Here is a story you don’t read everyday.

From SMH Au
Militaristic tradition … a Cossack wields his sword in a battle re-enactment. Photo: Reuters

THE governor of Russia’s Krasnodar region, which will host the Winter Olympics in 2014, has enlisted the area’s Cossacks as an auxiliary police force, urging them to prevent darker-skinned Muslims from moving there.

Alexander Tkachev, in a speech to police officers on Thursday, announced that as of next month, 1000 Cossacks would be paid from the budget to maintain public order.

He said the Cossacks – whose paramilitary forces served the tsars – could take measures beyond what the police are allowed.

”We have no other way,” he said. ”We shall stamp it out, instil order; we shall demand paperwork and enforce migration policies.”

He said a neighbouring region had stopped performing its traditional function as ”a filter” between central Russia and the North Caucasus. The people who live in the North Caucasus, who are darker skinned and mostly Muslim, are considered by some ethnic Russians to be foreigners.

He said ethnic Russians there were ”already feeling uncomfortable”, and that the people who settled the region, Cossacks among them, ”year after year are losing their position”.

The New York Times