This chapter follows the Russian volunteers who entered Donbas in 2014 believing they were stepping into a story larger and older than themselves. The conflict seemed to open a path back to a Russia they felt had slipped away, a space where fragments of Civil War myth and imperial longing could be arranged into coherence. Around Igor Strelkov formed a narrative gravity that drew equally on the work of his popularizers and on the volunteers’ own projections—their desire to escape the gloom of repressive Putin-era Russia and to find in him the features of a lost imperial glory. Donbas thus became the surface onto which they cast imagined loyalties and heroic versions of themselves, mistaking emotional intensity for truth. Violence, filtered through borrowed images and wartime legend, appeared to sharpen purpose rather than distort it. The confused language of love some used to justify cruelty revealed its deeper object: not the region or its people but an imagined nation assembled from memory, desire, and refusal of the present—a love whose imagined rejection demanded still more violence.