2 June 2023

The late Erast Yakovenko, a barrel-chested veteran of the 1990s war in Chechnya, hailed from a long line of Russian military men. So it was no surprise to his family when he signed up to fight in Ukraine — even at 53.

What was more unusual than his age — and his demise on the frontline — was the way he joined the war this spring: as a member of a Gazprom-backed military battalion. The Russian state gas company employed Yakovenko in life, and is expected to compensate his widow for his combat death.

His unit, which is named Potok, or stream, like Gazprom’s Nord Stream pipelines, includes recruits from among Gazprom’s security guards, many of whom were signed up at work, promised job perks, pay and equipment provided by the company.

The battalion forms part of a web of semi-independent military units that have mushroomed under Russia’s war effort after the regular army’s offensive flopped last year.

The Financial Times has traced the rise of Potok and another Gazprom-linked battalion called Fakel, through more than a dozen interviews with soldiers’ relatives, current and former Gazprom staff, military recruiters and associates, as well as a Ukrainian intelligence document on Russian militias.

Although formally attached to competing branches of Russia’s secret services and armed forces, the groups are turning the country’s fighting force into a messy patchwork of units with a plethora of elite sponsors, according to western and Ukrainian intelligence officials...

Known as volunteer battalions, since men enlist for a salary rather than under conscription, such smaller units have begun to rival the notorious paramilitary group Wagner for prominence on the front lines, irritating its founder Yevgeny Prigozhin...

Gazprom has never acknowledged involvement in the formation of frontline battalions. In previous years, it was keen to project a traditional western corporate image to its trading partners in Europe, making environmental, social and governance pledges and plastering its name across football stadiums through its sponsorship of the Uefa Champions League...

For Russia, the battalions provide a way to meet military manpower needs through private recruitment, without launching a new wave of forced mobilisation; a conscription drive last September caused widespread panic and led hundreds of thousands of people to flee the country...Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Moscow-based Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, said the emergence of a plethora of battalions at this stage of the war was “logical” given the desire to avoid a second mobilisation. “The Russian authorities are looking for some palliative solutions,” he added.