Quotes of the Day

Not too many warrior nations have survived into the modern age. The Vikings are gone. The Spartans are long gone, and the Mongol hordes have not been too productive (or rather, destructive) since around the 13th century. So if your national pastime is war, it seems to follow that you will eventually lose one too many, and for the rest of the peace-loving world, that is probably a good thing. The one exception, at least in Europe, would seem to be the Cossacks — the war-obsessed people of Slavs from southern Russia who have been fighting since the 17th century in the name of the Tsar, the Motherland or the Russian Orthodox Church. They are still going strong.

Last week, in a remote valley in southern Ukraine, General Viktor Vodolatsky, a former plumber and the leader of the modern Cossacks, arrived to inspect his newest batch of troops. Most of them were younger than 15, some as young as 8 years old. But they looked fearsome enough, and were it not for their blond hair and distinctly Slavic features, these few dozen boys in fatigues could have passed for child soldiers geared up to fight somewhere in Africa. Even the youngest ones had hunting knives dangling from their belts, a few held rifles, and one boy proudly gripped a mock Kalashnikov with a grenade launcher fixed to the barrel. Over their heads, the Russian flag flew alongside the Ukrainian. Vodolatsky smiled.

As both a Cossack and a member of parliament for the United Russia party, which is chaired by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Vodolatsky has taken on a new crusade of a typically Cossack stripe. He wants to extend Russia's hegemony (once again) across the Slavic world, in particular to Ukraine and Belarus. Over the past eight years, he and his lieutenants have pounded this vision of a "united Slavic state" into the heads of the roughly 1,500 new cadets they have trained at their camp in the Crimean peninsula, where Ukraine's most active Cossack groups are based.

Their latest graduates — some of them Cossacks by birth, others newly initiated — took in their commander's speech on Aug. 10 with all the requisite decorum. "The unification of the Slavic state is the guarantee of our future," Vodolatsky told them. "And the children who stand beneath these Cossack banners are ideologically pure, physically strong and secure in their faith. Now you must serve as an example to the youth in whatever town you come from."

Although the bombast of it all did look at times cartoonish (even some of the boys seemed less impressed with Vodolatsky than with a dead snake they found crushed beneath their tent), the Ukrainian authorities are not laughing. They have found themselves at the receiving end of the Cossacks' new offensive, and they have had to start fighting back. Last year, the organizer of the camp, Sergei Yurchenko, who is a city councilman and Vodolatsky's envoy in the Crimea, faced charges for training armed insurgents. (Those charges, which Yurchenko denies, were later dropped for lack of evidence: police found only pellet guns and blanks when they raided the camp in search of weapons. "We hid the live ammo," Yurchenko tells TIME, admitting that they fire live weapons at the camp.)

But the catch-the-Cossack game has only escalated since then, just as relations between Moscow and Kiev have once again started to falter. To the disappointment of many officials in Moscow, Ukraine's ostensibly pro-Russian President, Viktor Yanukovych, has not turned out to be the Kremlin lackey many expected him to be. After taking office in February last year, he did relieve some of the animosity caused by the Orange Revolution of 2004, when Ukraine veered sharply away from Russia's political orbit. Three weeks after his inauguration, for instance, he allowed Vodolatsky back into the country (the previous administration had deemed him persona non grata in 2009 for holding Cossack rallies in the Crimea). More importantly, after a political battle that saw brawls and food fights break out in the hall of parliament, Yanukovych extended Russia's lease on a naval base in the Ukrainian port of Sevastopol in the Crimea.

But the honeymoon began to fizzle after that. No less than his predecessors from the Orange Revolution, Yanukovych has proven a stern defender of his country's sovereignty, often to Moscow's chagrin. He has rebuffed invitations to form a union government, a union parliament or a customs union with Russia and other ex-Soviet states, and during his latest meeting with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev on Aug. 11, he again declined to integrate his country's energy systems with Russia. For the Cossacks, it has thus become clear that a "Slavic union" is no closer to include Ukraine than it was after the Orange Revolution. As a result, their campaigns have gotten increasingly shrill in recent months and have started turning violent.

In July, they clashed for the first time with Ukrainian police in the city of Feodosiya. That conflict began when a local Cossack commander, Konstantin Borayev, decided to put up an 8-m-tall Russian Orthodox cross at the entrance to the city without permission from the government. The idea, Borayev told TIME at his clubhouse for local Cossack boys, was to present the authorities with a dilemma. If they removed the cross, police would inflame the Russian Orthodox community. If they did nothing, they would be seen as bending to the Cossacks' demands. "We held the high ground either way," he says. For two months, the Cossacks guarded the cross day and night until finally, on the morning of July 1, a brigade of riot police moved in before dawn, ripped the cross from the ground and sawed it in half, separating the crucifix from its enormous metal base.

