -- a decade-long conflict that began with the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and then exploded into a full-scale invasion when tens of thousands of Russian regular forces poured over the border in February 2022.
Although their images have occasionally been posted (with faces obscured) on Telegram, the encrypted platform popular among soldiers on both sides, there are no reliable estimates of how many Serbs have fought alongside Russians, and such volunteers remain tight-lipped toward Western journalists in particular.
Serbia's Interior Ministry, its Foreign Ministry, and its Security Intelligence Agency (BIA) declined to respond to RFE/RL's question about how many of its citizens are currently in the conflict.
But RFE/RL was able to interview one of them about his stint as a mercenary, after granting him anonymity in order to get a detailed account of his eight-month experience in 2022-23. "Dragan," who spent two months in training and six more under contract to fight in Ukraine, provided RFE/RL's journalists with documents and photos that allowed them to corroborate the narrative presented here through independent sources and open data, unless otherwise noted.
Dragan's story of misplaced trust in dodgy intermediaries and disdainful commanders shows how Serbs lured in part by "brotherly" zeal are traveling to Russia to be hastily trained in warfare and shipped off to fight. It also provides a rare glimpse into a seemingly steady stream of casualties among Serbian and other Balkan nationals in Ukraine -- and the broken promises and other reasons that Dragan decided not to return to Russia or the trenches.
"Human life is as valuable to them as it was in [Josef] Stalin's time," Dragan told RFE/RL, invoking the legacy of the most brutal and notorious of the Soviet dictators to describe his experience as a mercenary. "One massive business, in which ordinary people are killed -- mobilized or paid, whatever."
Participating in foreign wars is a crime that can carry an eight-year prison sentence since Serbia tightened its laws in 2015, and Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic's public warnings against it have stiffened since early 2022.
However, his EU candidate country has also avoided joining the bloc's sanctions against Russia and has maintained trade and diplomatic ties with Moscow. Polling shows that nearly half of Serbia's 7 million residents still regard Russia as their main ally (well ahead of China), and the "Z" symbol of support for Russia's war effort is a common sight in Serbia.
An exhaustive examination of Serbian court records since 2014 shows that -- despite official confirmation that hundreds of Serbs fought in Ukraine in the first few years of the conflict -- there have been just 37 convictions for participating in the Ukrainian war and one more for organizing such participation. Just six resulted in prison sentences, and only one of those involved activities after the 2022 escalation. There are currently no criminal prosecutions under way of alleged fighters.
Dragan, who is in his early 30s, has never been prosecuted, according to the limited identifying documents provided by the courts.
But he traveled to Moscow in mid-November 2022 for training and to be sent into the war in Ukraine based on plans he'd agreed in detail with another Serbian citizen, Dejan Beric.
Beric has remained abroad since joining Russian forces in Ukraine in 2014 and has a "passport" from Russia-backed separatists in occupied Ukraine. He calls himself a war reporter but was investigated by Serbian authorities in absentia for participation in the war. Beric has never hidden that he has been welcoming Serb fighters to the conflict since 2014, and his latest recruitment-style YouTube video on September 13 claimed he was about to embark on a Russia-wide trip as part of "Putin's command."
Beric and a Bosnian Serb named Davor Savicic have been associated with a Russian fighting unit that has shared Savicic's call sign, "Wolf," since its establishment around the time of the 2022 invasion. Both men have spoken openly as recently as last year about recruiting Serbs for the war, including through the notorious Wagner Group, despite the risk of prosecution by Serbian or Bosnian authorities.
Dragan said that while he was led to believe that Beric would join or lead him and other Serb troops, he saw him in Ukraine just twice when Beric was there to make promotional videos.
He said he saw Savicic, whom Bosnian authorities suspect of being a Wagner mercenary, in Avdiyivka and Bakhmut, two Ukrainian cities eventually devastated by fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces that caused untold civilian casualties and forced tens of thousands of residents to flee.
Neither Beric nor Savicic responded to RFE/RL's questions sent via social media.
Dragan had no previous military experience beyond his obligatory six months of conscription, and he told RFE/RL he has never been involved in nationalist groups or even been especially active politically. But attracted to the prospect of "helping the brotherly Russian people" and the Russian passport that Beric promised him but never delivered, Dragan said, he bought his own air ticket to Moscow's Vnukovo International Airport via Turkey.
"Salary and money were not my motive," he said.
Asked about the financial terms of the deal, Dragan said he received 110,000 rubles (about $1,215) in cash for each of the two months of training, and about twice that figure for each of the six months he was fighting in Ukraine. The average monthly salary at the time in Serbia was around $808.
Dragan said he was welcomed at Vnukovo airport by a man who introduced himself as Dima and who Dragan understood to be an officer of Russia's GRU military intelligence service. RFE/RL was unable to confirm Dima's official status. Dima escorted him to a snowy parking lot and a white van with tinted windows for a 45-minute drive.
"We got off the highway in some populated areas. And at one point, military boom gates started to appear," Dragan said. "Everything around us was military [The guards] just stood still and saluted and opened [the gates] without saying anything."
