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James Heappey in Warsaw also hailed what he described as "the functional defeat" of the Russian navy in the Black Sea saying "it has been forced to disperse to ports from which it cannot have an effect on Ukraine". Said "every bit as important" as breakthrough on land in Kharkiv oblast last year.

As I walked around Kyiv on a beautiful, sunny morning in early September, I noticed the scaffolding in the city’s squares. Statues had been covered up to protect them from bomb damage. Later, I saw a statue with no protection around it– a graffiti-covered memorial to a Red Army general whose name nobody remembered. I was told that this statue had been covered by protective scaffolding before the war. The protection was removed when the war broke out. There was some hope that Russian bombs might solve the problem of what to do with this relic of Soviet rule.

You cannot understand the war in Ukraine without knowing its history. This was made very clear to me in a conversation I had with Olesia Briazgunova, who works for one of Ukraine’s two national trade union centers, the KVPU (Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine). I suggested that I saw some similarities between the situation in Ukraine today and the Spanish Civil War.

Olesia stopped me right there and asked if there had been genocide in Spain. I said there hadn’t been. She said, “Well there’s genocide here — and the Russians have been trying to wipe out the Ukrainian nation for a very long time.” I thought of Stalin’s terror-famine of the early 1930s, which Ukrainians call the Holodomor, and which they rightly consider an act of deliberate genocide. She had a point.

History surrounds you in Kyiv. You hear it in conversations, you see it in the street names, and you breathe it in the air. The Solidarity Center, which is the AFL-CIO’s global workers’ rights project, is located on a street once named after Stalin’s Communist International. The street was renamed in honor of Symon Petliura, a leader of the Ukrainian People’s Republic and a deeply controversial figure in the country’s history.

In addition to renaming streets with Soviet connections, the city seems to be removing much of its Russian history, too. At one point I was directed by Google Maps to Pushkin street. But Pushkin street no longer exists.

When I interviewed Georgiy Trukhanov, the leader of the 1.2 million member teachers union in Ukraine, about their relationship with the teachers union in Russia, he told me that those Russian teachers were partially guilty here. “Guilty of what?” I asked. All the Russian soldiers currently fighting in Ukraine, all of them, studied in Russian schools, he said. They were taught to be what they have become — killers and rapists.

The war has united Ukrainian society as never before. The unions are fully signed up. The FPU president, Grygorii Osovyi, told me that 20% of Ukrainian trade union members are now serving in the armed forces. Georgiy Trukhanov told me that teachers could not be drafted as they are considered essential workers — so thousands of them have volunteered.

I spoke with many union leaders about the situation in what Ukrainians call the “temporarily occupied territories.” Russian occupiers have essentially banned the Ukrainian language from classrooms. Many workers have fled those territories, and unions are doing an amazing job of helping them, collecting aid, providing accommodation, and much more. Union offices I visited were full of boxes of aid, including plastic sheeting to replace windows destroyed by Russian artillery. Mykhailo Volynets, a former miner and head of the KVPU, told me that there was an urgent need for bandages.

Amid the horrors of the war, there are occasional bits of very positive news. An LGBTQI activist explained to me how Putin had weaponized homophobia in Russia, including spreading rumors that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and other leaders were gay. Meanwhile, in Ukraine, there has been a huge shift in public opinion regarding LGBTQI people, many of whom are serving at the front. This is a part of the world where homophobia has run rampant, and even turned violent, as we have seen in countries like Georgia. But in Ukraine, the war has helped change attitudes in a positive way.

I spoke with Ukrainian socialists, with young workers who organize couriers, with aviation workers and railway workers. I was interviewed by women members of the nuclear power workers union — who are staying at their posts at Europe’s largest nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhya, now under Russian occupation.

The message I got from everyone could not have been clearer: The Ukrainian labor movement and Left stand fully against the Russian invasion. They want and expect solidarity from the labor movement and Left in other countries. They enormously appreciate everything from solidarity gestures such as the visits of leading trade unionists, including the American Federation of Teachers’ president Randi Weingarten, and donations from unions ranging from generators to much-needed bandages.

Despite the differences, I still see this conflict as the Spanish Civil War of our time. The many young men and women who have come to Ukraine to join the fight are inspiring in the way that the International Brigades were some 90 years ago. The Spanish Republic was defeated in large part because many democracies failed to come to its aid, while the fascists were fully backed by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Will the same thing happen in Ukraine?

Putin’s regime is a fascist one, and the war on Ukraine is an illegal, imperialist war. Ukraine is not a perfect society, and its government is not a perfect government. Nor was the Spanish Republic. But in the fight against fascism, we need to ask ourselves, to paraphrase the old song, which side are we on?

25 September 2023Human Rights Russian forces in Ukraine faced new allegations of war crimes on Monday as UN-appointed independent rights experts published the findings of their latest report into Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbour.

Members of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva that they have documented attacks with explosive weapons on residential buildings, civilian infrastructure and medical institutions, as well as torture and sexual and gender-based violence.

Rape allegations Commission Chair Erik Møse provided harrowing details on the findings to the Council, noting that in the Kherson region, “Russian soldiers raped and committed sexual violence against women of ages ranging from 19 to 83 years”, often together with threats or commission of other violations.

“Frequently, family members were kept in an adjacent room, thereby forced to hear the violations taking place,” Mr. Møse said.

‘Widespread’ torture The Commission said that its investigations in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia indicate the “widespread and systematic” use of torture by Russian armed forces against persons accused of being informants of the Ukrainian military, which in some cases led to death.

Mr. Møse quoted a victim of torture as saying, “Every time I answered that I didn’t know or didn’t remember something, they gave me electric shocks… I don’t know how long it lasted. It felt like an eternity.”

Probe into child transfers a ‘priority’ The Commissioners also indicated that they have continued to investigate individual situations of alleged transfers of unaccompanied children by Russian authorities to the Russian Federation.

“This item remains very high on our priority list,” Mr. Møse assured the Council.

Possible ‘incitement to genocide’ The Commission expressed concern about allegations of genocide in Ukraine, warning that “some of the rhetoric transmitted in Russian state and other media may constitute incitement to genocide”

Mr. Møse said that the Commission was “continuing its investigations on such issues”.

Call for accountability The UN-appointed independent rights investigators emphasized the need for accountability and expressed regret about the fact that all of their communications addressed to the Russian Federation “remain unanswered”.

In their report, the Commissioners also urged the Ukrainian authorities to “expeditiously and thoroughly” investigate the few cases of violations by its own forces.

No equivalence Replying to questions from reporters in Geneva on Monday, the UN-appointed independent rights investigators strongly refuted any suggestions of an equivalence in the violations committed by both sides.

Mr. Møse stressed that on the Russian side, the Commission had found a “wide spectrum” and “large number of violations”. On the Ukrainian side, there were “a few examples” related to indiscriminate attacks as well as “ill-treatment of Russians in Ukrainian captivity”, he said.

