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Who Are The Neo-Nazis Fighting For Russia In Ukraine?

The video, published in December 2020, showed two nattily dressed Russian men -- waistcoats, pocket squares, silk ties – sipping American whiskey in brandy snifters and discussing killing Ukrainians.

"I'm a Nazi. I’m a Nazi,” said one of the men, Aleksei Milchakov, who was the main focus of the video published on a Russian nationalist YouTube channel. “I'm not going to go deep and say, I’m a nationalist, a patriot, an imperialist, and so forth. I’ll say it outright: I’m a Nazi.”

“You have to understand that when you kill a person, you feel the excitement of the hunt. If you’ve never been hunting, you should try it. It’s interesting,” he said.

Aside from being a notorious, avowed Nazi known for killing a puppy and posting bragging photographs about it on social media, Milchakov is the head of a Russian paramilitary group known as Rusich, which openly embraces Nazi symbolism and radical racist ideologies. The group, and Milchakov himself, have been credibly linked to atrocities in Ukraine and in Syria.

Along with members of the Russian Imperial Movement, a white supremacist group that was designated a "global terrorist" organization by the United States two years ago, Rusich is one of several right-wing groups that are actively fighting in Ukraine, in conjunction with Russia’s regular armed forces or allied separatist units.

According to a confidential report by Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service, which was obtained by Der Spiegel and excerpted on May 22, numerous Russian right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis are fighting in Ukraine.

German analysts wrote that the fact that Russian military and political leaders have welcomed neo-Nazi groups undermines the claim by Putin and his government that one of the principal motives behind the invasion is the desire to “de-Nazify” Ukraine, Spiegel said.

This fact, Spiegel quoted the report as saying, renders "the alleged reason for the war, the so-called de-Nazification of Ukraine, absurd.”

From Syria to Ukraine

Even before the February 24 invasion, the war in Ukraine had drawn a substantial but unknown number of soldiers and fighters with right-wing sympathies. Most of the attention has long focused on right-wing militias and paramilitaries that have fought alongside or as part of Ukraine’s armed forces -- a phenomenon dating back to the start of the conflict in the Donbas in 2014.

Ukraine’s famed Azov Regiment was formed out of a right-wing militia called the Azov Battalion that gained renown in the early days of the war. The group’s leaders and founders openly espoused xenophobic and anti-immigrant rhetoric. Its logos bore a close resemblance to some used by Nazi units during World War II.

Later incorporated into Ukraine’s National Guard, Azov has toned down in extremist rhetoric, but retained a reputation as a formidable fighting unit.

For years, Russian officials have seized on Azov as well as 20th century nationalist figures like Stepan Bandera and others for propaganda purposes, often distorting or exaggerating their views and actions in support of the false assertion that Ukraine is controlled or dominated by neo-Nazis.

In announcing the invasion on February 24, Putin attempted to justify it by saying the goals were “demilitarization and de-Nazification.” Kyiv and Western governments say that argument is disingenuous and say, even if it was true, it wouldn’t justify launching an unprovoked invasion against a country with a democratically elected government.

Less attention, however, has been paid over the years to right-wing Russian militias fighting on behalf of Russia, not just in Ukraine but also in Syria.

While some fighters are believed to have joined the ranks of Russian private mercenary companies -- Vagner is the best known -- an unknown number of fighters joined, and trained under, Rusich, as well as the Russian Imperial Movement and its paramilitary unit, the Russian Imperial Legion.

Milchakov, a former paratrooper, has been identified by experts as the co-leader of Rusich, along with another Russian named Yan Petrovsky. Some experts say the group is explicitly affiliated with Vagner.

The Rusich group was formally founded as the Sabotage and Assault Reconnaissance Group Rusich in St. Petersburg in 2014.

Both Milchakov and Petrovsky fought against Ukraine as volunteers in the Donbas in 2014 and 2015 and have openly displayed patches awarded to them as part of the "Union of Donbas Volunteers.” At the time, however, Russia repeatedly denied its forces were fighting in the Donbas, asserting, while often straining credulity, that the local forces battling Ukrainian troops were merely local partisans.

In September 2014, near the Luhansk Oblast village of Shchastya, Rusich militants battled a Ukrainian paramilitary group called Aidar. Ukrainian news reports said dozens of Ukrainian soldiers were killed. Afterward, images of mutilated and burnt bodies circulated online, and Milchakov later openly bragged about photographing the bodies.

Milchakov also gained notoriety that same year when bloggers and reporters discovered a series of photos and videos from two years earlier in which he was shown killing a puppy, cutting off its head and allegedly eating it.

The tabloid Russian newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets titled an article about the gory incident “A Fascist Butcher From St. Petersburg Has Gone To Fight For The Insurgents.”

In early 2015, Milchakov and Petrovsky were sanctioned by Canada, Britain, and the European Union. Milchakov “has actively supported actions and policies which undermine the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine and to further destabilize Ukraine,” Britain said in its sanctions announcement.

In October 2016, Petrovsky was arrested in Norway, where he had been living and working alongside a Norwegian man tied to the right-wing group Soldiers of Odin. He was deported that same month.

Photographs and videos posted to social media in 2020-2021 indicated that Rusich fighters were in Syria, where Russia has conducted a military operation to back the Syrian regime and eliminate opposition fighters there. The St. Petersburg media outlet Fontanka in late 2017 also found photographs of Milchakov swimming in a pool near Palmyra.

The German intelligence report said Rusich fighters have been in Ukraine since early April.

There’s no confirmation that Milchakov or Petrovsky are or have been in Ukraine at any time since the February 24 invasion. However, on May 27, a Telegram channel that appeared to be affiliated with Rusich published an undated photograph that purported to show both Milchakov and Petrovsky in Ukraine, standing in front of a semi-destroyed armored vehicle.

Milchakov…is back in action,” the post said. “Now he is somewhere in the vastness of Ukraine actively engaged in de-Nazification and demilitarization.”

'Reserve Squad'

The day that Russia launched its invasion, the head of the Russian Imperial Movement, Denis Gariyev, posted a message on his Telegram channel saying: "Without a doubt, we are in favor of the liquidation of the separatist entity Ukraine.”

Founded in 2002 in St. Petersburg by Stanislav Vorobyov, the Russian Imperial Movement subscribes to a monarchist ideology, partly derived from a belief that Russia should be led by a descendent of the Romanov dynasty, the family of the last Russian tsar.

In April 2020, the U.S. State Department imposed sanctions on the group, as well as Vorobyov, Gariyev and another man.

The group “has provided paramilitary-style training to white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Europe and actively works to rally these types of groups into a common front against their perceived enemies,” the department said in a statement. The movement “has two training facilities in St. Petersburg, which are likely being used for woodland and urban assault, tactical weapons, and hand-to-hand combat training.

A few weeks after Gariyev’s Telegram post, the organization's combat training center in near St. Petersburg, called Partizan, announced the recruitment of volunteers to fight in Ukraine.

Gariyev has also created a related organization called Reserve Squad, which, according to the German intelligence report, has received multimillion-dollar orders from the Interior Ministry, the Federal Security Service, and the Federal Protective Service, which is the government agency charged with providing bodyguard protection to top Kremlin officials.

Like with Rusich, fighters with the Russian Imperial Legion joined the hostilities in eastern Ukraine in 2014-2015, and according to information provided by the militants, at least six members of the group were killed then.

According to German intelligence, Gariyev was wounded in fighting in mid-April, and his deputy, Denis Nekrasov, was killed, possibly near the Kharkiv Oblast city of Izyum.

Aleksandr Verkhovsky, a longtime expert on extremist groups in Russia and head of the research center SOVA, said that there were likely far fewer Russian extremist fighters in Ukraine now than there were in the early years of the Donbas war.

“Nationalists played a key role in the first phase of the war,” he told Current Time. “They were a significant part, not a majority, but significant. Now we don’t see here a large number of volunteers from Russia…. Maybe a maximum of a few dozen.”

Decrying Nazism – even when it’s not there – has been Russia’s ‘Invade country for free’ card Published: July 14, 2022 2.32pm CEST

Oleg Morozov, a member of the Russian parliament and an ally of President Vladimir Putin’s, made what sounded much like a threat in May 2022.

Poland should be “in first place in the queue for denazification after Ukraine,” he said.

Just days earlier, pro-Putin Moscow city assembly member, Sergey Savostyanov, asserted that after Ukraine, Russia needs to drive alleged Nazis from power in six more countries: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Moldova and Kazakhstan.

Just a few months following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which was made under the false pretense of denazifying the government of that country, such claims might send chills down the spines of the people in those countries as well as of many keen observers of the region.

It could be argued that such claims of denazification “might be dismissed as the hyperbolic expression of one individual in the overheated atmosphere of Russia today,” as scholar and former diplomat Paul Goble recently described it. Yet it’s evident that for over a decade, Russia has used lies and disinformation, including many references to denazifiying Ukraine, to build a case specifically for the Ukraine invasion.

And unsupported claims of denazification have been an excuse for Russian international aggression since World War II.

Putin and his allies have attempted to expand the meaning of “Nazism” to essentially render it meaningless – but still useful to them. Anyone who opposes Putin’s government can be labeled a Nazi, representing basically the worst and most horrible enemies Russia has ever faced in its history, the battle against whom cost almost 1 in 6 Soviet lives, civilian and military.

The opposition is fascist As a scholar of Russian diplomatic communication, I have researched Russian use of language to justify its military interventions. I found that Russian diplomats inconsistently use and misuse international law expressions to justify Russian actions aimed at gaining either more influence or territory.

And the label “Nazi” has been selectively used and misused to target the perceived opponents of the Putin regime, at times with some success. Indeed, on one extreme, according to Putin’s propogandists, Nazism doesn’t even have to be antisemitic. To Russian officials, anyone who expresses anti-Russian sentiment can be denounced as a Nazi. That allowed Russia to claim that Ukraine was run by Nazis, even though President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish.

In May 2022, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, a strong ally of Putin’s, accused the West of supporting Nazi ideas. Also in May, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs articulated that the Israeli government is supporting neo-Nazis in Ukraine. This assertion came right after Israel demanded an apology for Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s claim that Hitler had Jewish origins.

Long-running accusations Nowhere has Russia been more persistent with accusations of Nazism than in Estonia and Latvia, two countries with sizable Russian-speaking populations and membership in the European Union and NATO.

For decades, Russia has alleged that fascist ideas have been circulating in these countries on a large scale and have become mainstream. In 2007, Putin said that he is dismayed by Estonia and Latvia’s alleged reverence for Nazism: “The activities of the Latvian and Estonian authorities openly connive at the glorification of Nazis and their accomplices. But these facts remain unnoticed by the European Union.”

In 2012, Russia reacted angrily to a recent gathering of World War II veterans in Estonia and stated that it was aimed at “glorification of former SS-men and local collaborationists.”

In 2022, Latvia designated May 9 as the Day of Remembrance for those killed in Ukraine as a result of the Russian invasion. This move was sure to irk some folks in Russia, as Russia celebrates the Soviet victory over the Nazis in World War II on the very same day. Latvia was at the time also debating the removal of monuments to Soviet-era soldiers.

In response, Putin’s spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that “the ruling regime in Latvia has long been well known for its neo-Nazi preferences.”

The pot calling the kettle Meanwhile, another debate rages about whether Russia under Putin itself can be seen as a fascist state. On one hand, Putin’s dictatorship has embraced expansionist militarism, crushed domestic opposition, promoted toxic nationalism and revived Russian patriotism by building national identity around the Russian defeat of Nazi Germany.

On the other hand, those who argue that Russia may be a repressive and aggressive dictatorship – but not a fascist state – note that fascism is a fundamentally revolutionary ideology and tends to be accompanied with mass mobilization. Meanwhile, Putin is viewed by many as a reactionary right-wing dictator who is not guided by revolutionary ideas, does not have much charisma and is governing a largely passive population. His supporters will likely continue labeling perceived adversaries as Nazis. Such rhetorical groundwork could eventually lead to more wars beyond Ukraine.

How the Russian Media Spread False Claims About Ukrainian Nazis By Charlie SmartJuly 2, 2022

In the months since President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia called the invasion of Ukraine a “denazification” mission, the lie that the government and culture of Ukraine are filled with dangerous “Nazis” has become a central theme of Kremlin propaganda about the war.

Russian articles about Ukraine that mention Nazism

A data set of nearly eight million articles about Ukraine collected from more than 8,000 Russian websites since 2014 shows that references to Nazism were relatively flat for eight years and then spiked to unprecedented levels on Feb. 24, the day Russia invaded Ukraine. They have remained high ever since.

The data, provided by Semantic Visions, a defense analytics company, includes major Russian state media outlets in addition to thousands of smaller Russian websites and blogs. It gives a view of Russia’s attempts to justify its attack on Ukraine and maintain domestic support for the ongoing war by falsely portraying Ukraine as being overrun by far-right extremists.

News stories have falsely claimed that Ukrainian Nazis are using noncombatants as human shields, killing Ukrainian civilians and planning a genocide of Russians.

The strategy was most likely intended to justify what the Kremlin hoped would be a quick ouster of the Ukrainian government, said Larissa Doroshenko, a researcher at Northeastern University who studies disinformation. “It would help to explain why they’re establishing this new country in a sense,” Dr. Doroshenko said. “Because the previous government were Nazis, therefore they had to be replaced.”

Multiple experts on the region said the claim that Ukraine is corrupted by Nazis is false. President Volodymyr Zelensky, who received 73 percent of the vote when he was elected in 2019, is Jewish, and all far-right parties combined received only about 2 percent of parliamentary votes in 2019 — short of the 5 percent threshold for representation.

