Yan Petrovsky was born in 1988 in Irkutsk then in 2004 his family moved to Norway. In Oslo he joined the local far-right from Eastern Europe. He worked in Oslo as a tattoo artist until the police raided and found weapons belonging to a Russian Nazi, MMA fighter Vyacheslav Datsik, who had escaped to Norway from a psychiatric clinic near St. Petersburg. He went to fight in Donbass, where he and Milchakov founded the Rusich battalion. In 2016, Norwegian authorities considered Petrovsky’s ties to right-wing extremists and his military skills a “threat to important national interests” and [deported](https://meduza.io/en/feature/2017/01/20/enemy-of-the-state-or-its-founding-element) him to Russia.