New Delhi: There’s a lot of talk on foreign fighters in Ukraine and many are surprised to find Indians joining the war. In 2015, journalist Kim Sengupta tracked Ravi Singh, a communist from Punjab who was one of the first pro-Russian Indian fighters. He had no combat experience but was driven by ideology.
Singh joined the Essence of Time movement in Moscow to “fight fascism & revive communism”. The grp was allied with the United Armed Forces of Novorossiya founded by Donetsk and the Luhansk Republic to defend against Ukraine. He was placed in the special forces Khan Batallion.
He arrived in Russia from Christchurch NZ in 2015, where he was doing odd jobs after finishing business mgmt. Online, he heard about civil unrest in E.Europe and protests to overthrow some govt. He was excited to learn that communists were gathering to fight `US-supported Nazis’.
He closely began to follow the conflict and was moved to learn about the 2014 Odessa massacre, where over 50 pro-Russia separatists died in a building set alight. Int fighters were joining Novorossiya Forces and Singh got in contact to enrol himself in Russia-affiliated militia groups.
Singh said he was determined to fight for the people of Donbas and was warmly welcomed by Russian comrades even though he didn’t speak the language. As a special forces member of the Khan Battalion, he received close combat and tactical training. “I put as much effort as my Russian brothers.”
He believed to be fighting on the “right side of the war” which was not the Russian” invasion of peaceful Ukraine.” He blamed Ukraine for cease-fire violations and daily bombing. “We are taking every possible step to bring Donbas republic closer to Russia. It is only a matter of time,” he said.
Singh said he was a “true Communist and anti-capitalist” who grew up on stories of the Khalistan movement in Punjab and was a staunch follower of the Indian communist struggle. He was excited to witness the conflict provoked by `some fascist crack-heads who hated Russia and its policies’.
He denied the possibility of following similar separatist groups at home or joining the Naxal movement but emphasized joining the fight in his native Punjab if there was a revival of the Khalistan movt like in the 70s. “Then there would be no giving up,” he said.
When journalist Shweta Desai spoke to him in 2016 via email, he had been in Donbas for 9 months. His parents had no idea about him fighting the Ukraine war. He did not consider himself to be “radicalized” like the foreign fighters in Syria who around the same time were joining jihad against the Assad regime.
Kim Sengupta of independent met Ravi Singh in 2015 in the theatre of war.
Sengupta wrote that Ravi Singh, from Chandigarh in Punjab, is sometimes mistaken for a Brazilian volunteer. He had gone to university in New Zealand and he was working as a restaurant manager in Christchurch when he decided to travel to Donbas.
Singh, then 24, was a supporter of one of India’s many communist parties. “I thought Russia had become a fascist state after the fall of communism. Now I know that is not the case. I started following what was going on in Ukraine, terrible things like the fire in Odesa [when 46 pro-Russian demonstrators were burnt to death] and thought I must do something,” he said.
At 6ft 5in, Singh was snapped up by the People’s Republic army for its elite Khan Battalion. “I haven’t found it physically difficult. I am quite fit, I played cricket.”
Although he supported separatism in Ukraine, he did not do so in India. “I followed the movement for Khalistan [an independent Sikh state] once, but then I realised it was being organised by the CIA,” he said. “This is different, the Ukrainians are cowards, they fire over our heads at civilians. I will stay here until we get the victory. Then I want to go to Syria, if that war is still going on, and fight for the Kurds.”
But now we do not know where he is.