“We tolerate in most Western democracies significantly higher rates of far-right extremism,” said Monika Richter, head of research and analysis at Semantic Visions and a fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council.

The common Russian understanding of Nazism hinges on the notion of Nazi Germany as the antithesis of the Soviet Union rather than on the persecution of Jews specifically said Jeffrey Veidlinger, a professor of history and Judaic studies at the University of Michigan. “That’s why they can call a state that has a Jewish president a Nazi state and it doesn’t seem all that discordant to them,” he said.

Despite the lack of evidence that Ukraine is dominated by Nazis, the idea has taken off among many Russians. The false claims about Ukraine may have started on state media but smaller news sites have gone on to amplify the messages.

Social media data provided by Zignal Labs shows a spike in references to Nazism in Russian language tweets that matches the uptick in Russian news media. “You see it on Russian chat groups and in comments Russians are making in newspaper articles,” said Dr. Veidlinger. “I think many Russians actually believe this is a war against Nazism.”

He noted that the success of this propaganda campaign has deep roots in Russian history. “The war against Nazism is really the defining moment of the 20th century for Russia,” Dr. Veidlinger said. “What they’re doing now is in a way a continuation of this great moment of national unity from World War II. Putin is trying to rile up the population in favor of the war.”

Mr. Putin alluded to that history in a speech on May 9 for the Russian holiday commemorating victory over Nazi Germany. “You are fighting for our motherland so that nobody forgets the lessons of World War II,” he said to a parade of thousands of Russian soldiers. “So that there is no place in the world for torturers, death squads and Nazis.”

A key feature of Russian propaganda is its repetitiveness, Ms. Richter said. “You just see a constant regurgitation and repackaging of the same stuff over and over again.” In this case, that means repeating unfounded allegations about Nazism. Since the invasion, 10 to 20 percent of articles about Ukraine have mentioned Nazism, according to the Semantic Visions data.

Experts say linking Ukraine with Nazism can prevent cognitive dissonance among Russians when news about the war in places like Bucha seeps through. “It helps them justify these atrocities,” Dr. Doroshenko said. “It helps to create this dichotomy of black and white — Nazis are bad, we are good, so we have the moral right.”

The tactic appears to work. Russians’ access to news sources not tied to the Kremlin has been curtailed since the government silenced most independent media outlets after the invasion. During the war, Russian citizens have echoed claims about Nazism in interviews, and in a poll published in May by the Levada Center, an independent Russian pollster, 74 percent expressed support for the war.

Part of what makes accusations of Nazism so useful to Russian propagandists is that Ukraine’s past is entangled with Nazi Germany.

“There is a history of Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis, and Putin is trying to build upon that history,” Dr. Veidlinger said. “During the Second World War there were parties in Ukraine that sought to collaborate with the Germans, particularly against the Soviets.”

Experts said this history makes it easy for the Russian media to draw connections between real Nazis and modern far-right groups to give the impression that the contemporary groups are larger and more influential than they are.

The Azov Battalion, a regiment of the Ukrainian Army with roots in ultranationalist political groups, has been used by the Russian media since 2014 as an example of far-right support in Ukraine. Analysts said the Russian media’s portrayal of the group exaggerates the extent to which its members hold neo-Nazi views.

Russian television regularly featured segments on the battalion in April when members of the group defended a steel plant in the besieged city of Mariupol.

“For Russia, it was a perfect opportunity,” Dr. Doroshenko said. “It was like, ‘We’ve been smearing them for so long and they’re still there, they’re still fighting, so we can justify our tactics of destroying Mariupol because we need to destroy these Nazis.’”

Russia’s false claim that its invasion of Ukraine is an attempt to “denazify” the country has been criticized by the Anti-Defamation League, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and dozens of scholars of Nazism, among others.

“The current Ukrainian state is not a Nazi state by any stretch of the imaginiation,” Dr. Veidlinger said. “I would argue that what Putin is actually afraid of is the spread of democracy and pluralism from Ukraine to Russia. But he knows that the accusation of Nazism is going to unite his population.”

Published: 03.04.2022 Antisemitism Globally March 04, 2022

“When Ukrainian nationalists and Jews look at those red and black flags, we see two different things.” – Prof. David Fishman

By Andrew Srulevitch, ADL Director of European Affairs

As the Russian assault on Ukraine has intensified, the Russian president and his government has escalated rhetoric falsely labeling the Ukrainian government and its leaders as “Nazis.” President Vladimir Putin has claimed that the military action is aimed at the “denazification of Ukraine” and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called the Ukrainian president “a Nazi and a neo Nazi.”

Earlier this week, I spoke to Dr. David Fishman, a professor of Jewish History at The Jewish Theological Seminary, about how Russian propaganda, including rhetoric linking Ukraine and the Nazis, is being used as part of a campaign of disinformation in an attempt to discredit the democratically elected Ukrainian government.

Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.

Q: Why does Putin think it makes any sense to call Ukrainian leaders Nazis, especially when President Zelensky is Jewish?

Dr. Fishman: “This propaganda is an attempt to delegitimize Ukraine in the eyes of the Russian public, which considers its war against Nazi Germany its greatest moment, and in eyes of the Western publics who may not know much about Ukraine except that it’s next to Russia.”

Q: But why call them Nazis, aside from that being the worst accusation one can make?

“This propaganda isn’t new. Russia has for years highlighted the activity of a marginal group of Ukrainian ultra-nationalists as a way of trying to stigmatize all of Ukraine. Yes, some members of these ultra-nationalist groups have used Nazi insignia, made Hitler salutes, and used antisemitic rhetoric, but they are politically insignificant and in no way representative of Ukraine. The political parties which the ultra-nationalists support received just over 2 percent of the vote in the 2019 elections. Ukraine is a flawed democracy, but unquestionably a democracy, and in no way a Nazi regime.”

Q: But we’ve seen torchlit marches in the middle of Kyiv with the red and black flags of UPA (the WWII-era Ukrainian Insurgent Army) and pictures of Stepan Bandera, who allied with the Nazis during WWII. Isn’t that evidence of Nazism in Ukraine?

“For Ukrainian nationalists, UPA and Bandera are symbols of the Ukrainian fight for Ukrainian independence. The UPA allied with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union for tactical – not ideological – reasons. For Jews, however, not only is allying with the Nazis unforgivable under any circumstance, but historians have documented that Ukrainian nationalists participated together with Germans in the murder of many thousands of Jews in Ukraine.

“We should also not forget that 10 million Ukrainians fought in the Red Army against Nazi Germany and 1.5 million Ukrainians died in combat. The number of Ukrainians who fought the Nazis dwarfs the number who collaborated with them. When Ukrainian nationalists and Jews look at those red and black flags, we see two different things.”

Q: So you wouldn’t term as Nazis even those who march with the red and black flag?

“There are neo-Nazis in Ukraine, just as there are in the U.S., and in Russia for that matter. But they are a very marginal group with no political influence and who don’t attack Jews or Jewish institutions in Ukraine. Putin’s propaganda is so far from the truth that it doesn’t survive the first contact with even a little knowledge.”

Is there any truth to Russia's 'Ukrainian Nazis' propaganda? Kathrin Wesolowski 12/03/2022December 3, 2022 Russian propagandists are constantly saying Ukraine is full of Nazis, and posting alleged evidence online. DW's fact-checking team has investigated some of this supposed evidence.

Ever since the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and even before, there were stories circulating that claimed many Ukrainians were adherents of Nazism. On well-known propaganda channels such as the German-language Telegram group "Neues aus Russland" ("News from Russia"), run by the allegedly independent journalist Alina Lipp, assertions regarding "Ukrainian Nazis" are rife. Such posts are influential — Lipp's channel alone has more than 183,000 subscribers.

A simple search on the channel shows that the word "Nazi" occurs 285 times, "National Socialism" 22 times and "swastika" 17 times (as of November 25).

But why is there this narrative about Ukrainian Nazis? And what about the alleged evidence spread by pro-Russian accounts on social media?

Claim No. 1: A video in a tweet allegedly coming from the Arab news broadcaster Al Jazeera says three drunk Ukrainians spread Nazi symbols at the football World Cup in Qatar.

DW fact check: False

Russian journalist and propagandist Vladimir Solovyov has also shown this video on his Telegram channel, where it has been watched almost 400,000 times as of November 25. In the style of Al Jazeera, the video reports on how three Ukrainians drew a Hitler mustache on a graffiti image of the FIFA World Cup mascot and wrote a Nazi slogan next to it. The video also claims the three Ukrainians had destroyed 10 posters near the Al Bayt Stadium, and that they were then arrested without protest.

The video and its claims are fake, as our research has shown and Al Jazeera itself said in its own fact

In the clip, one can see the Al Jazeera logo and fonts that are very similar to the authentic videos of the broadcaster (here an example). The video itself does not show the three specific alleged Ukrainian fans, but only general images of Ukrainian supporters.

Although that is a usual procedure in journalism, it is interesting that no more specific details are given on the men — which is cause for suspicion, as men aged between 18 and 60 have not been allowed to leave Ukraine since mobilization was announced there. What's more, the Ukrainian team did not even qualify for the World Cup.

It is also striking that the name of Al Bayt Stadium was written incorrectly as El Beit. Nor are there any pictures of the allegedly ruined posters to be seen. A scene is also shown in which the Ukrainian fans are allegedly arrested — but the clothing worn by the police is not that used by the security staff on duty at the World Cup, according to the Qatari Interior Ministry.

If the emblem seen on the arm of one of the alleged officers is put into a reverse image search, it leads to various websites that indicate that it is a military badge, though it's not clear from what country.

In conclusion, the video was examined by various fact checkers and is fake. Al Jazeera, the alleged originator, has also confirmed that it is faked.

Claim No. 2: "Some Ukrainian fighters wear the slogan 'Jedem das Seine' ["to each his own" — a slogan written on the main gate of the Buchenwald concentration camp — Editor's note] as a sign of their commitment to neo-Nazism," the above-mentioned Alina Lipp writes on her Telegram channel, publishing a photo that is meant to serve as proof.

DW fact check: False

The photo has clearly been manipulated, as our research shows. The slogan was superimposed on the soldier's helmet using image-processing software, a reverse image search reveals. What's more, the original photo is turned about as a mirror image.

The men on the photo are also not unknown. They are from the Ukrainian band Antytila, which no longer just sings but also helps defend Ukraine against the Russian invasion. The band became known internationally when they recorded a remix of the song "2Step" with the musician Ed Sheeran. International media such as The Washington Post used the photo, showing the band members in soldiers' uniforms, as a feature image.

Claim No. 3: In a Ukrainian shopping mall, there is a staircase with a big swastika on it — that is implied by a video that is spread by this Twitter user, among others.

DW fact check: Misleading

The video, which has often been shared on social media, shows a huge LED swastika shining on a staircase, with a big red heart further up, in a shopping center called Gorodok in Kyiv.

The video is indeed authentic — but misleading. According to a statement by the shopping center that was published three days later on Facebook, the incident occurred back on February 16, 2019, at around 1:30 p.m. Hackers were said to be responsible for the LED swastika. The statement said a security guard had informed managerial staff as soon as he noticed the Nazi symbol on the illuminated staircase, whereupon the shopping center immediately turned off the lighting.

The case was reported to investigating authorities. On July 29, 2019, the Kyiv state prosecutor's office said in a press statement that a 17-year-old had accessed the computer system with the software TeamViewer. The logo of the software can be seen in the video.

According to the state prosecutor, the password of the system could briefly be seen, something the youth exploited to be able to insert the swastika. A large number of fact checks have already been published about the video.

In conclusion, while it is true that a swastika was displayed for a few minutes in a shopping center in Kyiv, it wasn't intentional. It was the result of a hacking attack, and not a permanent LED fixture.

Putin's narrative about 'Ukrainian Nazis' So the fact is that many of the claims about alleged "Ukrainian Nazis" are invented, or misleading. But the narrative persists because Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian propagandists are constantly spreading false information.

Even in his speech (here subjected to a DW fact check) shortly before Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in late February, Putin spoke of Russia having to "denazify" Ukraine. So-called denazification is a historical term that has to do with the policy of the victorious Allied powers toward Nazi Germany after World War II. They wanted to rid the country of Nazi influences and remove those associated with the ideology from office.

But the comparison with Ukraine does not hold up, Andreas Umland, an analyst at the Stockholm Center for Eastern European Studies told DW back in February. "The president of Ukraine is a Russian-speaking Jew, who won the last presidential election against a non-Jewish Ukrainian candidate by a huge margin," he said, adding that the talk of Nazism in Ukraine was completely unfounded.

Umland said that although there were right-wing extremists groups in Ukraine, they were relatively weak in comparison with many European countries. "We had a unity front of all the right-wing radical parties at the last [EU] parliamentary elections in 2019, and that unity front received 2.15%," he said.

What about the Azov Battalion? There has also been criticism of right-wing Ukrainian militia members who were fighting against the separatists in the east of Ukraine earlier this year — above all, the Azov Battalion. Umland said that although it was founded by a right-wing extremist group, it was integrated into forces of the Interior Ministry, the National Guard, in the fall of 2014.

After that, he said, there had been a separation of the movement and the regiment, with the latter still using the former's symbols but no longer being classified as part of the right-wing extremist scene. During military training courses, extremist soldiers had sometimes come to light, he said, but they had then "been revealed and named as a scandal."