RFE/RL was able to confirm from Dragan's account of the trip and images he provided that he was taken to the Alabino military training ground just west of Moscow. RFE/RL also compared details from Dragan's photos with images from a Beric video from Alabino and confirmed they were made at the same location.
Dragan was taken to a tent with other fresh Serb recruits and, for the next two months of training at Alabino, Dima and another purported GRU officer who went by the name of Oleg were in the charge of them.
Dragan estimated that there were around 25 Serbs with him at Alabino over the next eight weeks; five, he said, quit before completion of training. There were Serbs from Serbia, he said, but also from Republika Srpska in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and even an ethnic Serb from France. RFE/RL could not independently verify that information.
Dragan said he signed a six-month contract with a private military company at Dima and Oleg's tent, although he could not provide a copy of the contract or a photo.
"You could see in the contract it doesn't have anything to do with the Russian Defense Ministry but that it's a private military company OOO Redut," he told RFE/RL. RFE/RL's Systema and Schemes programs have previously confirmed that Russia was using a company called PMC Redut at the time to recruit and deliver fighters to Ukraine.
As RFE/RL revealed in October 2023, the "Wolf" unit was one of at least 20 formations fighting in Ukraine under the Redut insignia.
Since then, partly as a result of the embarrassment felt by the Kremlin after Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin's rebellion against the Russian defense establishment in June 2023, mercenaries bound for Ukraine have entered directly into contracts with and been consolidated under the Russian Defense Ministry.
Dragan said the monthly cash payments were delivered by a man who went by the code name "Amur." The RFE/RL investigations confirmed Amur's ties to Redut and identified him as a commander of mercenary forces active in occupied areas of Ukraine. The same reporting found that Amur had ordered those forces to round up individuals for interrogation and throw them into "pits" before he personally interrogated and tortured the detainees.
Dragan had no complaints about his two-month combat training process, which he said took place from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. six days a week.
He was part of a unit called the 1st Diversionary-Reconnaissance Assault Brigade "Wolves" (1-я ДРШБр Волки) and said the group was trained by four instructors who he understood to be members of the Russian military's Special Operations Forces.
He and his fellow trainees were schooled in shooting, drone piloting, medical aid, and participated in combat and other simulations.
After two months in Alabino, Dragan joined the war in Ukraine in January 2023.
He provided many details about where his team was deployed that RFE/RL was able to corroborate through photos and other digital clues. They fought battles near Lysychansk in the Luhansk region and near Avdiyivka in the Donetsk region. They were also sent to Soledar, a city with a prewar population of around 10,000 in the Bakhmut region that was captured by Russian forces in January 2023.
Dragan said he counted roughly 70 other Serbs throughout his eight-month experience, although he said many had been sent into the fight with far less training and utterly unprepared for battle.
"We're the only ones who had [a full two months of] training," Dragan said. "Others had it for five to 14 days."
He cited the case of one Serb who he said passed through Alabino, too, albeit for an even briefer period of training. Serbian media suggested in early August 2023 that Emrah Zornic, from Novi Pazar in southwestern Serbia, had mysteriously turned up in Ukraine before he was killed trying to "provide aid to the wounded and civilians."
But Dragan claimed Zornic was a fighter who had gotten an afternoon of training at Alabino before he was given weapons "and that was it." Although Zornic's family was Muslim, in what was possibly an effort to portray him as Orthodox for political reasons, Russian media showed his funeral service in the southwestern city of Tambov being presided over by an Orthodox priest. It also claimed Zornic had been a parishioner in Tambov, a city about 350 kilometers from the Ukrainian border -- virtually impossible since he had spent only a few days there en route from the training grounds near Moscow to Luhansk in eastern Ukraine.
The date of his death was listed as April 17, 2023, matching Dragan's timeline in Ukraine. Beric, the "war reporter" who recruited Dragan, went on Russian TV in August to acknowledge the death of one unnamed Serb killed "below Bakhmut." On the same program, Savicic, the Bosnian Serb also associated with the "Wolves," said he never sent untrained individuals to fight but acknowledged that much "depends on how fast someone can learn."
Asked by RFE/RL, Dragan estimated that 15 Serbs died during his half-year of fighting in Ukraine, although that number was impossible to independently verify.
After six months in Ukraine, in June 2023, Dragan said he was disappointed by what he had seen of the Russian Army. From his perspective, "business and corruption are flourishing" and the "Russians -- as we Serbs imagine and regard them -- exist in a very small percentage."
He said it was also clear to him that he would never get the Russian passport that he had been promised by Beric.
Before returning to Serbia, Dragan was given a document saying he had been working for a Moscow-based company called Monte Gradnja, in case Serbian border officials were suspicious. The document, seen by RFE/RL, bore the company stamp and signature of its sole founder and general director, Rajko Backovic.
Monte Gradnja did not respond to queries, but RFE/RL uncovered a link between Backovic and Savicic through a Russia-based company called "Volf Group," that lists construction of residential buildings as its main activity.
Suspected in Bosnia of having joined the fighting in Ukraine, Savicic provided a similar explanation to journalists after a foreign trip in 2016, saying he was engaged in construction work. Last year, the mother of a Serbian volunteer who fought in Ukraine, Vukashin Stevanovic, told the BBC that her son "works in construction."
With writing and contributions by Andy Heil
