Gennady E. Afanasiev and his co-authors published the Russian article "Khazarskie konfederaty v Basseyne Dona" in Yestestvennonauchnie metodi issledovaniya i paradigma sovremennoy arkheologii: Materiali Vserossiyskoy nauchnoy koferentsii, Moskva, Institut arkheologii Rossiyskoy akademii nauk, 8-11 dekabrya 2015 in 2015 on pages 146-153. They examined the uniparental markers of 4 individuals in the Saltovo-Mayaki culture of Khazaria who lived circa the 800s:
•Sample A80301 belonged to the Y-DNA haplogroup R1a1a1b2a (R-Z94) which is of Persian/West Asian origin and found today among Turkic-speaking Karachay people. A80301's mtDNA haplogroup was I4a which is found today in northwestern and central Europe such as in Sweden, and also found around the Black Sea, in the North Caucasus, and in Armenia, Iran, and Siberia.
•Sample A80302's mtDNA haplogroup was D4m2, which is found today in Siberia among the Dolgan, Yakut, and Even peoples, but is never found among Ashkenazim.
•Sample A80410 belonged to the Y-DNA haplogroup G, commonly found among peoples in West Asia and the Caucasus today.
•Sample A80411 belonged to the Y-DNA haplogroup J2a, which is also commonly found in West Asia and the Caucasus today, and also in Central Asia and in parts of Europe like the Balkans.
Anatole A. Klyosov and Tatiana Faleeva's article "Excavated DNA from Two Khazar Burials" in Advances in Anthropology 7 (2017) on pages 17-21 examines the Y-DNA STRs of two Khazar samples from the lower Don region of southern Russia. Both of them belong to haplogroups within R1a's subclade Z93's Turkic branches, not part of the Ashkenazic Jewish or North Slavic lineages of R1a. The authors write that "R1a-Z93 is very common in present-day Turkic-speaking peoples such as Caucasian Karachaevo-Balkars, also Tatars, Bashkirs, Kirgiz, and other populations who apparently descended from Scythians, and have their common ancestors in the R1a-Z93 subclade dated back to 1500-2500 years ago".