More in-depth investigations The latest update reflects the Commission’s ongoing investigations during its second mandate, which started in April this year.

Mr. Møse said that it was now undertaking “more in-depth investigations” regarding unlawful attacks with explosive weapons, attacks affecting civilians, torture, sexual and gender-based violence, and attacks on energy infrastructure.

“This may also clarify whether torture and attacks on energy infrastructure amount to crimes against humanity,” the Commissioners said.

The Commission The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine was established by the Human Rights Council on 4 March 2022 to investigate all alleged violations and abuses of human rights, violations of international humanitarian law and related crimes in the context of the aggression against Ukraine by Russia.

Its three members are Chair Erik Møse, Pablo de Greiff and Vrinda Grover. They are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their work.

The mandate of the Commission of Inquiry was extended by the Council last April for a further period of one year. Its next report to the General Assembly is due in October.

Deportation, Treatment of Ukraine’s Children by Russian Federations Takes Centre Stage by Many Delegates at Security Council Briefing Delegate Questions Moscow’s Position in International Community once Conflict Ends The United Nations remains committed to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity amidst indefensible attacks on civilians and infrastructure, a senior United Nations official told the Security Council today, as speakers took stock of the war’s impact on Ukraine’s children on the thirty-second anniversary of that country’s independence.

Rosemary DiCarlo, Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, noting that today marks 18 months since the Russian Federation launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, said that “the numbers alone tell a horrific story”. Citing confirmed numbers of at least 9,444 civilians killed — including 545 children — and nearly 17,000 injured, she added that “the real figures are likely much higher”. And, since Moscow’s 17 July withdrawal from the Black Sea Grain Initiative, the fighting has only escalated.

Detailing Russian Federation attacks against Ukraine’s ports, cultural heritage and civilian infrastructure, she expressed regret that the UN still does not have the necessary access to verify allegations of violations against children in the territory of Ukraine under Moscow’s control or in the Russian Federation itself. Attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure are “indefensible”, she stressed, underlining the UN’s “unwavering” commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders.

Kateryna Rashevska, legal expert at the Regional Center for Human Rights, then reported that Russian Federation agents have taken at least 19,546 children to that country from Ukraine since 18 February 2022. Among other violations, Russian Federation citizenship is imposed on them, and they are forbidden to speak and learn the Ukrainian language or preserve their Ukrainian identity. “Leaving Ukrainian children in Russia means continuing to violate their rights,” she stressed, urging the Council “to assist in the return of Ukrainian children”.

Also briefing the Council was Mykola Kuleba, Chief Executive Officer of Save Ukraine, who said that, when the Russian Federation began “its war of genocide against our country” in 2014, more than 1 million Ukrainian children ended up on the occupied territories of Crimea and Donbas and were further deported to Moscow. Stolen and turned into weapons, thousands of them now fight against their motherland. “You have the power to help these children,” he underscored, urging the Council to act to reunify families.

In the ensuing debate, many speakers spotlighted the impact of violence on the civilian population, urging a cessation of hostilities and a resumption of dialogue. Others spotlighted the conflict’s global ramifications and called for the resumption of the Black Sea Grain Initiative. The treatment of children, however, took centre stage.

The representative of the Russian Federation said that Kyiv’s tragedy began when “the West chose Ukraine as a pawn to fight against and to weaken Russia”. Citing the war initiated by the “Kyiv regime” against its own Russian-speaking citizens in 2014, he stressed that his country was “compelled to come to the defence of women, children and the elderly, who were being destroyed by Ukraine after that country and the West unequivocally refused to comply with the Minsk agreements”.

Ukraine’s representative, however, stressed that the Russian Federation has pursued a policy of mass abduction and forceful indoctrination of Ukrainian children since 2014. “Russia’s aggression is about Ukraine’s future, and there is no future without children,” he observed, calling for relevant UN agencies and officials to properly monitor and report on the mass abduction of children from the occupied territories of Ukraine to the Russian Federation and Belarus.

Albania’s representative joined others in stating that Moscow “has failed to convince the world that its re-education camps and forced adoptions are, as portrayed, humanitarian actions”. He recalled that, based on hard evidence regarding the unlawful deportation of children, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for the Russian Federation’s President and Commissioner for Children’s Rights.

The representative of Japan, similarly, stressed that no matter how much Moscow tried to mislead the world, “we are united in our voice that Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is nothing but a flagrant violation of the UN Charter”. As families are being torn apart by unlawful deportations, he urged a just, lasting peace for Ukraine and spotlighted a recent conference towards that end held in Saudi Arabia featuring the participation of more than 40 countries.

The representative of the United Arab Emirates also expressed alarm over reports of child abductions and forced transfers in Ukraine, urging the parties to the conflict to facilitate the reunification of such children with their families and for States to cooperate with the Central Tracing Agency of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). He also called for a cessation of hostilities and a diplomatic solution in accordance with international law.

Along those lines, Mozambique’s representative — recalling Africa’s experience in conflict mediation and resolution — underlined the indispensable nature of dialogue and diplomacy. The representative of Ghana also underscored that embracing dialogue and diplomacy remain Moscow’s best option for resolving its stated security concerns. China’s representative stressed that the “security of all States is indivisible”, adding that the Ukraine crisis demonstrates that provoking bloc confrontations and seeking absolute security “do not work”.

The representative of Ecuador, meanwhile, questioned whether the Russian Federation’s authorities have thought about the country’s position in the international community once the conflict ends. He underscored that States are not measured today by their nuclear power, the territory they snatch from their neighbours or the fear they instil. Rather, they are measured by their cosmopolitan culture, democratic institutions, tolerance, artistic creativity, technological progress and respect for law and human rights.

MAINTENANCE OF PEACE AND SECURITY OF UKRAINE

Briefings

ROSEMARY DICARLO, Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, noting that today marks 18 months since the Russian Federation launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, said that “the numbers alone tell a horrific story”. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has confirmed at least 9,444 civilians killed — including 545 children — and nearly 17,000 injured. “The real figures are likely much higher,” she added, noting that some estimates put the total number of civilians and military personnel killed on both sides at 500,000. There is no end in sight to this war — launched in violation of the principles of the Charter of the United Nations and international law — and, since the Russian Federation’s withdrawal from the Black Sea Grain Initiative on 17 July, the fighting has only escalated.

Detailing “brutal and relentless Russian attacks” that have damaged grain-export infrastructure in Ukraine’s Black Sea and Danube ports, she stressed that attacks targeting grain facilities threaten to reverse the progress made in bolstering food security over the past year. “This could be catastrophic for the 345 million people already acutely food insecure around the world,” she emphasized. She also spotlighted the Russian Federation’s 19 August missile attack on a theatre in Chernihiv that took the lives of seven people — including a six-year-old girl — and injured more than 100 others. In recent weeks, dozens of civilians have also been killed in attacks on Kherson, Odesa, Donetsk, Lviv, Kharkiv, Sumy, Zaporizhzhia and other regions of Ukraine. In some instances, sequential strikes have killed and injured not only civilians but first responders who rushed to help.

