The Second Russian Civil War was a civil conflict fought between the NATO-backed Russian government and an insurgency of extreme nationalists loyal to the Russian Ultranationalist Party from 2011 to 2016. The war saw the Ultranationalists seize power in Moscow after five years of war against the corrupt government of Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin, and, while the majority of Russians accepted the new Russian government, a minority faction of the Russian Army continued to fight against the Ultranationalists from bases in foreign countries such as India and the Czech Republic.
Background[]
The Dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 ushered in a period of political, economic, and social chaos in Russia and the other former Soviet republics as the post-Soviet governments implemented controversial "shock therapy" reforms to liberalize their economies. These reforms led to the empowerment of an elite class of wealthy oligarchs and their political allies, and Vladimir Putin's authoritarian United Russia regime drew criticism from the West due to its strong ties to the oligarchic elite. Former arms dealer Imran Zakhaev - who had been believed dead by Britain since the Pripyat raid on 1996 - founded the underground Russian Ultranationalist Party, which advocated Russia's to its former Soviet-era glory. The Ultranationalists were a diverse coalition, including Marxist-Leninist hardliners, National Bolsheviks, Russian Orthodox nationalists, neo-fascists, neo-Soviets from the other post-Soviet republics, and any others who shared the same anti-Kremlin, anti-West, and pro-Soviet sentiment. Initially, Zakhaev's lieutenant Vladimir Makarov carried out a string of terrorist attacks against the government, including a 2001 Moscow bus bombing which killed 29 and injured 19 more, a 2001 bombing of Piccadilly Circus in London which killed 407, a 2001 massacre at the Russian GUM mall which left 87 dead, the 2003 bombing of several government buildings in Kazakhstan which left 245 dead, occasional guerrilla attacks on Russian Army and US Army troops, and the 2009 bombing of a US oil company in Baku. The Ultranationalists increased in popularity due to rising unemployment and poverty, despite being labelled as a terrorist group by the international community.
War[]
In 2011, pro-Ultranationalist protests across the former USSR were forcibly suppressed, leading to the Ultranationalists rising in rebellion against the Russian government. Zakhaev had already equipped and outfitted a sizable army since the 1990s, but they were soon joined by a vast number of Russian Army defectors who brought with them helicopters, BMPs, tanks, and military hardware. The North Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Russian Far East fell under Ultranationalist control, while the central government controlled European Russia. The Ultranationalists also established bases in neutral countries such as the Republic of Georgia and Azerbaijan, and they provided financial and material support to Ba'athist insurgents in Iraq to distract the United States and United Kingdom with an escalation of the Iraq War. The British SAS intercepted an Estonian-flagged cargo ship carrying a nuclear warhead in the Bering Strait, discovering the Ultranationalist-Iraqi insurgent alliance before the Russian Air Force struck the cargo ship and forced the SAS team to hastily evacuate. The Russian government, which had decided to keep the Ultranationalist surge under wraps, claimed that the ship had been lost in a storm. The SAS team proceeded to rescue their informant Nikolai from a safehouse in the Caucasus Mountains after aiding the local Loyalist cell in seizing the town from the Ultranationalists, although there was a degree of friction between Captain John Price and the Loyalist commander Kamarov due to Kamarov's intent to use the SAS team to help his soldiers in battle rather than help them rescue their informant. The SAS team's helicopter was shot down over Verkhnetoyemsky, Arkhangelsk Oblast, forcing the US Air Force to send in an AC-130 gunship to fight off their Ultranationalist pursuers as they fought their way to a landing zone where they were evacuated by an American military helicopter.
The SAS team was redeployed after the Iraqi insurgent leader Khaled al-Asad used a nuclear bomb to kill 30,000 American soldiers in Iraq, with the SAS team being inserted into northern Azerbaijan to track down al-Asad. The SAS's Amsar raid resulted in al-Asad's death, and they conducted a valiant exfiltration eight hours later, fighting off superior numbers before being evacuated by helicopter. The SAS and US Marine Corps proceeded to launch a joint operation to track down Zakhaev, first attempting to capture his son Viktor Zakhaev in Uzlovoy. Viktor shot himself before he could be captured alive, but the joint team was still able to track down Zakhaev after he issued a threat to send several ICBMs to strike the American Eastern Seaboard unless all British and American soldiers left Russia. The joint task force headed to the Altai Mountains to prevent the ICBMs from launching; while the ICBMs ultimately launched, the US-British-Loyalist team stormed the nuclear silo and the control room and aborted the missile launches, causing them to fall harmlessly into the Atlantic Ocean. The Russian government covered up the near-miss, claiming that they were local nuclear tests within UN protocols, despite international condemnation. Shortly after, Zakhaev was chased down and killed by the British and American troops, sparking a leadership crisis within the Russian Ultranationalist Party. Its moderate nationalist wing under Boris Vorshevsky prevailed with the support of the military and the majority of the Russian populace, while its extremist wing under Makarov began a terror campaign against Vorshevsky's faction. By 2016, Vorshevsky's faction had seized power in Moscow with popular support, but his rivalry with Makarov and the revanchist machinations of American general Herschel Shepherd led to the outbreak of World War III later that year.