Neo-Nazi Russian militia appeals for intelligence on Nato member states This article is more than 9 months old Move by Task Force Rusich raises fears of rogue paramilitary attacks on Baltic nations of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia

A neo-Nazi paramilitary group linked to the Kremlin has asked its members to submit intelligence on border and military activity in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, raising concerns over whether far-right Russian groups are planning an attack on Nato countries.

The official Telegram channel for “Task Force Rusich” – currently fighting in Ukraine on behalf of the Kremlin and linked to the notorious Wagner Group – last week requested members to forward details relating to border posts and military movements in the three Baltic states, which were formerly part of the Soviet Union.

The news has prompted questions over who has overall command over the far-right pro-Kremlin groups fighting in Ukraine.

Rusich is closely aligned to the Wagner Group, a military outfit run by a close ally of Vladimir Putin and now leading the Russian offensive to capture the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, currently the most fiercely contested battle of the conflict.

Sources speaking on condition of anonymity said the “extraordinary” move by Rusich could point to disenchantment with the Kremlin and frustration with how Putin’s war in Ukraine is going.

They added that the Kremlin could lose control of its far-right Russian paramilitary organisations, which may exploit more extreme methods to pursue the Ukrainian war, raising fears of escalation if a Nato state were attacked.

However, sources added it was unlikely that the Kremlin was directly involved because its espionage service would undoubtedly already have intelligence on military and border activity in the Baltic states.

The source said: “Does it indicate fragmentation within the Russian system? What happens if the Russians lose control of them [the paramilitary groups] and they start committing rogue actions that could accidentally escalate the situation? The real question is: how much control does the Kremlin really have?”

Recent reports indicate that some paramilitary groups such as the Wagner Group, founded by the powerful Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, already have considerable autonomy and as much access to Putin as formal government officials.

Although interactions between Rusich and Wagner Group-affiliated online channels have been documented recently, it remains unclear to what extent the group operates with strategic oversight from Wagner or even the Russian defence ministry.

Rusich promotes itself as a sabotage and reconnaissance force, though its frequent crowdfunding efforts suggest it is not effectively supported by Russian logistical operations.

Last Wednesday, the operators of Rusich’s official Russian-language channel on Telegram published a post requesting users in Baltic countries to anonymously share information relating to military and associated infrastructure.

The post, viewed by more than 60,000 users, called for information relating to military units, with specific references to member data and occupations, relatives of members and their personal transport. It also asked for details of patrol movements, and for the locations of border posts, surveillance systems and vehicles.

Details of communication towers and security apparatus on the border, as well as the coordinates of fuel depots and security systems in border areas, were similarly requested.

Rusich’s fighters, notorious for their brutality in Syria and the 2014 war in Crimea, have been spotted via open-source intelligence in Ukraine’s Donbas and Kharkiv regions, and in Kherson.

The US treasury department announced in September that it was imposing sanctions against Rusich.

Recent reports indicate the Biden administration is now considering designating the Wagner Group as a foreign terrorist organisation. The group was widely condemned after it posted a gruesome video of the execution with a sledgehammer of a former recruit who defected to Ukraine but was apparently recaptured by the group.

The Wall Street Journal’s latest documentary “Shadow Men: Inside Russia’s Secret War Company” goes deep inside the lethal global expansion of the Russian private military company Wagner — tracing the group's evolution from a small, guns-for-hire operation into a sprawling network of businesses that has been active on four continents.

Through interviews with current and former Wagner fighters, government insiders, victims of attacks and war crimes investigators, the film reveals how the group is hiding the flow of riches and resources through a complex network of front companies that ultimately connect to the Kremlin.

0:00 What is Wagner and who is Yevgeny Prigozhin? 3:36 How the Wagner Group operates 6:16 Wagner’s origins 10:36 A new business model in Syria 17:24 Wagner’s expansion into Africa 19:59 Wagner’s Africa playbook: guns and gold 27:13 The war in Ukraine, Wagner steps out of the shadows 36:09 Wagner’s future

OPINION Fighting against the USSR didn’t necessarily make you a Nazi Canada’s Hunka scandal is a demonstration of how when history is complicated, it can be a gift to propagandists who exploit the appeal of simplicity.

Keir Giles is an author and commentator. His most recent book, “Russia’s War on Everybody,” looks at the effects that Russia’s malign influence around the world has on ordinary people.

Everybody knows that a lie can make it halfway around the world before the truth has even got its boots on.

And the ongoing turmoil over Canada’s parliament recognizing former SS trooper Yaroslav Hunka highlights one of the most important reasons why.

Something that’s untrue but simple is far more persuasive than a complicated, nuanced truth — a major problem for Western democracies trying to fight disinformation and propaganda by countering it with the truth, and one reason why fact-checking and debunking are only of limited use for doing so.

In the case of Hunka, the mass outrage stems from his enlistment with one of the foreign legions of the Waffen-SS, fighting Soviet forces on Germany’s eastern front. And it’s a demonstration of how when history is complicated, it can be a gift to propagandists who exploit the appeal of simplicity.

This history is complicated because fighting against the USSR at the time didn’t necessarily make you a Nazi, just someone who had an excruciating choice over which of these two terror regimes to resist. However, the idea that foreign volunteers and conscripts were being allocated to the Waffen-SS rather than the Wehrmacht on administrative rather than ideological grounds is a hard sell for audiences conditioned to believe the SS’s primary task was genocide. And simple narratives like “everybody in the SS was guilty of war crimes” are more pervasive because they’re much simpler to grasp.

Canada’s enemies have thus latched on to these simple narratives, alongside concerned citizens in Canada itself, with the misstep over Hunka being used by Russia and its backers to attack Ukraine, Canada and each country’s association with the other.

According to Russia’s ambassador in Canada, Hunka’s unit “committed multiple war crimes, including mass murder, against the Russian people, ethnic Russians. This is a proven fact.” But whenever a Russian official calls something a “proven fact,” it should set off alarms. And sure enough, here too the facts were invented out of thin air. Repeated exhaustive investigations — including by not only the Nuremberg trials but also the British, Canadian and even Soviet authorities — led to the conclusion that no war crimes or atrocities had been committed by this particular unit.

But this is just the latest twist in a long-running campaign by the Russian Embassy in Ottawa, dating back even to Soviet times, when the USSR would leverage accusations of Nazi collaboration for political purposes as part of its “active measures” operations.

And given Moscow’s own history of aggression and atrocities during World War II and its aftermath, there’s a special cynicism underlying the Russian accusations. Russia feels comfortable shouting about “Nazis,” real or imaginary, in Ukraine or elsewhere, because unlike Nazi Germany, leaders and soldiers of the Soviet Union were never put on trial for their war crimes. Russia clings to the Nuremberg trials as a benchmark of legitimacy because as a victorious power, it was never subjected to the same reckoning. And yet, both before and after their collaborative effort to carve up eastern Europe between them, the Soviets and the Nazis had so much in common that it’s now illegal to point these similarities out in Russia.

Yet, it’s not just enemies of democracy that are subscribing to the seductively simple. Jewish advocacy groups in Canada have been understandably loud in their condemnation of Hunka’s recognition. But here, too, accusations risk being influenced more by misconception and supposition than history and evidence.

The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center registered its outrage, noting that Hunka’s unit’s “crimes against humanity during the Holocaust are well-documented” — a statement that doesn’t seem to have any more substance than the accusation by Russia.

In fact, during previous investigations of the same group carried out by a Canadian Commission of Inquiry, Simon Wiesenthal himself was found to have made broad accusations that were found to be “nearly totally useless” and “put the Canadian government to a considerable amount of purposeless work.”

The result of all this is that otherwise intelligent people are now trying to outdo each other in a chorus of evidence-free condemnation.

In Parliament itself, Canadian Conservative MP Melissa Lantsman called Hunka “a monster.” Meanwhile, Poland’s education minister appears to have decided to first seek Hunka’s extradition to Poland, then try to determine whether he has actually committed any crime afterward. And the ostracism is now extending to members of Hunka’s family, born long after any possible crime could have been committed during World War II.

The episode shows that dealing with complex truths is hard but essential. Unfortunately, though, a debunking or fact-checking approach to countering disinformation relies on an audience willing to put in the time and effort to read the accurate version of events, and be interested in discovering it in the first place. This means debunking mainly works for very specific audiences, like government officials, analysts, academics and (some) journalists.

But most of the rest of us, especially when just scrolling through social media, are instead likely to have a superficial and fleeting interest, which means a lengthy exposition of why a given piece of information is wrong will be far less likely to reach us and have an impact.

In the Hunka case, commentary taking a more balanced view of the complex history does exist, but it’s rare, and when it does occur, it is by unfortunate necessity very long — a direct contrast to most propaganda narratives that are successfully spread by Russia and its agents. Sadly, an idea simple enough to fit on a T-shirt is vastly more powerful than a rebuttal that has to start with “well, actually . . .”

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has now issued an apology in his own name over Hunka’s ovation too. However, any further discussion of the error has to be carefully phrased, as any suggestion that Canada is showing contrition for “honoring a Nazi” would acquiesce to the rewriting of history by Russia and its backers, and concede to allegations of Hunka’s guilt that have no basis in evidence.

It’s true that Hunka should never have been invited into Canada’s House of Commons. But that’s not because he himself might be guilty of any crime. Rightly or wrongly, on an issue so toxic, it was inevitable the invitation would provide a golden opportunity for Russian propaganda.

The Role of Russian Neo-Nazi Groups in the War Against Ukraine May 12, 2023 Since the beginning of Russia's hybrid war against Ukraine in 2014, neo-Nazi groups have been involved in combat actions in violence against Ukrainians.

Russian propaganda has chosen to embrace "anti-fascism" as its supposedly guiding principle. This can be seen in slogans "No to fascism," the cult of victory around WWII, resolutions against neo-Nazism at the UN, the repeated accusations of "Nazism" against countries which don't support Russia, even the use of "denazification" as a justification of Russia's current full-scale war against Ukraine. This is, of course, only a ruse. In a rather Orwellian irony, Russia's government has been using various violent neo-Nazi groups within Russia to both suppress civil society and opposition inside Russia and to deploy in combat actions against Ukraine and occupy its territory.

Neo-Nazi trails in the Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine

Among the most visible of Russia's far-right groups are the sabotage assault reconnaissance group Rusich, which has been responsible for savage violence in Ukraine since 2014 and is linked to theWagner mercenary group and Russian Imperial Movement.

"I don't think any Ukrainian nation exists. These are just stupid people who were originally Russians. They have been told for many years that they are a separate nation. Therefore, we need a complex de-Ukraininzation. We have no differences - they have been imposed during the last 100 years... They have to be terrified of us," argued one of Rusich's leaders, Alexey Milchakov, in an interview.

Their members have not only taken part in Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the occupation of its territories, but also in the torture and murder of Ukrainian prisoners of war. In addition to committing violence, Russian neo-Nazis share photos and videos of torture on social media, encouraging others to commit war crimes. These actions have become a strategy both to dehumanise Ukrainians and break Ukrainian resistance and to to recruit new supporters of their effort to exterminate the Ukrainian identity and subjugate Ukrainians to"the Great Russian World."

These groups also take part in purges in occupied territories. They work with occupation forces in persecuting, arresting, and torturing those who remain loyal to Ukraine while under occupation. This activity is also net hidden Rusich justifies their kidnapping, torture, and murder of Ukrainians who refuse to embrace Russian rule by claiming to protect the lives of Russian occupiers.

Rusich has expressed clearly genocidal intentions towards the people of Ukraine which echoes those of the Nazis and other perpetrators of genocide towards their victims. In a Telegram post speculating on how to “solve the Ukrainian question,” they discuss exterminating Ukrainian children using scientific experiments and forcing those who remain to serve as soldiers or wives of Russian soldiers without any civil or human rights to be given “passports of non-citizens of the Russian Federation”. In particular, they call for Russian soldiers to be “given 2-3 girls each” [aged 10 or below, in addition to “normal wives”] as sexual slaves “to solve the demographic question in Russia.”

Though this post has been deleted from the main channel, their calls to kill as many Ukrainians, as possible remain visible in other messages shared by Russian neo-Nazis. In particular, members of Rusich deny the criminality of Russian war crimes against Ukrainians and justify sexual violence against Ukrainian women by claiming that "Ukrainian women dream about being raped by Russian soldiers" and that "this rape is not a crime, but an act of charity."

Rusich makes very clear that it has a Nazi identity in addition to genocidal aims and actions. It uses Nazi and far-right symbols. Russia's use of open Nazis in their genocidal war of conquest against Ukraine makes clear just how absurd their claims of "denazifying" Ukraine are.

"Russian volunteers in Donbas" - the role of neo-Nazi groups in 2014

Members of these neo-Nazi groups did not hide their ideology during the first outbreak of Russia's war against Ukraine. Rusich's Alexey Milchakov was known for sharing neo-Nazi slogans and photos with Nazi symbols on social media, as well as killing animals. Beginning in 2014, he was involved in armed aggression against Ukraine in Donetsk Oblast, where he posted photos of dead Ukrainian soldiers and encouraged war crimes against Ukrainians

"I'm a Nazi. I can even throw up my hand [in a "sieg heil" motion]. When you kill a person, you feel the hunter's excitement - those who have never been hunting, try it - and you will have a bit fewer problems..." - he once said in an interview [1.06.51 - 1.07.04].

Milchakov and his comrade Yan Petrovskiy have been sanctioned by Canada, the UK, and the EU. EU authorities have also found cases in which they tried to recruit far-right individuals in EU countries.

The "Russian world" brand of irredentism that was injected into Russia's public discourse in 2014 after the occupation of Crimea and the beginning of hybrid war in Donbas has been sued as a way to mobilise members of Russia's neo-Nazi and far-right groups to join their country's aggression in order to "return historical Russian lands" and fight for "faith, state and the leader."

