It was meant to be a celebration: Katya, a 30-year-old events organizer from the northern Russian city of Arkhangelsk, was moments away from blowing out the candles on her birthday cake at a rented nightclub when the attackers arrived. Dressed in masks, the group stormed the venue, launching a violent physical and verbal assault on Katya and her guests. “They called us faggots and lesbians. I could hear violence from every corner,” Katya recalled in an interview with BBC World Service’s investigative team. Her own mother, she added, was forced to get down on all fours during the attack.
The raid was not the work of random thugs. It was coordinated by Russkaya Obshina, the largest and most active nationalist vigilante network in Russia, which operates to advance President Vladimir Putin’s political agenda of erasing Western liberal influences and cementing so-called traditional family values across the country. In a striking pattern documented by the investigation, local law enforcement officers joined the vigilantes during the operation.
The group claimed the raid was carried out to search for evidence of illegal LGBT “propaganda,” a criminalized offense under Russian law. No such evidence was ever found, but Katya was still taken into custody for interrogation. Nine months after the attack, she was convicted of blasphemy, with the prosecution pointing to a single red neon light shaped like a crucifix hanging on the nightclub wall as evidence of her crime. She was sentenced to 200 hours of court-ordered community service.
During her interrogation, Katya says a law enforcement officer told her she did not align with traditional Russian values and that there was “something wrong with her.” The case was amplified by local media and the group’s social media channels, triggering waves of severe online harassment that have left Katya living in constant fear. “For 10 years, I lived in a certain rhythm. It made me happy, it was my life. What do you feel when a part of you is taken away? You feel loss,” she told the BBC. Despite the risk of further targeting, Katya chose to share her story to expose the group’s tactics.
Over 12 months of reporting, the BBC World Service spoke to six current and former members of Russkaya Obshina, as well as dozens of people harmed by the group’s actions. The investigation, which also incorporated analysis of more than 21,000 social media posts from the group’s public channels between 2020 and 2025, paints a clear picture of a rapidly expanding movement of ideologically driven nationalist and religious activists who carry out coordinated raids on private businesses, event venues, migrant communities, abortion clinics and other spaces they claim violate their strict traditional worldview. After launching their raids, the group pressures law enforcement to prosecute their targets.
Migrants are among the group’s most frequent targets: the BBC’s analysis found that one in four of the group’s social media posts focus on migrants, and often include virulent racist language. In videos posted online, group members can be seen confronting migrants at their workplaces and public spaces, publicly accusing them of criminal activity.
When contacted by the BBC for comment, Russkaya Obshina did not directly respond to the investigation’s specific claims, instead disputing the BBC’s ability to contact current and former members. “Even though Russkaya Obshina is an informal community of people, with no legal entity and no formal membership, the BBC’s great thinkers have somehow ‘found’ former and current members of the Obshina… If you grab anyone off the street and call them a member of the Obshina, you can put any nonsense you like into their mouth,” the group said in a social media post addressing the investigation.
One former member, a wounded ex-soldier who left the group just two months before the BBC’s interview and asked to be identified only as Dimitry, fits the profile of many members. After returning from the front lines in Ukraine, he said he joined the group to find a new sense of purpose, channeling his military training into what he frames as defending Russian culture from “foreign intrusion.” “People from other cultures come in and Russkaya Obshina responds like an antibody, stopping them harming the organism. You could say Russkaya Obshina is like a kind of doctor,” he explained.
The group has received explicit backing from influential Russian institutions. Last year, the Russian Orthodox Church, a close political ally of the Putin government, formally advised all of its bishops to build partnerships with Russkaya Obshina, codifying existing informal ties and granting the unregistered vigilante group greater public legitimacy.
Political analysts broadly agree that the group could not operate at its current scale without implicit approval from the Kremlin. For years, the Russian government has framed the country as a guardian of traditional conservative values in contrast to Western liberalism, a policy that hardened dramatically after Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In November 2022, Putin signed a formal decree dedicated to preserving “traditional Russian spiritual and moral values” nationwide. Russkaya Obshina has been a vocal supporter of the war in Ukraine, and in December 2024, the group formed a joint military unit deployed to the front lines alongside the far-right Espanola brigade, which has already been sanctioned by the UK government.
Contrary to the group’s claims that it operates without formal financial backing, documents reviewed by the BBC’s investigative unit BBC Eye link the network to funding from two high-profile figures with close ties to the Kremlin, routed through multiple charitable foundations. The first major funder identified in the documents is a foundation run by Igor Khudokormov, a Russian sugar magnate whose agriculture conglomerate Prodimex is a leading Russian food producer and a major trading partner with the European Union, according to U.S. trade data. Khudokormov has close personal ties to Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Patrushev, son of former Federal Security Service director Nikolai Patrushev, a core member of Putin’s inner circle.
Tom Keatinge, a finance and security expert at the UK-based Royal United Services Institute, said that Khudokormov’s backing of a group engaged in human rights abuses and military activity in Ukraine raises urgent questions for European companies and governments that trade with his firm. “Do you want… a Russian company providing critical materials into the food chain, especially [one run by someone]… funding the sort of activity he’s funding? That’s a question governments and companies have to answer,” Keatinge said. Khudokormov did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.
The second funder named in the documents is Sergei Mikheev, a prominent pro-Kremlin media commentator who has reportedly collaborated with the Kremlin and Russian intelligence on election campaigns across former Soviet states. Mikheev denied the claim, telling the BBC, “The charitable foundation I established, the ‘Sergei Mikheev Charity Foundation,’ has never transferred any funds to Russkaya Obshina. Any documents allegedly confirming this are fake.”
The BBC’s analysis of the group’s social media content found that the first recorded raid was carried out in May 2023. Between that date and the end of 2025, the group documented more than 900 raids across Russia, with local law enforcement joining roughly 300 of those operations. Reporters note the total number is almost certainly an undercount, as the group does not publicize all of its activity on public channels. To map the activity of Russian nationalist groups, the BBC built a custom multi-agent AI system, which cross-analyzed social media content from more than 10 similar nationalist networks, finding that Russkaya Obshina maintains a far larger street-level presence than any comparable group.
While Russkaya Obshina has attempted to frame itself as part of Russia’s official network of registered civilian patrol groups that assist police with public order, the group remains unregistered, despite police participation in its raids. Sergei Ognerubov, who leads a registered civilian patrol in St. Petersburg that has allowed some Russkaya Obshina members to join his organization, criticized the group for its unregulated, extralegal tactics. “If you want to tackle migration, join us and do it legally. Simply running into some market in masks isn’t fighting migration – that’s more like petty hooliganism,” he said.
Alexander Verkhovsky, a Moscow-based researcher focused on Russia’s far right, noted that the group’s extralegal intimidation tactics themselves violate Russian law, despite its claims to uphold order. “Russkaya Obshina – which claims to uphold law and order – mainly operates through intimidation which is itself illegal” in this context, he said.
In response to the BBC’s investigation, the Russian Embassy in London defended the group, saying “The broad public support [Russkaya Obshina] enjoys reflects the… growth of interest in national culture and historical traditions” and “it would appear that… civic engagement in Russia provokes irritation among those who seek to denigrate and discredit our country.”
For Katya, the consequences of the raid have been irreversible. She has stopped hosting the alternative community events that defined her career and personal life for a decade, and her daily routine remains upended by the harassment and conviction. Today, she lives with constant fear of further targeting, but remains one of the few voices willing to publicly speak out about the vigilante network’s growing power.