Attacks against Ukrainian culture and heritage have also escalated, she reported, noting that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has verified damage to 284 cultural sites since the beginning of the war. Another recent UN assessment — on the impact on the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam — concluded that the breach caused a far-reaching environmental disaster, the scale of which may not be clear for decades. She also stressed that the war has had a devastating impact on women, who represent the majority of the 6.2 million people forced to move to other countries because of the violence. Civil-society organizations led by Ukrainian women were among the first to respond to the full-scale invasion and, to support these efforts, the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN-Women) has allocated over $14.6 million to finance over 120 civil-society organizations that support females both inside Ukraine and displaced in the Republic of Moldova.

Also detailing incidents of sexual violence and the destruction of schools and hospitals, she expressed regret that the UN still does not have the necessary access to verify allegations of violations against children in the territory of Ukraine under Moscow’s control or in the Russian Federation itself. Further, she expressed concern over the possible impact on civilians of the shelling of Russian Federation border communities and drone attacks deep inside that country, including Moscow. Attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure are “indefensible” and strictly prohibited under international law, she underscored. Observing that “today’s grim milestone of 18 months of war coincides with the thirty-second anniversary of Ukraine’s independence”, she underlined the UN’s “unwavering” commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders.

KATERYNA RASHEVSKA, Legal expert at the Regional Center for Human Rights, reported that according to the Ukrainian National Information Bureau, since 18 February 2022, Russian Federation agents have taken at least 19,546 children to that country from Ukraine — 3,855 of them orphans and children deprived of parental care — amounting to “a violation of Article 49 of the fourth Geneva Convention and a war crime”, she stated. Moscow further refuses to transfer the list of evacuated children to the Central Tracing Agency of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). These considerations formed the basis of the decision of the International Criminal Court’s Pre-Trial Chamber II to issue arrest warrants against Russian Federation President Vladimir V. Putin and his Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova. She further pointed to the imposition of Russian citizenship on Ukrainian children, as “the right to preserve one’s identity is a prerequisite for exercising all human rights.”

She emphasized that if Russian Federation officials intended to act for humanitarian reasons, then instead of legislation for the simplified imposition of citizenship, they would facilitate medical care and remove obstacles to education and social benefits. “But this is not the case,” she stressed. Ukrainian children are recognized exclusively as Russian citizens, and there is no dual citizenship agreement between Kyiv and Moscow. She affirmed that raising these children by Russian citizens, as well as political indoctrination, Russification, and militarization in the education system, is a violation of several articles of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Ukrainian children are forbidden to speak and learn the Ukrainian language or preserve their Ukrainian identity. For six years, she recalled, Moscow has not implemented the International Court of Justice order to ensure the right to education in Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar languages in Crimea.

She noted the transfer of at least 7,116 children to recreation camps in 2023 — some facilities being 9,000 kilometers away from their original homes. Due to the lack of access to these territories, confirming or denying the return of Ukrainian children home is impossible. She further cited additional checks at the border, long-term interrogations by representatives of Russian Federation law enforcement, the requirement to obtain Russian citizenship, forced nudity and polygraph examinations. She addressed the Council “with a clear call: to assist in the return of the Ukrainian children”. Although the relevant article to the Geneva Conventions was adopted by consensus, a General Assembly resolution is needed to define the obligations of each member of the international community in returning Ukrainian children — which should be a transparent process by appointing a third-party guarantor and concluding an international binding agreement. “Leaving Ukrainian children in Russia means continuing to violate their rights,” she stressed.

MYKOLA KULEBA, Chief Executive Officer of Save Ukraine, said he will be a “voice of Ukrainian children deprived of their fundamental and inalienable right to life and their right to maintain individuality, including citizenship, name and family ties”, adding: “Today I will speak in the name of the lost, the dead and the wounded Ukrainian children, deprived of these rights.” He recalled that Save Ukraine is the biggest non-governmental organization in his country that is rescuing children in Ukraine from the warzones and the occupied territories. It has been operating since 2014, when the Russian Federation started the “war of genocide against our country and our nation”, he reported, recalling that back then more than 1 million of Ukrainian children ended up on the occupied territories of Crimea and Donbas and were further deported to Moscow. “These are stolen Ukrainian children, who were turned into a weapon by the Russian Federation”, he stressed, pointing out that thousands of these children are now fighting against their motherland. He also noted that since 2014, Moscow has been conducting these actions “quietly, hiding its crimes from the world”.

Noting that the Russian Federation “covers its military objects with the Ukrainian children”, he said that Moscow’s military forces have placed their equipment next to an orphanage in Kherson. He further cited several messages of Ukrainian mothers and children pleading with his organization for help to return their children from the occupied territories, while underscoring that the Russian Federation “deprived all Ukrainian children of the happy childhood and the chance to a normal life, while maintaining 20 per cent of them as hostages”.

“You have the power to help these children,” he underscored, adding: “On the Independence Day of Ukraine, which the Russian Federation recognized in 1991, I stand on the most powerful world platform and ask for your help and assistance, while I am assured that you have all the means to resolve this important and painful issue.” “Our children are not a weapon, not a shield, they are merely small children, who have the right to a happy childhood and life,” he stressed, adding: “Let’s reunite families, let’s reunite nations, reunite all of us around Ukrainian children.”

Statements

LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD (United States), Council President for August, speaking in her national capacity, underscored that “Ukraine’s very existence is under attack”. Ukrainians have courageously fought back to defend their country’s sovereignty, freedom and democracy, as well as to return Ukrainian children who have been ripped from their homes. Since February 2022, the Russian Federation forcibly transferred or deported thousands of Ukrainian children, including babies as young as 4 months. “We don’t even know the location of so many of the children who have been forcibly transferred,” she decried, detailing stories of parents who freed their children. “Russia’s campaign of cruelty continues to this day,” she said, refuting Moscow’s claims that transfers of children are part of their “humanitarian evacuations”. The International Criminal Court has alleged President Putin is responsible for war crimes, she said, also spotlighting reports that Belarusian leaders have supported moving Ukrainian children to camps in their country. Today, the United States is imposing sanctions on two entities and 11 individuals, including those reportedly responsible for the forcible transfers and deportation of Ukrainian children to camps. Additionally, she noted that her Government is taking steps to impose visa restrictions of three Russia-installed purported authorities for their involvement in human rights abuses of Ukrainian minors.

