The Tsar promised to help Serbia at some point, but couldn’t guarantee anything in the near term, since Russia’s war industries were fully occupied supplying its own military needs.

In early March, the acting governor of the Zaporozhye Region, Yevgeny Balitsky, announced that Serbian volunteers who were fighting on the side of Russia in the Pavel Sudoplatov volunteer ...

Russian “volunteers” for the Slav cause and its mobilization in the face of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s declaration of war against Serbia in July 1914 helped ignite World War I.