The leader of pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine, a war criminal in Bosnia

“The Balkan Magpie” by Mikhail Polikarpov shows for whose interests and against whom Russian volunteers fought in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990s. Polikarpov was one of them. After the war, he will write the book “Balkan Border”, which is actually a collection of testimonies and memories of Russian volunteers who fought in BiH.

"I was 25 years old and in 1994 I boarded a train to Belgrade. The Hungarian border guards almost stopped me, but in the end everything went well and I arrived in Serbia and from there I took a bus to Sarajevo, to the Jewish cemetery area where the base of the Russian volunteer detachment was located. We were few. 17 people in total. But the Serbs appreciated it very much and felt our support," the book's author and volunteer Mikhail Polikarpov recalled in an interview with the Russia Beyond portal two years ago.

The book was published in 2017 and is dedicated exclusively to Russian volunteers who fought in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo. The most famous Russian volunteer in Bosnia and Herzegovina was Igor Girkin. His nickname is Strelkov and he became known to the world public for leading pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine. He is accused of shooting down a Malaysian civilian airliner in the Donetsk region of Ukraine, killing 298 passengers.

Girkin fought in Visegrad, a town in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina where Serbian soldiers, under the command of convicted war criminal Milan Lukic, burned captured Bosniak civilians, mostly women and children, to fuel the fires. Igor Girkin, a volunteer linked to Russia's state intelligence services, was a fellow fighter with Lukic's killers.

Milan's cousin, Sredoje Lukic, participated in the burning of prisoners in Visegrad. The Hague tribunal indicted him in 1998. Sredoje Lukic has been hiding in Moscow for years. He surrendered in 2005, the same year his cousin Milan was arrested in Argentina. Sredoje was sentenced to 27 years in prison. Milan has been sentenced to life in prison. Igor Girkin Strelkov, a Russian fighter from Visegrad, remained at large and today leads pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine.

“Heroes were buried on the spot,” Mikhail Polikarpov said in 2019, speaking about Russian volunteers in BiH, in an interview titled: “I wanted to show Serbs that they are not alone.”