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 ...

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.

"The Pavel Sudoplatov battalion has incorporated volunteers from fraternal Serbia, who arrived in the ... proving in earnest their commitment to Russia and their readiness to fight against Nazism ...

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.