FERIT HOXHA (Albania) stressed that “we all have failed” when laws are not implemented, when commitments are not respected and when innocent people are hurt. Underscoring that there is no doubt regarding the aggressor in Ukraine, he said that the assault on that country’s present “is nothing short of an audacious bid to dismantle its future”. Credible reports have confirmed a well-prepared plan for the deportation of Ukraine’s children to the Russian Federation, and the Secretary-General’s annual report on children and armed conflict listed the Russian Federation’s military forces among those who commit grave violations against children. He recalled that, based on hard evidence regarding the unlawful deportation of children, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants on 17 March for the Russian Federation’s President and Commissioner for Children’s Rights. Against that backdrop, he stated that — while Moscow continues to brainwash domestic opinion — “it has failed to convince the world that its re-education camps and forced adoptions are, as portrayed, humanitarian actions”.

DOMINGOS FERNANDES (Mozambique), recalling Africa’s experience in conflict mediation and resolution, as embodied in its Silencing the Guns initiative, underscored the indispensable nature of dialogue and diplomacy. Yet regrettably, urgent appeals for peace have not found fertile ground. Citing the unfortunate collapse of the Black Sea Grain Initiative and the starving of resources to mitigate humanitarian emergencies in global hotspots, he emphasized that “we are reminded of the global ramifications of this conflict.” This disruption not only threatens individual nations but also erodes the framework of peaceful coexistence, destabilizes multilateral and collective security arrangements, and makes the fulfillment of multilateral commitments such as the Sustainable Development Goals more difficult. “Now, more than ever, we are in dire need of a paradigm shift, that prioritizes dialogue in alignment with the UN Charter’s ideals and our shared values,” he stressed, advocating for a political and negotiated resolution of the ongoing armed conflict.

SÉRGIO FRANÇA DANESE (Brazil) underlined that, as a peaceful and lasting solution to the conflict in Ukraine continues to be elusive, it is essential to limit the impact of violence on the civilian population. The current dynamics of the conflict deprive millions of basic and dignified conditions for survival, a concern that grows deeper, especially with the coming winter. Accordingly, it is essential to increase the call from the international community for the cessation of hostilities, and for negotiations that bring a lasting solution. The resumption of dialogue can rebuild confidence where confidence and trust were shattered, and provide the means to resolve urgent issues, such as the situation of prisoners of war, humanitarian access, the security of nuclear facilities and the full resumption of transport of grain and fertilizers across the Black Sea, a claim made especially by developing countries, he emphasized.

ZHANG JUN (China) reiterated that all countries’ sovereignty and territorial integrity should be safeguarded, that all parties’ legitimate security concerns should be considered and that all efforts towards peaceful settlement of the crisis should be supported. Further, the international community should encourage the parties to exercise calm and restraint, achieve consensus and explore ways to create conditions conducive to peace talks. “The security of all States is indivisible,” he underscored, noting that the Ukraine crisis demonstrates that provoking bloc confrontations and seeking absolute security “do not work”. Also underlining the need to manage spill-over effects, he said that the Black Sea Grain Initiative “should not be easily abandoned”. All parties should strive for the early resumption of grain and fertilizer exports from the Russian Federation and Ukraine through dialogue and consultation. He added that the delivery of humanitarian assistance must be ensured and that measures must be taken to guard against risks to nuclear safety and security.

FELIX OSEI BOATENG (Ghana), voicing deep concern over the presence of Russian Federation troops in Ukraine, underscored that ending the war and embracing dialogue and diplomacy remain Moscow’s best option for resolving its stated security concerns. Urging relevant United Nations agencies to provide mental health and psychosocial support, he cited statistics on the harrowing post-traumatic stress disorder that about a quarter of the Ukrainian population have been diagnosed with. He further condemned deliberate and indiscriminate attacks on civilian infrastructure, notably health-care facilities, schools, residential areas, and food systems. Calling for the resumption of the Black Sea Grain Initiative, he encouraged the parties to cooperate with the Secretary-General’s efforts to comprehensively address all bottlenecks. The purely military logic underpinning this war over the past 18 months will not deliver any durable settlement or sustainable peace, he stressed.

NATHALIE BROADHURST ESTIVAL (France) underscored that, with its deliberate bombardments targeting civilian populations and infrastructure, the Russian Federation has inflicted unspeakable suffering on the Ukrainian people. Moscow is responsible for murder, maiming, illegal transfers of children, sexual violence against children, and attacks against schools and hospitals. Condemning the Russian Federation’s illegal deportations of Ukrainian children, she called on that country to return to Ukraine all deported children. She further recalled that the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants against President Vladimir Putin and the Russian Commissioner for the Rights of the Child. The Court — which operates in full independence — found that there are reasonable grounds to believe that Moscow’s highest leadership is responsible for the deportation of Ukrainian children, she said, adding that acts of deportation of children constitute war crimes. Recalling on incident on 19 August, during which Russian Federation strikes caused the death of seven civilians and injured more than 150 people when a university and a theatre were targeted in Chernihiv, she urged Moscow to stop targeting the Ukrainian population and civilian infrastructure.

HERNÁN PÉREZ LOOSE (Ecuador) observed that today not only marks 18 months since the invasion, but also since diplomatic efforts by the international community and the Council “were blown to smithereens” by bombardments that began while Council members echoed the Secretary-General’s call for Moscow to “give peace a chance”. Wondering how many more refugees, deaths and orphans it will take for the Russian Federation to end its invasion, he questioned whether that country’s authorities have thought about the Russian Federation’s position in the international community once the conflict ends. History repeatedly teaches that “nations unable to reconcile their past with their present pay a high price”, he observed. States are not measured today by their nuclear power, the territory they snatch from their neighbours or the fear they instil. Rather, they are measured by their cosmopolitan culture, democratic institutions, tolerance, artistic creativity, technological progress and respect for law and human rights, he stressed.

EDWIGE KOUMBY MISSAMBO (Gabon) noted that fighting in recent weeks has intensified in the south of Ukraine, with an increase in attacks by drones, missiles and other long-range weapons. Citing indiscriminate attacks continuing to target civilian populations and infrastructure, she voiced concern over the plight of millions of men, women and children left to fend for themselves, deprived of international aid. She called on the warring parties not to use mines, cluster munitions or other guided weapons. She further expressed regret that the momentum of hope represented by the Black Sea Grain Initiative seems to have evaporated, swept away by the sombre prospect of a war of attrition. Welcoming the extraordinary international mobilization of the United Nations — including the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’ winter response plan, and UNESCO’s initiative to train 15,000 school psychologists — she called on the parties to de-escalate and initiate dialogue to end the war.

JAMES KARIUKI (United Kingdom), recalling that 92 per cent of Ukrainians voted in favour of their independence in 1991, said that Kyiv’s “historic resistance” not only protects its freedom, but defends the United Nations Charter. “If Russia wins the war, it would give the green-light to a new era of international aggression where big countries can rewrite borders by force. None of us want that,” he said, adding that those present are “deeply indebted to the Ukrainian people for their immense sacrifice”. Turning to Ukrainian families, that suffered forced transfers and deportations, he said that Moscow uses fear of this tactic to suppress dissent among Ukrainians living under its temporary control. “Russia has not attempted to preserve the identities of the children it has forcibly deported,” he stressed, pointing out that Moscow has also failed to provide information about the children transferred to its territory and placed with foster families. “Just 386 children have so far been returned,” he reported.