"Russia for Russians" - The background of Russian neo-Nazism

Neo-Nazi groups in Russia are not a new phenomenon. They have been committing racist, xenophobic, and other hate-motivated crimes in Russia with practically complete impunity since 1990's. They have also been used by the Russian government as a tool to justify various restrictions of human rights and civil freedoms in the country under the guise of "anti-extremism legislation," as well as employed as thugs to attack the opposition using "managed nationalism."

Economic instability, revanchism caused by the collapse of the USSR, Russia's Chechen wars, and the emergence of Putin's authoritarian regime led to the rise of neo-Nazi gangs who committed racist attacks and murders, as well as persecuting and killing opposition activists as "threats to Russia.'' Since 2005, these groups have organized the so-called "Russian March" using imperialist and xenophobic slogans like "Russia for Russians," "Wake up Russia," and "We will make Russia Great Again."

These groups also have strong opinions on Ukraine, rejecting its independence and calling for the "liberation of historically Russian territories occupied by Ukrainian separatists."

In summary, Russia has been using neo-Nazi groups for decades to support the regime and commit crimes against its opponents. Since 2014, these groups have been involved in occupying Ukrainian territories and committing violence against civilians and prisoners of war. These actions are a part of a systemic strategy aimed at erasing Ukrainians as a separate nation and breaking their resistance. Despite claiming to be the world's greatest fighter against Nazis, Russia supports its own neo-Nazis and uses them as a tool in its imperialist, genocidal actions.

When Russia calls others 'Nazis', it should be taking a hard look at itself

The Kremlin's need to justify the war grew to embrace the most radical voices, including those peddling Nazi creed, as its ideologues became hell-bent on normalising the aggression, Aleksandar Đokić writes.

The Kremlin and its agents have many explanations and justifications for the invasion of Ukraine.

Those depend on the target audience: when they address the far-left, they swear by anti-colonialism. When they talk to the far-right, they speak about “wokeism” and traditional values.

When they turn to Europeans, they claim the US is exploiting the continent and that Washington provoked the war. When they move to the Middle East, they speak about the invasion of Iraq and the “Western Crusades”.

When they look at Africa, they pretend that Russia did not colonise swaths of the Asian continent.

The list goes on.

The fact of the matter is the Kremlin is not driven by any official ideology. It adheres to no principles whatsoever, and it is more akin to a highwayman changing his garb at will if it means getting to the loot more easily.

Delusions of grandeur while slaughtering victims Thus, the big question is: is it all for show? Are there absolutely no beliefs in the Kremlin’s decision-making circles, and are they then motivated exclusively by self-interest?

Or rather, did Russia's Vladimir Putin start the invasion because he is a neocolonialist rebuilding the empire or because he is a corrupt autocrat who wants to prolong his stay in power either by a quick military victory or a never-ending war?

One of the answers certainly can be, "why not both?"

Corruption and imperialism can co-exist in the same person's set of beliefs. After all, the said road bandit can also delusionally picture himself as a knight in shining armour while robbing and slaughtering his victims.

Putin can build his own castles in the sand and still promote the theory of the “degradation of the West” that’s been around for at least seventy years or so.

But, more important than its beliefs is how the Kremlin is using ideology in a fractured postmodern world to its advantage. And worryingly, Putin has increasingly allowed Nazism to seep in and take hold.

How close are Russian far-right figures to true Nazism? The Kremlin’s favourite argument for the Western audience, besides blaming the US for Russia’s invasion, revolves around the alleged “Ukrainian Nazis” that are pulling all the strings in Kyiv.

It’s not that Ukraine doesn’t have its share of far-right supporters. It’s the fact that the far right has a negligible influence on Ukraine’s political scene.

Russia, on the other hand, has nurtured imperialist far-right ideas for decades. Growingly, these feature all the textbook signs of Nazism — the disdain for liberal democracy, the outright hatred of others, scientific racism, and calls for the eradication of entire groups in particular.

In some, far-right ideas in Russia are a mixture of Nazism and Stalinism, as witnessed in former Duma member Zakhar Prilepin’s National-Bolsheviks.

Others only thinly veil their extremism in traditional Orthodox Russian imperialism, exemplified by the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) leadership and former paramilitary commander Igor Strelkov aka Girkin.

The now-infamous Konstantin Malofeev and Yegor Kholmogorov from the far-right Tsargrad TV also belong in this niche.

The version of Eurasianism pushed by self-proclaimed political philosopher and strategist Aleksandr Dugin represents a mix and rehashing of concepts from proto-fascist Russian thinkers from the turn of the 20th century.

Besides them, there are the ultra-patriots, the official far-right, centred in the LDPR party, once led by notorious extremist political provocateur Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and the Just Russia party, headed by Sergey Milonov, both of which are in the Duma.

Finally, there are actual neo-pagan ethnonationalists believing in the “pure Slavic race” who are, in essence, neo-Nazis (like the Rusich battalion waging war for Russia in Ukraine).

Fringe became mainstream, all thanks to Putin What’s drastically changed since the invasion is that the far-right is rapidly becoming mainstream in Russia.

Once a poster boy for a would-be liberal Russia and the country’s toothless president, Dmitry Medvedev now writes mammoth social media posts about “unterukraine” and “Big Great Russia”, using Nazi vocabulary.

On the federal Russian Orthodox TV channel Spas, or "Salvation", Yevgeny Nikiforov, the editor-in-chief of yet another Russian Orthodox outlet, Radio Radonezh, often parrots lines such as that “the disease, which has taken hold in Ukraine, should be cleansed by fire”.

Igor Fomin, a highly ranked cleric of the Russian Orthodox Church — bearer of three ROC medals with a parish on the grounds of Moscow’s MGIMO university, which is mostly attended by the progeny of Russia’s new elites — compares the war Russia is waging in Ukraine with the Old Testament and presents the hierarchy he believes in as “Nation, President, God”.

The Almighty, apparently, has to settle for the bronze medal.

He then goes on to say that Putin is doing God’s work in Ukraine like Joshua — the Biblical character famously tasked with wiping the “wicked nations” from the face of the Earth — did with the Canaanites.

Many such statements are now regularly broadcast on Russian federal media, be it state or “private” (although there can’t be any private media in Putin’s wannabe-totalitarian system).

Anything goes, just to justify the war Before the invasion, the Russian far-right was mostly marginalised on the fringes of society. They had ties with the Kremlin or the security circles — especially in the FSB and the army — but they did not reach large audiences.

The ultra-patriot group was always in plain sight, but they were not there to represent the policies of the government. Rather, their task was always to sound more radical, reckless and dangerous than Putin in his “spin dictator” phase, as economist Sergei Guriev neatly summarised it.

With the February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin's need to justify the war grew to embrace everyone, including the most psychotic among the commentariat.

Even when the Kremlin launched its unsuccessful “Novorossiya” project in 2014, the Russian extremists from the Donbas, posing as military correspondents or journalists, were not a part of everyday Russian society.

They were officially treated by the regime as an allied neighbouring force fending off the “evil West and Banderites” and kept at a distance, a perk of plausible deniability.

With the February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin's need to justify the war grew to embrace everyone, including the most psychotic among the commentariat, as the entire narrative was organised around normalising the aggression.

In turn, now even the most radical nutjobs have become a part of the norm.

Russia is at a stage where it will need to undergo denazification All of these far-right theories, some of which portray Russia as a force handpicked by God to postpone the Apocalypse — one of the non-standard Russian Orthodox teachings rehashed by Dugin, known as the Katekhon — or Russia as the righteous empire in a struggle against the “fallen” Western democracies, were in circulation, but they were not presented by the state as the norm on a daily basis like they are today.

We have come to the point where we can justifiably claim that the damage done by Putin's mafia regime has led to a full-fledged Nazification of Russia.

The Russian people can turn off their TV sets, as the research shows they are doing, but these narratives aren’t going away.

They have entrenched themselves in the Russian political and social discourse.

And now, we have come to the point where we can justifiably claim that the damage done by Putin's mafia regime has led to a glaring Nazification of Russia.

Therefore, in the near future, Russian society will have to undergo a painful process of denazifying itself — that is, if it ever wants to be trusted as a progressive part of the continent and a good neighbour to the countries it tried to oppress.

Aleksandar Đokić is a Serbian political scientist and analyst with bylines in Novaya Gazeta. He was formerly a lecturer at RUDN University in Moscow.

Some have pointed out the far right received only 2% of the vote in Ukraine’s 2019 parliamentary elections, far less than in most of Europe. Others have drawn attention to Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and the efforts of the Ukrainian state to protect minorities like Crimean Tatars and LGBTQ+ people, who are subject to brutal persecution in Russia.

What has received less coverage is the Putin regime’s own record of collaboration with far-right extremists. Even as Russian diplomats condemned “fascists” in the Baltic states and Kremlin propagandists railed against imaginary “Ukronazis” in power in Kyiv, the Russian state was cultivating its own homegrown Nazis.

The roots of neo-Nazism in Putin’s Russia The origins of this relationship date to the late 1990s, when Russia was shaken by a wave of racist violence committed by neo-Nazi skinhead gangs. After Putin’s accession to the presidency in 2000, his regime exploited this development in two ways.

First, it used the neo-Nazi threat to justify the adoption of anti-extremism legislation, a longstanding demand of some Russian liberals. Ultimately, this legislation would be used to prosecute Russian democrats.

Second, the Kremlin launched “managed nationalism”, an attempt to co-opt and mobilise radical nationalist militants, including neo-Nazis, as a counterweight to an emerging anti-Putin coalition of democrats and leftist radicals.

Moving Together, a pro-Putin youth organisation notorious for its campaign against postmodernist literature, made the first move by reaching out to OB88, the most powerful skinhead gang in Russia.

This cooperation expanded in the aftermath of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004. To insulate Russia against the contagion of pro-democracy protest, the Kremlin transformed Moving Together into a more ambitious project called “Nashi”, or “Ours”.

As part of its preparations to confront a potential democratic uprising in Russia, Nashi enlisted football gang members, whose subculture overlapped with the neo-Nazi underground.

During 2005, Nashi’s thugs staged a series of raids on anti-Putin youth groups. The most violent attack, which left four left-wing activists in hospital, led to the arrest of the assailants. They were released after a visit to the police station from Nikita Ivanov, the Kremlin functionary who supervised the regime’s loyalist youth organisations.

The resulting scandal provoked a reconfiguration of “managed nationalism”. While Nashi distanced itself from football gangs, its radical militants migrated to two rival Kremlin proxies, the nationalist “Young Russia” group and the anti-immigration “Locals” group. These organisations became bridges between the neo-Nazi subculture and the Kremlin.

Neo-Nazi leaders implicated in killings As I demonstrated in a recent study of the Kremlin’s relationship with Russian fascists, these linkages made possible a bold experiment to create a pro-Putin neo-Nazi movement.

In 2008-09, the Kremlin was threatened by Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny’s efforts to build an anti-Putin coalition of democrats and radical nationalists in Russia. In response, the Kremlin began to work with Russkii Obraz (“Russian Image”, or “RO” for short), a hardcore neo-Nazi group best known for its slick journal and its band, Hook from the Right.

With the assistance of Kremlin supervisors, RO attacked nationalists who were abandoning the skinhead subculture for Navalny’s anti-Putin coalition. In return, RO was granted privileged access to public space and the media.

Its leaders held televised public discussions with state functionaries and collaborated openly with Maksim Mishchenko, a member of parliament from the ruling party. Perhaps most shockingly, RO also hosted a concert by the infamous neo-Nazi band Kolovrat in Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square, within earshot of the Kremlin.

The problem for the Kremlin was that RO’s leader, Ilya Goryachev, was a fervent supporter of the neo-Nazi underground, the skinheads who committed hundreds of racist murders in the second half of the 2000s. The authorities turned a blind eye to RO’s production of a two-hour internet “documentary” titled Russian Resistance, which celebrated these killers as patriotic heroes and called for armed struggle against the regime.

But they could not ignore the arrest on murder charges of Nikita Tikhonov, an ex-skinhead and cofounder of RO. Tikhonov was the leader of BORN (“Fighting Organisation of Russian Nationalists”), a terrorist group that committed a string of murders of public figures and antifa militants.

The victims included the renowned human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalist Anastasia Baburova. Tikhonov was convicted of their murders in 2011.

The police investigation revealed that Goryachev regarded BORN and RO as the armed and political platforms of a neo-Nazi insurgency, on the model of the IRA and Sinn Féin in Ireland and Northern Ireland.

The court materials show that as Goryachev was reporting to his Kremlin supervisors, he was also advising Tikhonov about the choice of murder victims. Goryachev was found guilty in 2015 of ordering the murders of numerous people, including Markelov.

The adverse publicity wrecked the careers of some of the Kremlin’s Nazi promoters, but veterans of RO flourished in the propaganda institutions of Putin’s increasingly autocratic regime.

One of them is Anna Trigga, who worked for the Internet Research Agency, the trolling factory that interfered in the 2016 US presidential election and tried to foment anti-Muslim hatred in Australia. Another is Andrei Gulyutin, editor of the website Ridus, an important platform of pro-Putin Russian nationalism.

Promoting neo-Nazis overseas No less important is the role of neo-Nazis and other right-wing figures in Russia’s onslaught against Ukraine.

In 2014, RO’s Aleksandr Matyushin helped to terrorise supporters of the Ukrainian state in Donetsk on the eve of Russia’s proxy war in eastern Ukraine. He went on to become a major field commander.