By noon the next day, about a hundred angry Cossacks had descended on the scene from all over the Crimea. After waiting for the press to arrive, they picked up the crucifix, complete with its Byzantine depiction of Christ, and used it as a battering ram to charge the line of riot police who were guarding the spot where it had stood. In the ensuing brawl, more than a dozen Cossacks were beaten with truncheons, several had to be hospitalized, but their goal had been achieved: the Ukrainian police had come off as brutes and apostates in the eyes of many in the Russian Orthodox community.

"These actions send an effective message, and we will continue them," said Vitaly Khramov, one of Ukraine's most prominent Cossack elders. "We want them to understand that the state of Ukraine is a stillborn project, a tumor that Ukrainians must extract from themselves ... We are the immunity against this disease." As the head of Sobol, the radical Cossack battalion whose flags adorned the training camp last week, Khramov is one of the movement's key ideologues in Ukraine, and his preaching has reached many of the boys who attend the Cossack camps. (Among the ideas he spouted during his interview with TIME were the notions that the U.S. is a satanic nation secretly run by the Rockefeller family, that Jews practice ritual sacrifice and necrophilia, and that Vladimir Putin, Khramov's political hero, is a future saint of the Russian Orthodox Church.)

He said several times that the "Khramov brand," which he meant his reputation and ideology, had been developed by powerful people in Moscow's political circles. ("I am only a pawn in a much bigger game," he said.) But it is impossible to know how much of this is braggadocio. The Ukrainian secret service, however, has chosen to err on the side of caution: it has been seeking to deport Khramov, a Russian citizen, back to his motherland since last year after he was convicted and fined for inciting ethnic hatred. Khramov is appealing that verdict. (Among the other charges investigators have considered filing against him is polygamy, to which Khramov readily admits. Standing more than 2 m tall with hands the size of dinner plates, he says he has fathered 16 children by five wives, all of them common law.)

At his most recent court hearing on Aug. 9 in the Crimean capital of Simferopol, a small contingent of uniformed Cossacks demonstrated outside the court house. Along with several dozen policemen who stood guard around them, a secret-service agent from the counterextremism squad was on hand to videotape Khramov's supporters. "I wouldn't call them an imminent threat, more like a nuisance," the agent told TIME, only giving his first name, Andrei. "So far the Cossacks can't get more than a few hundred people out on the streets to protest." Asked if he knew where their funding was coming from, Andrei said it was unlikely to be the Russian Orthodox Church, which he said is too venerable an institution to get involved with "hooligans." Much more likely, he said, "the money is coming from the Cossacks in Russia."

With one degree of separation, that trail could lead back to Moscow's political institutions, which have given the Cossacks official status and provided generous state support. The Kremlin has a department devoted to Cossack relations, and in 2005, Putin signed the federal law called On the State Service of the Russian Cossacks, which establishes special Cossack units in Russia's security forces, granting them various rights normally monopolized by the state, like the right to police Russian territory and provide military training. All such services, the law states, are to be financed by the government. There is of course no such law in Ukraine, where Cossack groups have the legal status of nongovernmental organizations.

But in recent years, the Cossacks have begun actively campaigning for and winning seats in Ukraine's political bodies, primarily local legislatures in the Crimea and the pro-Russian heartland of eastern Ukraine. In Russia, there are already numerous Cossacks in senior positions of government, like the powerful Kremlin envoy to the North Caucasus Federal District, Alexander Khloponin, who was initiated into the Terek Cossack legion during an extravagant ceremony last October. Aside from being a member of the State Duma, Vodolatsky chairs a committee in the union parliament of Russia and Belarus. In his interview with TIME, he said that was where millions of dollars in financing had come from for the recruitment and training of Cossacks in the two countries. He declined to say whether any of that money was used for training in Ukraine. Yurchenko, his envoy in the Crimea, denied that his training camp received any foreign funding.

But regardless of who might be financing the camp, it does provide the young boys with ample lessons in pro-Russian ideology, as well as putting some of them through a brutal initiation rite that Vodolatsky defended as a necessary step toward "making them men." Conducted either by a martial-arts instructor or one of the older cadets, the test involves a three-minute beating that leaves the boys bruised and bloodied. "It was totally worth it," said Kiril, a 15-year-old Ukrainian who also said he passed the initiation to receive his Cossack cadet's beret. "I felt like I'd been born again after that." In a few years, when he came of age, he said he planned to join the Ukrainian army. But he seemed not to have given much thought to the question of his loyalties. Whose orders would he obey first? Those of his Cossack commander or his Ukrainian ranking officer? "I don't know. Both, I guess." He looked around at several of the other boys, who stared down into their lunch of potato soup. "Is that possible?"

• Simon Shuster / The Crimea, Ukraine
• The idea of an official warrior clan in 21st century Russia may seem anachronistic, but the Cossacks and their ideologues are not being funny