VASSILY A. NEBENZIA (Russian Federation), recalling a military parade in Kyiv on 9 May 2010, with 2,500 military personnel from Ukraine, the Russian Federation and Belarus, said that “only four years later” the fighters from the neo-Nazi battalions of “Azov” and “Dnipro-1”, during a similar parade, openly killed those who went out on the streets “to honour the memory of their grandfathers.” As a result, 99 people were killed and 119 wounded. Moreover, on the holiday eve, around 50 peaceful protestors, who stood up in defence of the Russian language, were burned alive at the Trade Union building in Odesa. “How were Ukrainians able to overnight replace the heroes who liberated the country from fascism with fascist collaborators complicit in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews, Poles, Russians and Ukrainians? How was an essentially Russian language country able to stoop to persecution of Russian language speakers?” he emphasized.

Noting that Ukraine’s population has reduced from 48.2 million in 2001 to “no more than 29 million people” today, he said that Kyiv’s tragedy began, when “the West chose Ukraine as a pawn to fight against and to weaken Russia”. Recalling the war initiated by the “Kyiv regime” against its own Russian-speaking citizens in the east in 2014, he said: “We were compelled to come to the defence of women, children and the elderly, who were being destroyed by Ukraine after that country and the West unequivocally refused to comply with the Minsk agreements.” Pointing out that everything linked to the Russian Federation was declared to be hostile even before the “special military operation”, he added: “Are you aware of any other country, where there is persecution on religious grounds taking place openly?” In this regard, he stated: “We have nothing to congratulate Ukraine on its Day of Independence,” adding: “Let the Ukrainian tragedy never again repeat itself.”

ISHIKANE KIMIHIRO (Japan) said families are being torn apart by unlawful deportation and transfer of Ukrainians, including children. Countless critical civilian infrastructure, including power plants and dams, have been destroyed. Europe's largest nuclear power plant is illegally occupied, posing a risk of nuclear disaster. Moreover, Ukraine's grain exports have been hampered, grain prices have risen and vulnerable populations have lost access to food. “The world is being held hostage,” he said, adding: “The damage is too great to list here.” No matter how much Moscow tries to mislead the world, “we are united in our voice that Russia's aggression against Ukraine is nothing but a flagrant violation of the UN Charter”. He pointed to a recent conference on peace for Ukraine which was held in Saudi Arabia, with the participation of more than 40 countries, including Japan. “We continue to seek a just and lasting peace for Ukraine together,” he said.

FRANCESCA GATT (Malta), underscoring that the weaponization of food is unconscionable, voiced regret that the Russian Federation disregarded a UN proposal ending a lifeline for millions facing hunger. “The threat of famine, with people slowly starving to death, is a red line for international peace and security,” she asserted, calling for the restoration of the Black Sea Grain Initiative as a means to re-balance the global food market and contribute to Ukraine’s export of grains to the countries that need it the most. Moreover, threats regarding the potential targeting of civilian vessels navigating in the Black Sea waters are unacceptable, she emphasized, highlighting an incident last week, during which a Moscow’s warship fired warning shots at a cargo ship. She also sounded alarm over the recent attacks on the Kherson region — especially in Mykolaiv, Zaporizhzhia, Donbas and Kharkiv — noting that missile and drone strikes have destroyed vital infrastructure, health facilities, religious and residential buildings.

SAOD ALMAZROUEI (United Arab Emirates) expressed alarm about reports of child abductions and forced transfers in Ukraine, stressing the need for parties to the conflict, without exception, to protect children and respect their rights in accordance with the specific framework stipulated in the First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions. He further urged the parties to facilitate reunification with their families and for States to cooperate with the Central Tracing Agency of the ICRC and the provision of information on children separated from their families. Last week, his country announced an aid package for the educational sector as the new academic year commences, in addition to humanitarian programmes responding to the needs of civilians in Ukraine and refugees in neighbouring countries. He reiterated the call for a cessation of hostilities and a diplomatic solution in accordance with international law and the Charter of the United Nations.

RICCARDA CHRISTIANA CHANDA (Switzerland) said Ukraine’s Independence Day is supposed to be a festive day. Yet, it also marks a year and a half of the Russian Federation’s military aggression. Highlighting the disastrous consequences of the war, she said that almost 10,000 civilians have been killed in the last 18 months. She condemned the fact that waves of attacks continue to hit the country's cities and areas where civilians gather. In recent days, Moscow’s strikes have again claimed the lives of civilians, including children. Indeed, children are particularly affected by the consequences of this war, she said, adding that nearly two out of three children in Ukraine have been forced to leave their homes. Of particular concern are credible reports of deportations of children to the Russian Federation and forced transfers of children within the occupied territories. Added to this are the immense humanitarian needs: 17.6 million persons — almost half of Ukraine's current population — require humanitarian assistance and protection.

SERGIY KYSLYTSYA (Ukraine), noting the thirty-second anniversary of his country’s independence, said that it has always been a matter of national pride that such independence was restored peacefully and that Ukraine has developed, democratically, into a peace-loving nation, reliable partner and friendly neighbour. However, the only role that the Russian Federation assigns to Ukraine, he emphasized, is that “of a lawless colony, where the local population either bows to forceful Russification or faces deportation and repression”. He went on to recall that the first judgment in Nuremberg referred to numerous Nazi crimes against children. He also recalled that it contains a quote by Heinrich Himmler regarding Nazi forced-adoption practices “that sounds terribly relevant today”: “What the nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type, we will take. If necessary, by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us.”

Against that backdrop, he stressed that the Russian Federation has pursued a policy of mass abduction and forceful indoctrination of Ukrainian children since 2014. Ukraine has strong grounds to believe that several hundred thousand Ukrainian children were forcibly, unlawfully taken by the Russian Federation and subsequently exposed to aggressive brainwashing to erase their Ukrainian identity. He underscored that Moscow’s crimes against children — like those of the Nazis during the Second World War — are one of the most horrible markers of the war. “Russia’s aggression is about Ukraine’s future, and there is no future without children,” he observed, repeating a call for relevant UN agencies and officials to properly monitor and report on the mass abduction of children from the occupied territories of Ukraine to the Russian Federation and Belarus. Noting that the first verdict of the International Criminal Court — like that in Nuremberg — was related to crimes against children, he said that this “makes us believe that every Russian criminal eventually will be brought to justice”.