Today, RO’s Dmitrii Steshin, a celebrated war correspondent for a mass circulation tabloid, disseminates lies blaming Ukrainian false-flag operations for atrocities committed by Russian forces.

The Kremlin’s cultivation of domestic neo-Nazis is matched by its promotion of neo-Nazis in the West. Some have amplified anti-Western conspiracy theories as “experts” on RT, the Kremlin’s cable TV propaganda channel.

Others have served the Kremlin as “monitors” who applaud the conduct of fraudulent elections. Meanwhile, Rinaldo Nazzaro, an American, has been quietly running The Base, the international neo-Nazi terrorist organisation, from an apartment in St Petersburg.

Putin’s weaponisation of neo-Nazis was always a risky strategy, but it was not irrational. Unlike mainstream nationalists, who tend to support the idea of free elections, neo-Nazis reject democratic institutions and the very idea of human equality. For a dictator dismantling democracy and constructing an authoritarian regime, they were ideal accomplices.

This article originally appeared in The Conversation.

Ukraine: Apparent War Crimes in Russia-Controlled Areas Summary Executions, Other Grave Abuses by Russian Forces

(Warsaw) – Human Rights Watch has documented several cases of Russian military forces committing laws-of-war violations against civilians in occupied areas of the Chernihiv, Kharkiv, and Kyiv regions of Ukraine. These include a case of repeated rape; two cases of summary execution, one of six men, the other of one man; and other cases of unlawful violence and threats against civilians between February 27 and March 14, 2022. Soldiers were also implicated in looting civilian property, including food, clothing, and firewood. Those who carried out these abuses are responsible for war crimes.

“The cases we documented amount to unspeakable, deliberate cruelty and violence against Ukrainian civilians,” said Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “Rape, murder, and other violent acts against people in the Russian forces’ custody should be investigated as war crimes.”

Human Rights Watch interviewed 10 people, including witnesses, victims, and local residents of Russia-occupied territories, in person or by telephone. Some people asked to be identified only by their first names or by pseudonyms for their protection.

On March 4, Russian forces in Bucha, about 30 kilometers northwest of Kyiv, rounded up five men and summarily executed one of them. A witness told Human Rights Watch that soldiers forced the five men to kneel on the side of the road, pulled their T-shirts over their heads, and shot one of the men in the back of the head. “He fell [over],” the witness said, “and the women [present at the scene] screamed.”

Russian forces in the village of Staryi Bykiv, in Chernihiv region, rounded up at least six men on February 27, and later executed them, according to the mother of one of the men, who was nearby when her son and another man were apprehended, and who saw the dead bodies of all six.

A 60-year-old man told Human Rights Watch that on March 4, a Russian soldier threatened to summarily execute him and his son in Zabuchchya, a village northwest of Kyiv, after searching their home and finding a hunting rifle and gasoline in the backyard. Another soldier intervened to prevent the other soldier from killing them, the man said. His daughter corroborated his account in a separate interview.

On March 6, Russian soldiers in the village of Vorzel, about 50 kilometers northwest of Kyiv, threw a smoke grenade into a basement, then shot a woman and a 14-year-old child as they emerged from the basement, where they had been sheltering. A man who was with her in the same basement when she died from her wounds two days later, and heard accounts of the incident from others, provided the information to Human Rights Watch. The child died immediately, he said.

A woman told Human Rights Watch that a Russian soldier had repeatedly raped her in a school in the Kharkiv region where she and her family had been sheltering on March 13. She said that he beat her and cut her face, neck, and hair with a knife. The next day the woman fled to Kharkiv, where she was able to get medical treatment and other services. Human Rights Watch reviewed two photographs, which the woman shared with Human Rights Watch, showing her facial injuries.

Many of the Ukrainian civilians we interviewed described Russian forces taking food, firewood, clothing, and other items such as chainsaws, axes, and gasoline.

All parties to the armed conflict in Ukraine are obligated to abide by international humanitarian law, or the laws of war, including the Geneva Conventions of 1949, the First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions, and customary international law. Belligerent armed forces that have effective control of an area are subject to the international law of occupation. International human rights law, which is applicable at all times, also applies.

The laws of war prohibit willful killing, rape and other sexual violence, torture, and inhumane treatment of captured combatants and civilians in custody. Pillage and looting are also prohibited. Anyone who orders or deliberately commits such acts, or aids and abets them, is responsible for war crimes. Commanders of forces who knew or had reason to know about such crimes but did not attempt to stop them or punish those responsible are criminally liable for war crimes as a matter of command responsibility.

“Russia has an international legal obligation to impartially investigate alleged war crimes by its soldiers,” Williamson said. “Commanders should recognize that a failure to take action against murder and rape may make them personally responsible for war crimes as a matter of command responsibility.”

For detailed findings, please see below.

Kharkiv Rape

On March 13, a Russian soldier beat and repeatedly raped Olha [not her real name], a 31-year-old woman in Malaya Rohan, a village in the Kharkiv region that Russian forces controlled at the time.

Russian soldiers entered the village on February 25, Olha said. That day, about 40 villagers, mostly women and girls, were sheltering in the basement of a local school. She was there with her 5-year-old daughter, her mother, her 13-year-old sister, and her 24-year-old brother.

At around midnight on March 13, a Russian soldier forcibly entered the school, Olha said: “He broke glass windows at the entrance to the school and banged on the door.” A guard opened the door.

The soldier, who carried an assault rifle and a pistol, went into the basement and ordered everyone there to line up. The woman stood in the line holding her daughter, who was asleep. He told her to give him the girl, but she refused. He told her brother to come forward and ordered the rest of the group to kneel, or, he said, he would shoot everyone in the basement.

The soldier ordered her brother to follow him to help find food. They left and came back an hour or two later. The soldier sat down on the floor.

“People started asking if they could go to the bathroom and he let them, in groups of two and three,” Olha said. After that, people started settling down for the night. The soldier approached her family and told her to follow him.

The soldier took her to a classroom on the second floor, where he pointed a gun at her and told her to undress. She said: “He told me to give him [oral sex]. The whole time he held the gun near my temple or put it into my face. Twice he shot at the ceiling and said it was to give me more ‘motivation.’” He raped her, then told her to sit on a chair.

She said she was getting very cold in the unheated school and asked if she could get dressed, but the soldier told her she should only put on her top, not her pants or underwear. “While I was putting on my clothes, the soldier told me that he was Russian, that his name was [name withheld] and that he was 20. He said that I reminded him of a girl he went to school with.”

The soldier told her to go to the basement and get her things, so that she could stay in the classroom with him. She refused. “I knew my daughter would cry if she saw me,” she said. The soldier got a knife and told her to do so as he said if she wanted to see her child again. The soldier raped her again, put a knife to her throat and cut the skin on her neck. He also cut her cheek with the knife and cut off some of her hair. He hit her on the face with a book and repeatedly slapped her. Photographs that she shared with Human Rights Watch, dated March 19 and 20, show cut marks and bruising on her neck and face.

At about 7 a.m. on March 14, the soldier told her to find him a pack of cigarettes. They went downstairs together. She asked the guard to give the soldier some cigarettes. After the soldier got the cigarettes, he left.

That day she and her family walked to Kharkiv, where volunteers provided her with basic medical assistance. They moved into a bomb shelter. “I am lucky to be alive,” she said. She said that the Malaya Rohan council authorities were in touch with her and her mother and that the authorities were preparing a criminal complaint, which they plan to file with Ukraine’s prosecutor’s office.

Human Rights Watch received three other allegations of sexual violence by Russian soldiers in other villages in the Chernihiv region and in Mariupol in the south but has not been able to independently verify them.

Summary Killings, Other Violence

On February 27, Russian forces rounded up six men in the village of Staryi Bykiv, in the Chernihiv region, and summarily executed them. Tetiana, from Novyi Bykiv, which faces Staryi Bykiv, just across the Supiy River, spoke with the relatives of four of the men who were killed. She told Human Rights Watch that on February 27, the bridge between Novyi Bykiv and Staryi Bykiv was blown up, and Russian forces shelled both villages. A column of Russian armored vehicles then entered Staryi Bykiv.

“Most people were hiding in their basements because of shelling, and soldiers went door to door,” Tetiana said the families from Staryi Bykiv told her. The soldiers took six men from their homes:

They took six men from three different families. One mother had both of her sons taken [and shot]. Another young man was in his early 20s, his name was Bohdan, I know his mother well, she told me that the soldiers told her to wait near her house while they took her son … to question him. They said the same thing to other families. Instead, they led these six men away, took them to the far end of the village, and shot them.

Viktoria, Bohdan’s mother, interviewed separately, told Human Rights Watch that on February 27:

They took my son, Bohdan [age 29], and my brother-in-law, Sasha [full name Olexander, age 39]. We were in the basement [due to the shelling], so we didn’t see. They went out to smoke. Then our neighbor ran up and said he saw them taking Bohdan and Sasha away, and a few other guys.

Viktoria ran to the street to ask Russian soldiers at the checkpoint what had happened. “They told us not to worry, that [soldiers] would scare them a bit and then let them go,” she said. “We walked away about 50 meters … and heard gunshots. It was about 6:20 p.m.”

Viktoria said that the next day she and her sister went to the meadow and saw the bodies lying by a building there:

Three were on one side of the building, but not my son and brother-in-law. We walked around to the other side and saw [Bohdan and Sasha, and one more]. They were laying there. There were gunshots to their heads. Their hands were tied behind their backs. I looked at my son’s body, his pockets were empty, he didn’t have his phone, or keys or [identity] documents.

Viktoria asked soldiers at the checkpoint for permission to collect the bodies, but they refused. Heavy shelling continued the following days.

On March 7, Viktoria said, they again asked the soldiers for permission to collect the bodies: “At the checkpoint they told us to go the cemetery, that they’d bring us the bodies.… Everyone [all the neighbors] came, like 75 people.... We buried all of them on the same day, in separate graves.”

Viktoria said that the other four men buried that day were Volodymyr, 40, another Olexander, 40, and two brothers, Ihor, 31, and Oleh, 33.

Tetiana said the soldiers also took all of the villagers’ wood, leaving them nothing for cooking or heating their homes.

On March 4, Russian forces summarily executed a man in Bucha, 30 kilometers northwest of Kyiv, and threatened to execute four others, said a teacher who witnessed the killing. She said she heard shooting at about 7 a.m. and saw three Russian armored vehicles and four Kamaz [Russian brand] trucks driving down her street. She was sheltering in the cellar with her two dogs when she heard glass breaking, and then her front door being broken down. Voices outside said [in Russian]: “Come outside right now or we will throw a grenade.”

She yelled that she was alone in the cellar and came out with her hands up.

“There were three men outside, two [Russian] soldiers and a commander,” she said. “They took my phone and checked it, then told me to get my [identification] documents and come with them.” As she walked down the street with the soldiers, she saw that they were also rounding up her neighbors and ordering them to walk. She said:

They took us to where the office of AgroButpostach [a rental storage company] used to be. Right next to the building, there is a parking lot and a small square. They gathered people at that square, mostly women but there were also several men among us, over 50 [years old]. There were around 30 military there and the commander had [paratrooper] insignia [on his fatigues]. He spoke with an accent from western or central western Russia…. I was born in Russia myself, so I pick up on such things. The soldiers were all thin and looked the worse for wear.

She said that the soldiers brought about 40 people to the square, gathered everyone’s phones, checked documents, and asked who was in territorial defense, or local self-defense units:

Two women asked to go to the bathroom. One of them was pregnant. I asked to go with them. A soldier showed us the way to the toilet, which was around the building, I think it was now their headquarters. The building was long. Along the wall on the other side, we saw a large pool of blood.

She said they waited in the square for hours in the very cold weather:

At one point they brought in one young man, then four more. The soldiers ordered them [to] take off their boots and jackets. They made them kneel on the side of the road. Russian soldiers pulled their T-shirts, from behind and over their heads. They shot one in the back of the head. He fell. Women screamed. The other four men were just kneeling there. The commander said to the rest of the people at the square: “Don’t worry. You are all normal – and this is dirt. We are here to cleanse you from the dirt.”

She said that after several more hours the soldiers took the people back to their homes. The other four men remained kneeling when she left.

She said that when she was able to leave the town on March 9, the young man’s body was still lying where he had been shot.

Dmytro, 40, told Human Rights Watch that he and his family fled the heavily shelled city of Bucha on March 7. He said that they did not know of any safe evacuation routes, so they walked – wrapped in white sheets and waving white sheets in the air – for about five kilometers to the village of Vorzel.

Once in Vorzel, they sheltered for two nights in the basement of a two-story building, with a group of local residents. Dmytro said that there was a woman with them in the basement who had chest and leg wounds. Other people in the basement told him that she had been shot the day before, when Russian soldiers stormed that same basement and threw a smoke grenade inside. Several people panicked and ran outside, where Russian soldiers fired at them. The woman was wounded, and the people in the basement told him that a 14-year-old child was shot in the head and killed. Dmytro said that the woman died the next day, on March 8. He and several local residents buried her outside the bomb shelter.

On March 4, Russian forces threatened to execute a man and his son in Zabuchchya, a village outside the city of Irpin, northwest of Kyiv. A village resident said that on March 4, Russian forces entered the village, where he was sheltering with 10 other people, including a family from Irpin, in the basement of his home. In a separate interview, his daughter corroborated his account. He said that 13 soldiers entered his house to search it:

The soldiers asked about my son, 34, who is in the territorial defense. He came out to meet them. They asked who was in the house and then they searched the house and turned it upside down.… In the backyard, they found my hunting rifle and a bottle of gasoline, and they went ballistic.

