I’ve become something of a student of Irregular Warfare since starting this blog. Lately I have been paying close attention to the Russo-Georgian War and reports of Ossete, Chechen and Cossack irregulars. They’ve been following in the wake of the Russian Army’s unconscripted kontraktniki regulars (called that because they sign enlistment contracts; the same term is also used to describe Russian mercenaries in the Balkans and Chechnya) like jackals after lions, burning, pillaging, looting, plundering, raping, and going medieval on Georgian ass. Seems amazing to me that in this day and age Tsar Volodka has called up the Cossacks to pacify the Near Abroad. Until very recently I had no idea that they still existed as an armed paramilitary force.
Strange parade in a strange land
Kremlin Backing of Cossacks Heightens Tensions in the North Caucasus
Russia’s Cossacks rush to join fighting with their “brothers”
Putin sends for Cossacks in fight against terrorism
- billy club or quirt?
Both. It’s a nagayka, good for beating horses and persecuting non-Russian minorities .
These guys may look like reenactors, but they take themselves very seriously.
Watch Return of the Cossacks and March of the Cossacks
MORE: a Cossack and a Chechen from an ethnic irregular militia unit fighting alongside the Russians
massacres, looting, and arson by irregular Cossack paramilitary units swarming across the border
Cossacks maintain close contact with militia in Kaluga. They call their cops militia. Kaluga is a city 117 miles southwest of Moscow.
Civilian Irregular Information Defense Group 
Those Cossacks are Putin’s Schrecklichkeit Truppen, spreading frightfulness the old fashioned way. Most of the real Cossacks that survived the Bolsheviks joined the Germans, surrendered to the British and were turned over to Stalin’s NKVD.
Cossackry today is strange mixture of Great Russian neo-fascist ultra-nationalist reenactor vigilantes deputized by Putin to “defend the motherland,” harass non-Russian chernozhopy, and rent themselves out as gunslinging kontraktniki in Balkan and Caucasian feuds.
Some of them are just tubby bearded guys in funny costumes, some of them are mafia dons, some of them are brain-washed kids and some of them are murderous rapists and pillagers running in mixed packs with Chechen Vostok battalion cut-throats and South Ossetian brigands.
To put Cossacks in American terms, imagine the Single Action Shooting Society being taken over by white supremicists, dressing up like the Shriners, authorized by the federal gov’t to be an auxiliary police force modeling themselves after the Arizona Rangers.