The Kireyev family served the Russian Throne for generations as a minor noble family, their estate stretching across southern and central Russia. Dating back to the early 16th century, records list certain Kireyevs such as Yakov and Syemyon Kireyev as property owners in
Saratov,
Perm, and
Simbirsk serving a number of mostly minor positions, with the occasional noble finding his way to power in Moscow itself. Many also served as military leaders, such as Mamaj, Petr, and Aleksei Kireyev hailing from
Kazan. who served as a guardsman, and Andrei Ivanovich who lost his life fighting the armies of the
Crimean Tatar Khan Davlet I Giray during the
Battle of Molodi. Two centuries later, some, turned to Don Cossacks, would fight as a family clan against the invading
Ottoman Army during the 1787
Russo-Turkish War, as well as in the
Polish–Russian War of 1792 under the call of
Catherine the Great. Into the 1920s, Kireyevs resided in
Old Believer Nekrasov Cossack villages such as Esaulovskaya in the
Don Host Obslast. Establishing themselves in the Nekrasov community, Kireyevs were often persecuted under the Soviet government for their non-orthodox beliefs, with many fighting against the
Red Army in the
White movement throughout the 1920s. After decades of persecution under the process of
Decossackization, some of those left over fought alongside the
Nazi German Army when it
invaded in 1941, the ones that survived dying in exile. In 2011, a
Pecherskiy District Ukrainian judge descended from the family—Rodion Kireyev—came to prominence after ordering the detention of, and later sentencing
Yulia Timoshenko to seven years in prison. Shortly thereafter he fled
Ukraine, and as a result an arrest warrant was issued against him in 2015 by a
near-supermajority of the
Verkhovna Rada. == Crest ==