RYTIS PAULAUSKA (Lithuania), also speaking for Estonia and Latvia, said that 541 children have been killed and 1,139 injured, while many more were forced to flee their homes. Reporting that at least 3,281 education institutions have been impacted by fighting, 54 per cent of them in the eastern front-line areas, he pointed out that psychological effects of this trauma on children will have far reaching consequences on the future of Ukraine. Moreover, he underscored the importance of the situation related to Ukrainian children being forcefully deported to the Russian Federation and Belarus, subjected to “pro-Russia re-education” and military training, while also having been turned into Russian Federation citizens and illegally adopted. In this regard, he welcomed the recently adopted joint preventive plan of Ukraine and the United Nations to prevent and stop violations of children’s rights in Moscow’s armed aggression.

Reporting that more than 4 million refugees sought shelter in European Union countries, including 100,000 in Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia, he said that his country has accepted over 8,000 pupils from Ukraine. While Moscow continues to destroy civilian infrastructure, its military strikes against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure have led to power outages, affecting that country’s agricultural sector, interrupting its water networks and denying access to essential services. The destruction of Kakhovka Dam on 6 June caused an unprecedented ecological catastrophe, he said, noting that 200,000 people in flood-affected areas rely on water distribution due to water contamination or drop of water levels in the reservoirs. “Russia’s war of aggression, enabled by Belarus, is a manifest violation of the UN Charter,” he emphasized, underscoring the importance of supporting Ukraine in establishing a special international tribunal for the crime of aggression.

THOMAS PETER ZAHNEISEN (Germany) expressed sadness that as the international community congratulates Ukraine on its Independence Day, the Russian Federation attacks everything that independence stands for: security, freedom and peace for all Ukrainians. Russian Federation armed forces and its affiliates continue to commit grave violations of children’s rights, he noted — just on Sunday, 20 August, seven people including a 6-year-old girl were killed and 156 wounded after a Russian missile attack on the central square of the historic Ukrainian city of Chernihiv. Recalling “shocking reports” of attempts by the Russian Federation to erase the identity of abducted children — forcing them to speak Russian, change their names and threatening them with adoption by Russian families — he stressed that these “are war crimes and they must be treated as such”. He urged Moscow to immediately cease all such atrocities, withdraw its troops from Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders and “end this senseless war.”

SILVIO GONZATO, Deputy Head of Delegation of the European Union, in its capacity as observer, said that throughout the bloc Ukrainians have gathered with European Union citizens to mark the country’s independence, and that “its neighbour, Russia, continues to attempt to destroy by force”. In this regard, he emphasized the need for peace and the importance of holding Moscow’s political and military leadership accountable, while also calling for addressing the global consequences of this aggression. Welcoming the recent National Security Advisers’ meeting in Jeddah — at Ukraine’s initiative — he said the European Union will support Kyiv “as long as it takes”, also reaffirming the bloc’s support for Ukraine’s Peace Formula. He noted that the International Centre for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine has started its support operations in The Hague and welcomed the establishment of the Council of Europe’s Register of Damage [of Damage caused by the Aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine]. Turning to the forced deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children, he reaffirmed the Union’s support for the International Criminal Court’s mandate.

While condemning Moscow’s unilateral termination of the Black Sea Grain Initiative, he recalled that the deal has enabled the export of 33 million tons of grain and foodstuffs from Ukraine to 45 different countries, which played an instrumental role in reducing global food prices by over 23 per cent since the invasion. “Russia did not stop at pulling out of the Black Sea Grain Initiative. Just hours after withdrawing, it started destroying Ukraine’s grain storage facilities and port infrastructure, not only in the Black Sea itself but also in the Danube,” he stressed, pointing out that the European Union will continue strengthening its “EU-Ukraine Solidarity Lanes” as alternative agricultural exports routes. Moreover, the bloc has provided €18 billion to address food insecurity until 2024, he reported.

KRZYSZTOF MARIA SZCZERSKI (Poland) said the dramatic developments since the Russian Federation’s aggression against Ukraine in February 2022 have demonstrated that Ukraine’s independence needs to be defended in the most literal sense — on the battlefield. The key principles and objectives set out in Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Peace Formula should constitute a basis for ending Moscow’s unlawful war of aggression, he emphasized, adding that all perpetrators should be tried before appropriate courts. Voicing particular concern over the fate of children in this armed conflict, he spotlighted a dedicated group of friends, co-created in Kyiv by his Government. Echoing the words of Poland President Andrzej Duda, he underscored that “the de-occupation of Crimea and the restoration of Ukraine’s full territorial integrity are necessary preconditions, not just for the security of the Azov-Black Sea region but also for the stability of the whole global security architecture”.

MAURIZIO MASSARI (Italy), aligning himself with the European Union, noted that global concerns on systemic food security spiked after Moscow’s decision to unjustifiably withdraw from the Black Sea Grain Initiative and called on it to swiftly reconsider its resumption. He strongly condemned the Russian Federation’s continuous inhumane and brutal attacks on civilian infrastructure, as well as the forced deportation of Ukrainian children. “No amount of disinformation spread by the Russian Federation can deny the truth of the matter, nor shield individuals from accountability for these crimes,” he stressed. Collectively, the UN will hold those responsible to account in accordance with international law, also taking into consideration those who are facilitating the illegal war. Voicing strong support for President Zelenskyy’s Peace Plan, he stressed that Moscow can end the war immediately by ceasing its attacks and withdrawing its forces from the territory of Ukraine.

Congress and Ukraine Aid — Reasons to Be Cheerful By Catherine Sendak October 3, 2023

Despite the pyrotechnics of congressional disputes over funding, there are solid grounds for hope over renewed Ukraine aid.

Almost 20 months into the largest European war since the end of World War II, hundreds of thousands of casualties, millions of displaced families, dangers to energy and food security, the emergence of a totalitarian villain’s club bent on remaking a world order that better serves their ambitions, and yet internal politics are the subject of partisan squabbling in the most powerful country in the world.

The idea, widely accepted last year, that Ukraine is fighting for itself and also for the rest of us is now disputed. Aid was cut from the government financing deal agreed on September 30.

And yet. Despite the grin that will certainly have spread across Vladimir Putin’s face and despite some despair among Ukraine’s supporters, I think we’ll be alright. Grounds for optimism include the undisputed fact that both houses of Congress contain significant majorities for Ukraine aid.

As President Biden said on October 2: “There’s an overwhelming number of Republicans and Democrats in both the House and the Senate who support Ukraine. Let’s vote on it.”

The US has a short-term funding gap following the so-called continuing resolution (CR), which enables the federal government to keep going for 45 days.

Ukraine aid was stripped out, but there will now be efforts to restore it. The government has approximately $5.5bn of Ukraine funding remaining, and that is expected to last some months.

Congress needs to do two things.

First, lead the US efforts and ensure strong resourcing for Ukraine support for the remainder of 2023 and all of 2024, and quickly.

And second, carry the message to the American public, partners and allies, and Russia and other competitors and adversaries, of the critical nature of US leadership and support to Ukraine’s fight for freedom.

For the first, legislators need to take up this issue as soon as possible. And it cannot be limited to the $6bn in aid proposed in the most recent and ultimately unsuccessful budget package, or even the $24bn requested by the administration this summer.