The commander who gave orders to others said: “Take them [me and my son] to the tree outside and shoot them.” They took us outside. One of the soldiers objected. They took us back inside and ordered my son to strip naked because they said they wanted to look for nationalist tattoos. Other soldiers also went to houses on our street, including the house of a judge – she had gone and locked the house – and the local council deputy.

They broke the window in the judge’s house to get in. We saw them taking bags and bags of stuff out of the judge’s house. After that, they left.… I took my family and everyone who was in the basement, and we fled in two cars. My wife and my son and mother, 80, are now staying at my daughter’s house in Khodosivka [southwest of Kyiv].

Historian offers first deep dive into secret German-Soviet alliance that laid groundwork for WWII

From 1933 to 1939, Adolf Hitler grew the German military from 100,000 soldiers to nearly 4 million and from a few dozen combat vehicles to a fleet of thousands of the most technologically advanced planes and tanks of the time.

Amassing that force in six brief years was only possible because of a secret German-Soviet partnership that began more than a decade before Hitler came to power.

In new research that is the first to elucidate exactly what occurred at secret facilities in the USSR, Ian Johnson, the P. J. Moran Family Assistant Professor of Military History at the University of Notre Dame, details the inner workings of the German-Soviet alliance that laid the foundation for Germany’s rise and ultimate downfall in World War II.

Johnson’s book, “Faustian Bargain,” traces the on-again, off-again relationship from the first tentative connections between the sworn enemies in 1919, made “almost before the ink had dried on the treaties ending the First World War,” to Hitler’s betrayal of Joseph Stalin and invasion of the USSR in 1941.

“The Germans and Soviets would use each other — at great cost — to remedy their own perceived military weaknesses,” Johnson writes.

For German military leaders, the alliance with the Soviets allowed them to get around the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which dismantled the Imperial German Army after WWI and forbade Germany from developing or purchasing modern tools of war. A partnership with the Soviet Union meant rearmament and, someday, a war of revenge, according to Johnson.

Devastated by war and internationally isolated, the Soviet Union, in turn, received technical expertise, financial capital and new military technologies.

During the first period of cooperation — formalized in 1922 when the nations signed the Treaty of Rapallo and initiated covert military operations — the Soviet Union hosted hundreds of German soldiers, engineers and scientists at secret military bases.

Johnson drew from 23 archives in Russia, Germany, Poland, England and the U.S., uncovering a paper trail that confirmed the alliance in great detail.

“I argue that Germany would not have been capable of starting a war, let alone beating many of its adversaries, without all of this secret work,” Johnson said. “Between 1922 and 1933, all of these factories, laboratories, testing grounds and training facilities were relocated to the USSR. Almost every tank that Germany started WWII with was based on engineering work done in the USSR. Most of the engineering teams from major German firms moved there. Seven of Germany’s eight aircraft manufacturers were doing research at Soviet facilities.

“Without these bases, Germany wouldn’t have had modern tanks or planes at all, and when the war began, they had some of the best in the world.”

The Rapallo Era ended nine months after Hitler assumed power in 1933 and, at his orders, the secret facilities closed one by one. While mistrust pervaded Soviet-German relations over the next six years, ties were never completely severed, Johnson writes.

In spring 1939, both Stalin and Hitler proved open to renewing cooperation and in August, the country’s two foreign ministers signed a treaty of nonaggression, known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

“Secured against the prospect of a two-front war, Hitler invaded Poland on September 1,” Johnson writes. “Britain and France in turn honored their guarantees to Poland and declared war on Germany. The Second World War in Europe had begun, sparked by a German-Soviet pact.”

In the early days of the war, the Soviet Union supplied Germany with large quantities of raw materials, until the alliance began to crumble again in November 1940 when Hitler demanded more overt support from the USSR but refused to entertain Stalin’s counter-demands.

“Stalin thought he had leverage through this long partnership,” Johnson said. “He consistently ignored intelligence indicating that anything else would happen, so when the German invasion came in 1941, it was a horrific surprise with ugly consequences for both countries.”

Johnson notes that there are still disputes in Russia today over his and other historians’ accounts of the events and that examining this period is crucial — particularly because of its parallels to the current international landscape.

“There are still battles over the actual history today, which is one reason it’s important to look at this,” he said. “The other is that we live in a moment when the international order as it was established in 1945 is deteriorating. There are a lot of questions about how these institutions were set up after WWII and whether they’re working in a post-Cold War moment when we have a rising Russia and a rising China.

“The story I’m telling about the interwar period looks much the same. You’ve got two victorious powers from WWI, trying to find a way to maintain peace and to integrate rising powers into the international order to keep them happy. They failed to do so, disastrously, and the consequence was the bloodiest war in human history. So, understanding this moment is critical.”

Russian War Crimes (1837-1864)

In 1837, the former Decembrist revolutionary, Nikolai Lorer, was serving on the frontline in Russia’s war in the Caucasus. Demoted from major to private, he had been sent to Circassia, a small, independent country in the north, on the shore of the Black Sea. One day, Lorer was summoned to see the regional commander, General Grigory Zass.

“After entering the general’s office,” he recalled, “I was struck by some sort of intolerably offensive smell… Zass, laughing, ended our confusion by telling us that his people had no doubt placed under his bed a box with heads… he pulled out and showed us a huge chest with several heads that stared at us with horrible glassy eyes. ‘Why are they here?’ I asked. ‘I’m boiling and cleaning them and then sending them to various anatomical offices and my academic friends in Berlin.’”

he heads had belonged to members of the native population, the so-called “mountaineers”. At the time they were engaged in a war of resistance against the Russian occupiers. For the Circassians, this was an existential struggle for survival; for the Russians, a land grab that turned into a grim, relentless battle to impose their expansionist ideology. It would eventually, inevitably, evolve into ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Commanders like Zass had come to regard their enemies as sub-human, which to them justified the brutal measures they took to suppress the resistance. As well as heads under the bed, Zass the Impaler stuck other heads on lances planted on top of a hill for all to see. “Their beards blew in the wind,” remembered Lorer.

But such barbarities were not just the aberrations of a psychopathic monster, they were part of an unofficial policy of terror, which also included the use of rape as a weapon of war.

Eternal enemies

And it continued for decades. “Only horror could have an effect on the hostile mountaineers,” one Russian commander wrote in the 1860s, showing that Zass’s approach was still the order of the day. Alexander Baryatinsky, the Russian viceroy of Caucusus from 1856 to 1862, went even further, stating: “We must assume that we will need to exterminate the mountaineers before they will agree to our demands.”

In his seminal book on the conflict, The Circassian Genocide, Walter Richmond describes the increasing frustration of the Russian commanders: “the army that had defeated Napoleon was held in check by “savages””, he writes. He goes on: “In their minds the Circassians were no longer future subjects; they were eternal enemies who had to be wiped out.”

The end of a nation

The Circassian forces made their valiant last stand against the Russian army at Qbaada in May 1864. After surrendering, they were driven to the Black Sea coastal city of Sochi, where, as Richmond writes: “they died by the thousands as they waited for ships to take them to the Ottoman Empire.” These days Sochi is remembered as the venue for the 2014 Winter Olympics, not as the place where a nation ceased to exist.

It was the climax of a prolonged campaign of deliberate, systematic ethnic cleansing. Whether the Circassians died by warfare, mass murder, disease or starvation didn’t much matter to the Russians. As one Russian historian put it: “The state needed the Circassians’ land, but had absolutely no need of them.”

Reckoning the dead

According to the Russian government’s own – probably conservative – figures, 400,000 Circassians were killed in the “operation” (https://borgenproject.org/10-facts-about-the-circassian-genocide/). Hundreds of thousands more were forcibly transported to Turkey, which had agreed to take in its fellow Muslims in return for compensation.

Before the genocide, the number of Circassians in Circassia was between one million and 1.7 million. According to estimates, 80 to 97% of that number were either killed or forced into exile. By 1900, most of Europe had forgotten that there ever was a country called Circassia.

In 2003, during Putin’s first term as president of the Russian Federation, a statue to General Grigory Zass was unveiled in the heart of the territory he had so brutally controlled. To know a man, look at those he honours.

Russian Neo-Nazis Participate in ‘Denazifying’ Ukraine – Der Spiegel

At least two neo-Nazi groups are fighting for Russian forces in Ukraine, throwing into question Moscow’s claims of “denazifying” its neighbor, German weekly Der Spiegel reported Sunday, citing a confidential intelligence report.

The document shared with German ministries by the BND intelligence service does not provide the exact number of far-right fighters, but identifies them as the Russian Imperial Legion and Rusich groups.

Their involvement “makes the ostensible reason for war, the so-called ‘denazification’ of Ukraine, absurd,” BND is quoted as saying.

Both groups are thought to have participated in the war between Moscow-backed, pro-Russian separatists and Kyiv that broke out in eastern Ukraine in 2014. Several reports have linked Rusich with Wagner, a shadowy, Kremlin-linked private military company.

Russia sent troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24 with the stated aim of “denazifying and demilitarizing” its pro-Western neighbor, before shifting its focus toward eastern Ukraine for the campaign's second phase in late March.

The Russian Imperial Legion is a paramilitary arm of the ultranationalist Russian Imperial Movement, which the United States designated as a terrorist organization in 2020.

“Whether this decision [to join the conflict in Ukraine] was made at the request of or in consultation with the Russian leadership” is unclear, the BND analysis writes.

The Russian Imperial Legion announced its decision to enter combat operations in Ukraine shortly after its leader Denis Gariyev called on supporters to “be patient” in early March, the report states. Rusich is believed to have become involved no later than early April.

The Russian Imperial Movement’s flag was seen in Ukraine by the Guardian in Mid-March Meanwhile,. Britain’s The Times located Rusich fighters crossing into eastern Ukraine’s Kharkiv region near the Russian border in early April.

Gariyev, his deputy and two other right-wing extremists are believed to have been wounded in the fighting, BND said in the report cited by Der Spiegel. Rusich founder Alexei Milchakov was wounded as soon as the group entered Ukraine.

Milchakov and Rusich co-founder Yan Petrovsky had met at a Russian Imperial Movement paramilitary training program, according to The Times. Both were pictured in the BND report cited by Der Spiegel with a swastika flag and a Hitler salute.

The BND identified another Rusich member, Alexander M., as a military correspondent at Russia’s Channel One state broadcaster, according to Der Spiegel.

Putin has said that “De-Nazification” of Ukraine is one of his key objectives, and that it is the main justification for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Kremlin media even brands all those who oppose Russian aggression as “Neo-Nazis.”

At the onset of the invasion, Russian propaganda clearly distinguished between the Ukrainian “fraternal people” and the “criminal regime” in Kyiv. In his address in the early hours of 24 February, Putin said, addressing the Armed Forces of Ukraine: “Take power into your own hands. It looks like it will be easier for us to come to terms with you than with this gang of drug addicts and Neo-Nazis, who settled in Kyiv and took the entire Ukrainian people hostage.”

Later, the Kremlin and the pro-government media began to substitute certain concepts: “nationalists” and “Neo-Nazis” became synonymous with the Ukrainian Army, volunteer battalions, and territorial defence forces, which have put up massive resistance against the Russian invaders. Pro-Kremlin media headlines and newscast rhetoric are full of phrases about “hours spent under targeted fire by nationalists” or Russian units and their proxies “who managed to drive nationalists out of the most residential areas in the city.”

But still after 8 weeks of war, the Kremlin propagandists refer to Ukrainians daring to oppose Russian occupation as “Nazis.” For example, for Margarita Simonyan, the head of one of the Kremlin’s main mouthpieces, RT, it came as an unpleasant surprise that “a significant part of Ukraine was engulfed in the madness of Nazism.” On one of her panel shows, she said: “Previously, I also thought that there were a few of them, but I definitely could not imagine that there were so many!”

Why does Russian propaganda massively and indiscriminately brand all Ukrainians as Nazis? First of all, it’s about dehumanising the nation in the eyes of the Russians. The Kremlin needs to give them something that will make Russians hate Ukrainians and justify in their eyes the atrocities committed against Ukrainians by the Russian military, the annihilation of Ukrainian cities. How could this be done? It turned out to be that simple: to an average Russian, who has been under the harsh influence of the Kremlin’s propaganda machine for years, it’s enough to say: “You know what? They are all Nazis there, we shouldn’t feel sorry for them, it’s okay to kill them all!” Which is what the Russian forces are doing.

Meanwhile, in Russia, people get detained and prosecuted for phrases such as “No to fascism” and “fascism shall not pass” – such slogans are now equated with “discrediting” the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.

Putin’s statements that the power in Ukraine is controlled by neo-Nazis is blatant falsehood. As any other country, Ukraine has some problems with far-right movements. In Russia itself, there are no fewer ultra-right, Neo-Nazi and nationalist, sharply xenophobic groups and organizations close to them in spirit. Moreover, there are people today in the Russian circles of power who used to openly back extremely nationalist views and participated in the infamous “Russian Marches.” Traditionally, Russian law enforcement are trying to find a “Ukrainian trace” in pretty much anything, presenting ultra-right groups as “branches of Ukrainian radical movements.”

The Russian ultra-right are frequently in the news focus, and there are still plenty of skinhead gangs that go out terrorising and murdering representatives of various Central Asian ethnic groups, while caveman nationalists keep chanting their favourite “Moscow is for Muscovites” song.

The uncomfortable truth is that Russia has long and regularly made accusations against former Soviet republics about supporting neo-Nazism, But the reality as borne out by the obscene behaviour of the Red Army in Ukraine is that Russia is itself the main breeding ground for today’s Nazis, and it is this evil that the world must address urgently and destroy the demon before it spreads.

