The fight in Ukraine is doubling as a recruitment tool for racist, far-right extremists
Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine prompted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to later call on all “citizens of the world” to join the fight against the Russian army and help defend “peaceful coexistence.” Thousands appear to be taking up the cause, including dozens of Americans and Canadians.
Among the well-meaning citizens lining up to fight for Ukraine are volunteers with links to white supremacist and far-right extremism.
But among the well-meaning citizens lining up to fight for Ukraine are some global volunteers with links to white supremacist and far-right extremism. In recent years, global neo-Nazi and white supremacist extremist foreign fighters have sought training and combat experience by joining ultranationalist defense militias in Ukraine. A member of the U.S. neo-Nazi group The Base, an ex-Marine, joined the Ukrainian war effort in 2020 before he was expelled from the country.
Factions of Ukrainian fighters have been linked to white supremacist or neo-Nazi movements over the past eight years, including some members of the ultranationalist Azov Battalion, which fought against pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine in 2014 and eventually became a volunteer arm of the National Guard of Ukraine. As the conflict with Russia escalated last week, Azov members posted a video of themselves greasing bullets in pig fat and warning Russian Muslim soldiers, likely those from Russia’s Muslim-majority Chechnya, that they “will not go to heaven.”
Putin has exaggerated the fact that a small minority of Ukrainian fighters have ties to far-right extremism in his attempt to describe all of Ukraine as in need of “denazification,” which is patently false. While there are problems with far-right groups and far-right violence in Ukraine, as there are in other parts of Europe, there is little support among the broader population for right-wing nationalist parties, which garnered only 2 percent of the national vote in 2019. Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, who is Jewish, lost family members in the Holocaust.
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