The funds need to provide certainty to assist long-term planning and the oversight that Congress rightly insists upon. This cannot be done without consistent resources, budgeting, and planning.

This aid package should cover the rest of this year and, ideally, all of 2024. It should take into consideration 12-16 months of planning and support encompassing all aspects, including military, economic, and humanitarian assistance. Only by aiming for a long-term package can we ensure that Ukraine aid is ringfenced from the US election cycle and the (worrying) fact that the line between foreign policy and domestic issues continues to blur.

Secondly, the US and its democratic allies must provide leadership on tough and sometimes unpopular issues.

The US needs elected officials to constantly make the case about why this fight is not about a single country in Eastern Europe but to make the case that Ukrainian defeat would puncture the European continent’s security and so place US interests at risk.

US national security is entwined with European security. Leadership on both sides of the aisle and both sides of Capitol Hill understand this and repeatedly exhibit staunch support of continued aid to Ukraine. This included an unusual joint Senate letter by majority leader Chuck Schumer and minority leader Mitch McConnell, the same day as the continuing resolution passage, calling for a quick return to work on resources for the Ukrainian fight.

Yet internal strife in the House Republican party looks to be top of the to-do list when the House returns to session this week. There are signs that this could become quite nasty and may involve efforts to remove Speaker Kevin McCarthy. This would be a distraction.

But I choose to be hopeful. Over my years in government service, I have seen reason replace absurdity, pragmatism replace anger, and good governance replace politicking. I remain a believer in the system. The majority of Congress wants to get the work done, ensure Ukrainian support, and exhibit clear leadership on these critical national security needs. I believe in the institution of the US Congress; now it’s time for the institution to believe in itself.

Catherine Sendak is the Director of the Transatlantic Defense and Security program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). From 2018 to 2021, she was the Principal Director for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. Sendak also spent over a dozen years on Capitol Hill on both the House and Senate Committees on Armed Services.

Senator Mitch McConnell – CEPA Forum 2023 video link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztkkJN2vj5I

BAKHMUT SOUTH / 2000 UTC 3 OCT/ UKR forces reported to surround key RU position in an under track culvert near Andriivka. RU milbloggers report heavy losses.

Finnish Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen announced the preparation of a new package of military aid to Ukraine. In total, according to Valtonen, Finland allocated two billion euros to Ukraine. 🇫🇮 has contributed almost 2 bn euros to 🇺🇦. Our next defence materiel package is under preparation. 🇺🇦 is our largest development partner. Finland and the EU will support #Ukraine for as long as needed. Freedom will prevail. Many thanks for hosting us in Kyiv, @DmytroKuleba

Switzerland is ready to provide Ukraine with 100 million Swiss francs for humanitarian demining

Ukraine is also actively working on the implementation of new joint projects with the Geneva International Center for Humanitarian Demining in a number of directions.

ARussian propagandist has called for the reinstatement of the Russian Empire, saying that's the country's ultimate goal.

As Russia continues its military offensive against Ukraine, Russian propagandist Sergey Mardan alluded to a misconception that Russia wishes to restore the USSR, which collapsed in 1991, and instead suggested the country could rewind the clock back beyond the days of the Russian Empire.

His comments come as President Vladimir Putin announced a new Russian holiday, the "Day of Unification," on September 30, to mark the illegal annexation of the Dontesk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine. Putin declared them to be new Russian territory a year ago, following referendums not acknowledged under international law and he entrenched the move in the Russian constitution. He made a similar move after the illegal annexation of Crimea, which is celebrated in Russia on March 18.

Speaking on his show, Mardan Live, he mentioned the new state holiday, saying it will be "celebrated with trepidation," claiming that Russia is now "discovering its purpose," while admitting this is "yet to be defined." He defined the holiday as a cause for celebration as it marks Russia's supposed journey to restoring itself into an empire.

The Russian empire, otherwise known as Imperial Russia, was the final period of the Russian monarchy lasting from 1721 until its dissolution in 1917. The empire expanded over much of northern Eurasia, encompassing almost one-sixth of Earth's landmass. Modern day countries within in the territory included Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland, Poland and Georgia.

According to a translation by Russian Media Monitor, Mardan said Russia's "ideology is being born right now." He continued: "They call it the restoration of the Soviet Union. They say 'Putin wants to restore the USSR'. For any Russian person, for any person of Russian culture it sounds bizarre. For anyone who understands the retrospective of our national consciousness for the last 1,000 years. For us, the restoration of the USSR sounds a bit funny. What Soviet Union? Wake up!"

He goes on to say Russia is capable of rewinding the clock 800 years to restore the Russian Empire. "We can rewind it by 800 years more," Mardan continued. "You finally realize what this is all about is the restoration of a Russian nation, the restoration of the Russian Empire! This is what the celebration on September 30 is all about."

He added that Russia's existence since the dissolution of the USSR has been a time of "timelessness, blackness, and hopelessness," but the new holiday brings hopefulness to Russia. "A frightening holiday, but not for us. For us, it is a bright, long-awaited holiday, the one that is hard won. It was hard won for over 30 years," he proclaimed. "Pointless existence is the worst existential horror. There are some nations whose existence is pointless. They have no purpose, they've lost it."

Mardan also compared Russia's existence since the end of the Soviet Union to that of a drug user, saying: "We have lived like druggers with torn up veins," but he described the supposed transformation as "something wonderful, something frightening."

A new US intelligence report says the Kremlin spent $300 million since 2014 to try and influence several European countries using front companies and think tanks.

Russia has covertly spent more than $300 million in recent years trying to influence politicians and other officials in more than two dozen countries, including Europe.

According to the US State Department, a new American intelligence assessment of Russia's global covert efforts to support policies and parties sympathetic to Moscow targeted elections in Albania, Bosnia and Montenegro, among other countries, including Ukraine.

Some of the tactics Russia allegedly used included using front organisations to funnel money to preferred causes or politicians, including think tanks in Europe.

Putin was spending huge sums “in an attempt to manipulate democracies from the inside,” said a US official who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity.

State Department spokesman Ned Price called Russia's covert funding an “assault on sovereignty.”

“It is an effort to chip away at the ability of people around the world to choose the governments that they see best fit to represent them, to represent their interests, and to represent their values,” he added.

American diplomats have been tasked with talking to the governments of some of the countries allegedly targeted by the Kremlin for malign influence operations, and although no information has been given about any politicians or parties who specifically benefited from Russian funding, classified information has been given to some specific countries, the State Department said.

The US also has a long history of covertly funding political groups and individual politicians, and been responsible for efforts to topple or undermine foreign governments, including democracies.

Mark Porter, Cannes, 18/08/22

Throughout the six months of conflict, Vladimir Putin has insisted that Ukraine is run by neo-Nazis. For his part, Ukraine’s (Jewish) president Zelenskyaccuses Russian troops of repeating Nazi war crimes. It is a reminder of just how deeply rooted this conflict is, not just in the Cold War, but in 1939-45, the war which is key to Russia’s sense of identity.

