The Russian Community group has soared in popularity, with its focus on promoting the needs of ‘ethnic Russians’ and targeting immigrants.
A group of uniformed men, at least one of them masked, walk up to a pair of watermelon sellers in a street on the outskirts of the Siberian city of Novosibirsk. The men are dressed in black, wearing tactical vests with patches bearing the emblem of a bogatyr – a mythic warrior of Slavic folklore – riding on horseback.
They inform the traders, who they believe to be foreigners, that they are trading without a permit, and the black-clad men help load their goods into a van to be confiscated by the authorities.
But these men-in-black have no official position in law enforcement.
A video of this operation was uploaded online on Monday morning by the Russian Community, or Russkaya Obshchina (RO), who boasted of shutting down an “oriental bazaar”.