Russia sends in notorious neo-Nazi mercenaries to Ukraine The openly fascist and far-Right fighters in the Rusich task force undermine Russia's claims it is fighting to 'de-Nazify' Ukraine

Neo-Nazi mercenaries known for their brutality in conflicts in Syria and the 2014 war in Crimea have been deployed by Russia in Ukraine....

Features

Racism Behind Russia’s ultra-nationalist crackdown Despite targeting neo-Nazis and other hate groups, the Kremlin is rolling out its own version of the ‘Russian world’.

Moscow, Russia – Lanky, bespectacled and nerdy, the defendant said he was merely a publicist who advocated ideas that are now “heard on the Russia television channel”, a national TV network.

But a Moscow City Court jury found Ilya Goryachev, 33, guilty of illegal arms possession, masterminding five killings, and organising a brutal neo-Nazi gang that hatched plans to create a “Fourth Reich” in Russia.

Goryachev fainted on July 24 while a judge was reading the verdict that sentenced him to life in jail.

He claimed earlier he was a “political prisoner” framed by the FSB, Russia’s main KGB-successor intelligence agency, and spouted the names of Kremlin officials, lawmakers, and Orthodox Church clerics he once worked for.

His trial epitomised the government’s crackdown on white supremacist neo-Nazis and ultra-nationalist groups that held massive rallies, killed hundreds of non-Russians, and advocated the anti-migrant idea of “Russia for ethnic Russians”, which is now shared by more than half the population.

Yet amid this crackdown, President Vladimir Putin’s government has also sought to forge its own state nationalism – and used elements of the ultra-nationalist agenda in its increasingly anti-Western, neo-conservative and isolationist ideology that the Kremlin started to forge after last year’s annexation of Crimea.

“The nationalist rhetoric has always been present in the Kremlin’s political discourse, but of course, it has become more swaggering, insolent, bold after Crimea,” Andrey Kolesnikov of the Moscow Carnegie Center, a think-tank, told Al Jazeera.

This ideology is disseminated by the Kremlin’s propaganda machine – and is indeed heard on the “Russia” television channel.

“Just because the government wants to keep its monopoly on nationalism – and this is one of the most important political goals, because this ideology is popular and among other [factors] keeps Putin’s ratings high – it responds very harshly to manifestations of nationalist extremism,” Kolesnikov added.

Hate groups

Goryachev was found guilty of founding the neo-Nazi group BORN, or the Military Organization of Russian Nationalists. Unlike other neo-Nazi gangs that hunted down dark-skinned non-Russians, BORN mostly targeted “race traitors”, or ethnic Russians who confronted their ideology.

Between 2008-10, BORN members killed 10 people, including a human rights lawyer, a journalist, a judge who had sentenced several ultranationalists to jail, and three anti-Nazi activists.

They also killed a Muay Thai world champion and decapitated a Tajik man – placing his head in a government office with a note promising more murders.

BORN and dozens of similar groups mushroomed in the 2000s amid an influx of millions of labour migrants from ex-Soviet Central Asia and Russia’s Muslim Caucasus region, where two wars in Chechnya fuelled unemployment and prompted attacks on Russia’s urban centres.

Racially motivated attacks peaked in 2008, when militant ultra-nationalists killed at least 110 people and left 487 wounded, according to Sova, a Moscow-based hate crimes monitor.

The rankled Kremlin responded by jailing hundreds of neo-Nazis and ultra-nationalists from groups with names such as White Wolves, Northern Frontier, or Russian Cleansing, Sova said.

The number of hate crimes plummeted. In the first half of 2015, four people have been killed and 37 wounded, it said.

But despite the pressure, the ultra-nationalists still enlist up to 20,000 people who are busy training in gyms and forests throughout Russia, Sova’s director said.

“There’s less attacks and more military drills,” Alexander Verkhovsky told Al Jazeera.

Fearing arrests, many ultra-nationalists fled Russia – sometimes preferring to fight in eastern Ukraine on both sides of the conflict.

“I’m the only remaining leader and I am under investigation” for white supremacist speeches during Russian Marches, the annual get-togethers of ultra-nationalists in Moscow and Russia’s largest cities, nationalist leader Dmitry Demushkin told Al Jazeera.

With a full red beard, short auburn hair, and white shirt with traditional Slavic ornaments, Demushkin looked like a character from a 19th-century Russian novel.

But his not-so-distant past reveals another character – he is one of Russia’s first skinheads who had a swastika tattooed on his shoulder, boasted of his skills with knives, and founded Slavic Union, a white supremacist group whose Russian acronym SS intentionally mimicked the one used by the Nazis’ infamous paramilitaries.

A court banned the group in 2010 as extremist, and Demushkin’s latest creature – the movement that failed to register as a political party – was suspended in August.

“The Kremlin has long been preoccupied with borrowing [the nationalist] agenda. And to do that, it needed to destroy the political movement of Russian nationalists that was thousands of men strong,” Demushkin said.

The largest players in the field of official, Kremlin-sanctioned nationalism are the deeply conservative and immensely powerful Russian Orthodox Church, the resurgent “armies” of Cossacks, czarist-era paramilitary forces, and right-wing parties.

The most outspoken nationalist is Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a 69-year-old politician with Jewish roots who heads the LDPR party that holds 56 out of 450 seats in the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, and who served as a deputy speaker for more than a decade.

The outspoken nationalist ran for president five times campaigning on promises to “return” Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states to Russia, install barbed-wire around Chechnya and Dagestan, Russia’s violence-plagued Muslim provinces, and expel non-Russian labour migrants.

But his pledges and party are widely seen as pseudo-opposition and the Kremlin’s tool to “sterilise nationalist voices”, according to Kolesnikov.

European far-right

While uprooting domestic far-right groups, the Kremlin cultivates ties with their ideological counterparts in the European Union to promote Moscow’s agenda.

“Russian influence in the affairs of the far right is a phenomenon seen all over Europe as a key risk for Euro-Atlantic integration at both the national and the Union level,” the Political Capital Institute, a Budapest-based think-tank, said in 2014.

In April, representatives of Western far-right political parties, including neo-Nazi groups from Germany, Greece, and the UK, met for a Kremlin-funded conference in St Petersburg, Russia’s former imperial capital and second-largest city.

Russian trolls spread government propaganda During the conference dubbed the International Russian Conservative Forum, they called on their governments to “protect” Christian values – and stop the new “Cold War” against Russia.

In recent years, the Kremlin has also politicised the idea of the “Russian world”, or a multi-million-strong Russian diaspora in former Soviet republics and throughout the world whose interests Moscow now seeks to represent and protect.

“The Russian man, or so say more inclusively, the man of the Russian world, thinks that there is a certain moral calling,” Putin said in 2014.

He added the Western ideals of individualism and personal success “are not enough for us”, and patriotic self-sacrifice and one’s readiness to “die for the motherland” is what makes Russians themselves.

Some Russia observers disagree, however.

“In recent years Putin has misappropriated the term ‘Russian world’ and made it a political slogan that almost implies, ‘if you speak Russian you belong in Russia’,” British historian Timothy Garton Ash wrote.

Russian War Nationalism: Nationalist Practices, Empire, Conservatism, and Orthodoxy

by Alexandra Martin Brankova — Mar. 10, 2023

The start of the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian war intensified the domestic expressions of different forms of Russian nationalism, from extremist circles and nationalist intellectuals to policy, public debates, and media spaces.

In the Russian Federation, the line between state and non-state actors is blurred. Nationalist groups operate in a controlled landscape where anti-extremism legislation defines which organisations are allowed to be active. Websites, social media channels and other media platforms can be taken down by the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology, and Mass Communications (Roskomnadzor). Censorship has intensified since March 2022, targeting oppositional groups, independent media outlets, and Meta social media (such as Facebook or Instagram), by marking them as extremist. The regulations shape a climate of limited ideological plurality where right-wing extremist movements promoting oppositional views and exclusionary nationalism are among the most censored actors. Fractions with visions that overlap with the government can operate undisturbed.

Russian nationalist groups differ in whether they see Russia as a mono- or multi-ethnic society. The former camp includes right-wing extremist groups, which are inward-looking and Russo-centric while the latter groups support imperialist, outward-looking narratives for a multi-ethnic nation. Discourses of militarism, multipolarity, messianism, conservatism, and political Orthodoxy are ubiquitous. However, divides between civic and ethnic, national and imperial identity lines cannot be applied in a straightforward manner to the Russian case. There are groups displaying both imperialist and ethno-nationalist standpoints that operate without being labelled as extremists. The so-called imperialists do not have a unified ideological front: some groups support the Soviet legacy, territorial claims, and secular governance while others are longing for the return of a monarchical empire and a tsar alongside the Church. Here, focus will be on the practices and discourses of three active and imperialist Russian nationalist organisations: the right-wing extremist Russian Imperial Movement, the nationalist and conservative Tsargrad Society, and Izborskii Club.

It is important to understand such groups since they have a strategic function for the Russian war effort in Ukraine. This includes recruitment and training for the frontlines (RIM), as well as the formation of an ideological foundation for current policies and the media agenda (Tsargrad and Izborskii Club). The list of nationalist groups labelled extremist since the 2000s (published by the Ministry of Justice), demonstrates that the state is tolerant of such groups, whilst censoring oppositional movements together with extremist ethno-nationalists ones. Major far-right and far-left organisations were banned in the early 2000s (e.g. the National Bolsheviks, the Slavic Union, the Movement Against Illegal Immigration, the All-Russian National Union, and the Russian Socialist Society). The period between 2014 and 2021 saw the prohibition of Ukrainian groups too, as well as Russian grassroot actors such as football fans, sports and hooligan associations, skinhead movements, and youth organisations. Far-right organisation was scattered and decentralised as a result. However, other nationalist groups filled the vacuum, and managed to operate strategically without state repression.

The Russian Imperial Movement: Military training for the frontlines, empire, and monarchism The far-right Russian Imperial Movement (RIM), founded in 2001, is one of the nationalist groups which provides military training, and has actively participated in the wars on Ukraine since 2014. RIM was designated as a terrorist group by the US State Senate in 2020, and by the Canadian Government in 2021, due to the provision of paramilitary training for European white supremacists and neo-Nazis. In 2022 the movement mobilised its military arm, the ”Imperial Legion”, and maintains training facilities at their ”Partisan Centre” in Saint Petersburg. RIM has specific requirements for volunteers to the Imperial Legion, including adherence to Orthodoxy, conservative political views, physical fitness, and no alcohol or drug dependency. Volunteers can choose between participation in armed conflicts or civilian projects.

Social media and the digitalisation of wartime practices are crucial to RIM’s communications. For instance, public social media spaces are used to announce recruitment rounds, give live updates from the front, and provide details about casualties. Videos about topics such as combat and firearm training, tactical medicine, or the psychology of wartime stress are distributed through public social media channels as educational material for volunteers. The movement also engages in cultural practices, such as the celebration of Orthodox holidays, and commemorations of Russian monarchs, patriarchs and other historical figures.

RIM’s ideology can be summarised as far-right ethno-nationalism, imperialist monarchism, Orthodoxy, and Russian cultural chauvinism. RIM describes itself as adhering to the triad of “God, Tsar, Nation”, (reconceptualising Sergey Uvarov’s formula “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality”). Messianism and the idea of Moscow as the Third Rome are common themes in their programme. Russia is seen as the heir of the Byzantine empire, in terms of its moral mission to preserve Orthodox Christianity and conservative family values. The movement promotes an imperialist territorial imaginary, where Belarus and Ukraine are presented as “White Russia” and “Little Russia”. While much of their discourse overlaps with Kremlin ideology, RIM is at times critical of state decisions and elites. For instance, live updates during the retreat of RIM from Kherson in November 2022 portrayed it as a “betrayal” and “corruption”, indicating serious discontent with the regime.

Tsargrad Society and Tsargrad Television: The entanglement of the grand imperial imaginary, Orthodoxy, and conservative television in a digital media ecosystem Tsargrad Society (previously known as the Double-Headed Eagle), led by the Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, with its associated online television channel Tsargrad TV, is one of the most dynamic digital media nationalist ecosystems. Tsargrad TV was removed from YouTube after US sanctions against Konstantin Malofeev, but remains visible on Telegram, VKontakte (VK), and live broadcasts via their web platforms. Interestingly, according to Medialogia, Tsargrad TV became one of the top 10 most cited internet sources in Russia in May 2022, when state censorship of liberal and independent media outlets began. Tsargrad Society’s manifesto envisages the Russian state as a “civilisation of the North mastering the vast spaces of Eurasia”, а concept borrowed from Aleksandr Dugin’s Eurasianists. Dugin often appears on Tsargrad TV and comments on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, while Konstantin Malofeev held a speech at the funeral of Darya Dugina in Moscow.

Similar to RIM, Tsargrad Society often uses the concepts of the “Third Rome” or “Holy Rus” to frame the Russian Federation as promoting traditional family values, juxtaposed to a liberal and decadent Europe/West. Russian cultural centrism is key, especially when discussing immigration policy. Publications demand the assimilation of immigrants into Russian culture and language. Tsargrad lobbies for the introduction of professional restrictions based on qualifications such as knowledge of Russian, and the prioritisation of Russian citizens in recruitment. Some of the stated goals of Tsargrad are the “revival of the Russian empire with its historical borders” including the Baltic states, Central Asia, Caucasus, Moldavia, Belarus, and Ukraine.

