Overview

Alexei Milchakov, known by the call signs Serb and Fritz, is a cofounder and commander of the private military company Rusich, a former Wagner Group fighter, and a scout sergeant of the Russian Armed Forces. He is known for his sadistic character and ultranationalist views.

Born on April 30, 1991, in St. Petersburg to a single-parent family, Milchakov served in the 76th Guards Air Assault Division in 2012, the same unit as Wagner namesake Dmitry Utkin. Milchakov gained infamy for posting photos of animal killings in 2011. That year, he met Jan Petrovsky, with whom he later founded the Rusich group during the Donbas conflict. On September 3, 2014, Milchakov joined the Batman Battalion, led by Alexander Bednov, and served as co-commander of the irregular Rusich formation. In May 2016, he conducted military training for children in Belarus. His wife, Darina Ardanova from Kharkiv, also fights in Rusich under the call sign Talisman. Milchakov frequently appears in media, publicly encouraging the torture and killing of prisoners of war.

Milchakov joined the Wagner Group on January 18, 2017. As a Wagner employee, he was deployed to Palmyra, Syria, as a sapper and rifleman of the third assault squad, and to Sudan. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Milchakov has been active at various frontline hotspots, as evidenced by social media, including the Rusich Telegram channel. After being wounded in Kharkiv in 2022, he withdrew his personnel and later reappeared in Zaporizhzhia Oblast. Since April 2022, Milchakov has been serving as a scout sergeant in the Russian Armed Forces.

Milchakov and other Rusich members are implicated in numerous atrocity crimes, including the torture, murder, mutilation, and burning of dead Ukrainian soldiers from the Aidar Battalion and the 80th Air Assault Brigade on September 5, 2014. Milchakov openly propagates and justifies violence against Ukrainians in his interviews. He is sanctioned by the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Ukraine for undermining Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.