Whilst Tsargrad Society appears to be aligned or cooperating with the Kremlin on some matters, it holds divergent positions on others. On one hand, representatives of the Society participate in various state committees, and in conferences about government objectives related to demographics, family support, and migration policy, as well as joint initiatives with the Russian Orthodox Church. On the other hand, Tsargrad presents populist voices to Russian audiences, branding its content as an alternative to mainstream television. For example, despite demonstrating general support for the Russo-Ukrainian war, Tsargrad television distributed materials and 24/7 legal advice on how to avoid military conscription on social media and via a telephone hotline.

Izborskii Club: A platform for national unification and ideological production Izborskii Club is a platform which unifies a diverse body of Russian left- and right-wing nationalists, and contributes to the state’s patriotic policy, and agenda-setting for state media. The Club brings together figures such as Aleksandr Prokhanov, Alexandr Dugin, Valeri Korovin, Natalya Narochnitskaya, and Metropolitan Tikhon (Shevkunov), facilitating cooperation among imperialist nationalists. Unlike Tsargrad, which aims to engage broader audiences through media, Izborski Club is a think tank where different ideas such as the “Russian Dream”, the “Russian Ark”, or notions about Russia’s “cosmic” function are articulated. Their journal Russian Strategies (Russkie Strategii) is crucial to the communication of their ideas, and are supplemented with video content, round tables and conferences.

Discourses about the juxtaposition of Russia and the West were produced before the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war, but became more common in 2022–23. The conflict is framed as a fight for the survival of the Russian Federation, and the preservation of its sovereignty, resources and values - a global geopolitical battle with NATO and the USA. The Club works closely with state institutions and has been financed by the Presidential Fund for Cultural Initiatives, which aims to produce content for the state’s educational system. Similar to Tsargrad TV, the Club has developed a network with regional branches and local initiatives.

Conclusion The Russian Imperial Movement, Tsargrad Society, and Izborskii Club are only some of the actors that shape the current Russian nationalist landscape. However, they provide examples of synergies across domestic nationalist groups and overlapping identity discourses of empire, conservatism, Orthodoxy, and autocracy. Categories such as ethnic, civic, cultural, and imperial are entangled and negotiated in line with government discourses and frameworks, and in-group imaginaries. Nationalist cultural production is becoming more prevalent both in digital and traditional media spaces. While independent and oppositional media channels are restricted, only one year since the invasion, selected nationalist voices have filled the vacuum in Russian public space.

⚡️🇪🇪Estonia announced the transfer of the Role 2 mobile field hospital, which will save the lives of our soldiers at the front, - Rustem Umerov, the Ministry of Defense of 🇺🇦Ukraine, informed

This is already the 4th machine transferred by the Estonian Center Defense Investment (ECDI) in cooperation with partners.

Here is the situation on Tuesday, October 3, 2023.

Fighting At least two people were killed and eight injured in Russian shelling of Ukraine’s southern Kherson region. Governor Oleksandr Prokudin said the attacks hit residential areas, shops, medical facilities and other civilian infrastructure. Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov said the city will build Ukraine’s first fully underground school to protect pupils from Russia’s frequent bomb and missile attacks. While many schools in front-line regions have been forced to teach online, Kharkiv organised some 60 separate classrooms in its metro system before the school year that started on September 1, creating space for more than 1,000 children to study there. Diplomacy and politics European Union foreign ministers showed their support for Ukraine at a meeting in Kyiv, their first outside the bloc’s borders, after a pro-Russian candidate won an election in Slovakia and the United States’s Congress left Ukraine war aid out of a temporary spending bill. “The EU remains united in its support to Ukraine. … I don’t see any member state folding on their engagement,” EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told reporters. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the duration of the war was linked to support from its allies. “Our victory directly depends on our cooperation: the more strong and principled steps we take together, the sooner this war will end,” Zelenskyy said in a statement on his website, urging the EU to expand sanctions on Russia and Iran, which has supplied attack drones for Russian forces. He also called for the “acceleration” of work to direct “frozen Russian assets to finance the restoration of war-torn Ukraine”.

The US White House said it had been in touch with allies and partners about funding for Ukraine and stressed that there was continued bipartisan support in Congress to continue to support the country. Moscow said that while it expected Washington to continue its support for Ukraine, the vote in Congress was a sign of increasing divisions in Western countries over the conflict. “According to our forecasts fatigue from this conflict, fatigue from the completely absurd sponsorship of the Kyiv regime will grow in various countries, including the United States,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said.

Weapons Germany’s economy ministry said exports of military equipment to Ukraine had grown more than fourfold so far this year, to 3.3 billion euros ($3.48bn), making Kyiv the main recipient of German weapons. Denmark’s Ministry of Defence said it will spend 100 million kroner ($14.1m) in a joint European order for ammunition to help Ukraine. On Friday, the European Defence Agency (EDA) said seven EU countries had ordered 155mm artillery rounds for Kyiv and to replenish depleted stocks. Delivery is expected in 2024. The first batch of Leopard 2 tanks sent for repair in Poland after being damaged on the battlefield have been returned to Ukraine, according to the Polish Armaments Group. Germany and Poland agreed to set up a repair centre for the tanks in July.

Polish minister apologises for falsely accusing Ukraine of not inviting Poland to defence forum OCT 3, 2023

Poland and Ukraine have clashed over the absence of Polish defence firms from an industry forum in Kyiv at the weekend. The Polish state assets minsiter eventually apologised after realising he had falsely accused Ukraine of not inviting Poland.

Meanwhile, the Polish foreign minister skipped a meeting of his EU counterparts in Kyiv yesterday, saying that the decision was due to a current “downturn” in relations with Ukraine.

Though Poland has been a close ally of Ukraine since Russia’s invasion last year, the two countries are currently embroiled in a dispute over Ukrainian grain exports, which Warsaw has unilaterally banned.

Yesterday, the majority of the EU’s foreign ministers gathered in Kyiv for their first ever summit in a country outside the EU itself. They agreed a €5 billion package of additional military aid for Ukraine.

However, Poland was among a small number of countries that did not send its foreign minister, Zbigniew Rau, with one of his deputies attending instead.

“My absence from the meeting of EU foreign ministers in Kyiv is partly an expression of the fact that, when it comes to relations between Poland and Ukraine, we are entering a period of decline,” Rau told Polsat News.

“I wouldn’t call it retaliation,” he added, emphasising that Poland still has “common strategic interests with Ukraine”. However, when it comes to “national interests we have divergent interests and misunderstandings regarding the transit of Ukrainian grain through Poland”.

Rau’s remarks yesterday followed a war of words with Ukraine over a defence industry meeting last weekend in Kyiv. While firms from over 30 countries were present, there was no representative from Poland.

“Shame on you, Mr Zelensky,” tweeted Krzysztof Lipiec, an MP from Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party. “Where is Poland? This is how Ukraine thanks Poland?”

In an interview with Radio Zet yesterday, Poland’s minister for state assets Jacek Sasin said that “PGZ [Poland’s state defence holding firm] as a company was not invited”. He added that “we have been dealing with a series of unfriendly gestures from Ukraine recently”.

“I am afraid that this is a matter of current political interest on the part of the Ukrainian authorities, who believe that when an [election] campaign is underway in Poland, it is better to side with Germany and to play for a change of government in Poland,” said Sasin.”This will have a negative impact on Ukraine.”

However, that version of events was disputed by Ukraine’s ambassador to Poland, Vasyl Zvarych, who told broadcaster TVN that “Poland was among the first to be invited to this event” and its absence is “a question for the Polish side”.

Shortly after, Sasin issued a statement admitting that he had been wrong and that PGZ had, in fact, been invited to the forum in Kyiv. “I am sorry for the misunderstanding,” he wrote.

Sasin added that PGZ “decided not to attend due to the circumstances described below” and shared a statement from the firm. However, the statement did not provide any reason for PGZ’s decision not to attend the forum and instead talked about the firm’s existing good relations with Ukraine.

The government’s conflict with Kyiv has drawn criticism from the opposition, who have accused it of harming Poland’s relations with Ukraine in order to benefit the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party’s current campaign for parliamentary elections that will take place on 15 October.

“Poland as a country is currently paying the cost of an election campaign in which PiS subordinates the issues of national defence and relations with Ukraine to its own political benefits,” said Czesław Mroczek, an opposition MP and deputy head of the parliamentary defence committee.

“If Poland excludes itself from the group of countries and companies that will participate in the rebuilding of Ukraine, that will cause terrible harm to the interests and economy of our country,” Mroczek told industry news service Defence24.

injuries because he got blown up by his own comrades, not Ukraine Matthew Loh Oct 3, 2023

Russia has refused to compensate a soldier who was injured by his own comrades in Ukraine. A court ruling against Khizri Kurazov, a corporal, says he was wounded by an accidental mine blast. But he's not eligible for a standard $30,000 payment because he wasn't injured in the line of fire.

A Russian corporal wounded in Ukraine has been denied standard compensation for his war injuries because they were inflicted by his own comrades instead of Ukrainian forces, court documents show.

The case of Khizri Kurazov, a corporal of the military unit 3737 of the Russian Guard, was detailed in a September 8 ruling in Russia's southern district military court.

The ruling against Kurazov was earlier reported on by independent Russian media.

Kurazov, a contract soldier, was wounded in Ukraine by a mine accidentally detonated by fellow Russian personnel, according to the September 8 decision.

His injuries were certified by a Russian military hospital on March 14, and the cause of his wounds was listed as improper handling of ammunition by someone in his unit, the ruling said.

The corporal applied for a claim of 3 million rubles, or $30,000, according to the decision. Russia has disbursed these payments since early 2022 to soldiers wounded in the invasion of Ukraine.

But on May 25, an investigation run by Kurazov's combat unit found that the corporal's wounds weren't directly associated with any combat missions or tasks, and instead were inflicted by the mistakes of another serviceman.

It ruled that there were no grounds for the corporal to receive the lump-sum payment, and Kurazov's commander ordered a refusal of the claim, the judicial decision said.

A military court in the Nalchik Garrison also refused to grant Kurazov's payment on June 27, per the court filing.

Kurazov argued that the one-time payment to injured troops should be given to any Russian soldier wounded in Ukraine, including the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, the filing said.

He appealed the Nalchik Garrison military court's decision, bringing his case to the southern district military court in Rostov-on-Don in August.

But a panel of three military court judges — Viktor Alekseevich Kostin, Dmitry Viktorovich Merkulov, and Magomedbasir Gapurovich Shuaipov — ruled on September 8 that the original decision should be upheld.

They agreed that requirements for the $30,000 payment include the soldier being wounded in direct combat. However, they added that Kurazov has the right to apply for other types of compensation.

Kurazov's refused claim is one of several that have been contested by injured Russian soldiers, such as contract soldier Aziz Magomedov, who was denied payment after receiving initial treatment in April 2022 at a city hospital instead of a military one, Radio Free Liberty reported.

Russia's Defense Ministry did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment sent outside regular business hours.

Why Ukraine Could Start Manufacturing the Finnish Patria AMV Instead of Its Domestic BTR-4?

Posted Today

The Patria AMV is a versatile Finnish armoured military vehicle with an 8×8 chassis that can serve as a self-propelled platform for various weapon systems. The AMV features a modular architecture that allows for many different versions of this vehicle, including infantry transporters, self-propelled mortars, etc. Ukraine is buying quite a few Patria AMVs and may even manufacture them in the future. What about their domestic BTR-4?

In 2023 April 1 it was reported that Ukraine ordered 100 Patria AMVs from the Polish production lines and will pay for these machines with US and EU financial aid money. President Volodymyr Zelensky later specified that Ukraine would purchase 200 Patria AMVs in total.

Finland is now reportedly considering manufacturing the Patria AMV in Ukraine. Why not? Ukraine is an industrious country and it needs weapons. But, as Defense Express reminds us, Ukraine has its own similar machine called the BTR-4.

The Patria AMV XP, which is of most interest to Ukraine, weighs up to 32 tonnes. It is a universal self-propelled armoured vehicle with a good level of protection against anti-tank mines. The Patria AMV XP is normally armed with a 14.5 mm machine gun or a 30 mm autocannon. There are often anti-tank missiles there too. Finland also has a 120 mm mortar on the Patria AMV platform – it is that versatile.

The Patria AMV has a crew of up to 3 people and behind them, there is room for 8-12 troops. AMV has a very strong independent hydropneumatic 8×8 chassis and a powerful engine. The Patria AMV can accelerate to 100 km/h on the road, while in water it can reach about 10 km/h. Ukraine needs such weapons badly. But what about the Ukrainian BTR-4?

The BTR-4 Bucephalus is an infantry transporter developed in Kharkiv. It has some similarities to the Patria AMV – it also has an 8×8 chassis, carries 8 troops as passengers, and has a 3-person crew. Even the 30mm autocannon is similar.

However, at the moment there is no information about the production of BTR-4 – it is possible that it has stopped. It’s not even that important – if Ukraine has an opportunity to replace the BTR-4 with the Finnish Patria AMV, it probably should.

The BTR-4 has been in service only since 2014, but the suspension of this machine was developed in Soviet times. The BTR-4 is not as well protected. In addition, the suspension of this machine will not support much more weight, so the development of the BTR-4 into other systems is hardly possible.

Of course, the BTR-4 has its advantages. For example, the Ukrainian machine is cheaper. But that’s only because its technology is lagging behind. So, if Ukraine can welcome the production of the Patria AMV, it will be a smart decision. The BTR-4s did their job in the beginning of the Russian invasion but now Ukraine’s firepower is rapidly developing.

Written by Povilas M.