Putin said when announcing the “special operation” in February.that one of Russia’s goals was to “denazify” Ukraine. In the six gruesome months since then, the Kremlin has continuously pushed the narrative that Russians are “destroying neo-Nazis”.

All Ukrainian soldiers as far-right radicals, the story goes. There is no mention of the thousands of innocent civilians killed, or of the millions made destitute and driven into exile. Nor, sigificantly, is there any mention of the self-styled ultra-right/ neo-Nazi Russian nationalists who are at the forefront of Russia’s worst atrocities.

The independent Russian and English language news website, Meduza, banished from Moscow and working on in Latvia, tells the story of how Russia’s neo-Nazis were drawn into Putin’s war. Meduza still has a network of amazingly brave journalists, who daily risk their lives to report on the truth about Putin’s toxic dictatorship.

Their detailed investigation follows the blood-soaked paths trodden by Russian mercenaries through the mayhem and rubble in Ukraine.

These include members of the Russian Imperial Legion, the swastika-wearing Rusich task force, and the sinister Wagner Group — a murderous private army financed by Kremlin-linked oligarchs and led by Putin crony, known as his “chef”, Evgeny Prigozhin. Many of them participated in wholesale massacres in Syria – some 48,000 Russian troops were involved in “eliminating terrorists” there, according to Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu. The far-right, heavy metal band Russkyi Styag (Russian Warrior) band performs on the front line in Ukraine when not fighting.

Meduza‘s detailed investigation follows the footsteps of several leading fascist soldiers of fortune, some of whom have seen the light. It is a tale of turbo-charged hooliganism fuelled by falsely glamorous narratives of Valhalla, oppression, and imperialist glory. These are tales full of sound and fury (see: Macbeth, ActV Scene 5).

Signifying …what next?

On the surface Ukraine is a mightily complex brew, but it is well worth reading writers and geopolitical experts of the calibre of Peter Pomerantsev. Pomerantsev’s prose rapidly clears the battleground smoke.

Writing in The Economist‘s 1843 magazine, Pomerantsev, himself born in Kyiv, says: “It’s easy to see why Ukraine confuses people.

“To the uninformed outsider, it confounds all ideas of what makes a nation. Most people are casually bilingual. It contains many histories simultaneously: the Russian, Soviet, and Austro-Hungarian empires, Poland, Romania, and of course Ukraine itself. This lattice of historical narratives has made many in the West feel as though the country is not quite real.”

To validate his invasions, Putin called the Ukrainian “operation” an act of “denazification”. The slur is absurd but also strategic, argues Pomerantsev, who was heading a large research team in Ukraine until the February 24 invasion.

“For the past few years I’ve been trying to unlock the secret of Ukrainian identity by talking to Ukrainians. Through my research project, Arena, based originally at the LSE and now at Johns Hopkins University, I’ve worked with Ukrainian journalists and sociologists to find ways of strengthening democracy. My team has interviewed thousands of adults across the country. Our fieldwork shows that the response to Russia’s invasion has deep roots in Ukrainian history.”

“It is well known that some prominent Ukrainian nationalists sided with the Nazis in the second world war because they thought Hitler would grant Ukraine independence; a number of them were comfortable with the Nazis’ anti-Semitism. When Hitler betrayed them, many turned on the Germans and fought against both them and the Soviet Union.

“In Soviet post-war propaganda, Ukrainian nationalists were caricatured as the fascist enemy of the good Soviet citizen. Anyone who grew up steeped in that milieu is receptive to this framing,” writes Pomerantsev.

“Putin and his supporters have tried to split the country between a supposed pro-Soviet east and pro-nationalist west. However, our polling found this split to be a mirage. There were at least four distinct groups. The Ukrainians who were most pro-Soviet were older, often pensioners, and less educated, living largely in rural areas in the south and east of the country. A tiny proportion of the population, less than 5%, approved of Stalin (the equivalent figure in Russia is 70%). The memory of the Holodomor, Stalin’s man-made famine which killed roughly 4m Ukrainians in 1932-33, still burns.

“Ukrainian myths of national identity coalesce around a collective: the Cossacks, bands of self-governing warriors who roamed the steppe. A recent successful film told the story of how Ukrainian Jews and Crimean Tatars created underground networks to help each other in the second world war, to fight first the Nazis and then the KGB.

“One of the most popular Christmas films in Ukraine is Home Alone, which has a narrative that resonates with Ukraine’s story: a small country abandoned by the world’s parents, always attacked by bigger powers, and having to improvise self-defence with anything that comes to hand.”

Pomerantsev writes: “In this war, Ukrainians are showing that they can resist one of their most frequent and violent abusers, the Kremlin. Among the friends I speak to there’s a sense that they are fighting not just against this invasion, but for all the other times Ukraine has been violated. Putin himself referred to the invasion as a rape: “You sleep my beauty, you’re going to have to put up with it anyway,” he told a stunned press pack during a session with the French president, Emmanuel Macron. In Lviv today you see posters of a woman in Ukrainian folk costume pushing a gun into Putin’s mouth: ‘I’m not your beauty,’ she says.”

DW Media Forum, 26/08/22 Timothy Snyder on reporting post-colonial Ukraine (video) Meduza 15/07/22 – Dying to Kill Deutsche Welle 13/06/22 – How the War in Ukraine is Dividing Russian Nationalists Washington Post 23/03/22 Ivan Ilyn – the man who crafted Russian fascism Economist 1843 magazine – How the Ukrainians came together in adversity

Utkin, the Nazi-tattooed commander who gave Wagner its name Moscow (AFP) – A rare photo of the Wagner group's military commander shows a man with a shaved head, a cold stare and the Nazi SS symbol tattooed on both sides of his neck.

Issued on: 25/08/2023

Dmitry Utkin, a veteran of Russia's military intelligence division, the GRU, was reportedly beside Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin on the plane that crashed on Wednesday north of Moscow, killing all on board.

Little is known publicly of this former army officer, who Russian media -- including state-run outlets -- were calling the Wagner "commander" as far back as 2015-2016.

At that time, the Kremlin was denying links to the mercenary group, which was already operating in Ukraine and Syria, where Russian forces were shoring up dictator Bashar Al-Assad.

Then, in December 2016, Utkin was pictured alongside President Vladimir Putin at a Kremlin reception for Russian "heros" fighting in the Syrian civil war.

At around about the same time, Utkin's ex-wife, Elena Shcherbinina, gave an interview to Russian state-owned news site Gazeta.ru, saying she was unable to reach him.

She said Utkin was born in 1970 and served in the Russian army in the Chechen wars.

He left the army in 2012 and set up a private security company, according to the dossier.center website founded by anti-Kremlin oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Shcherbinina told Gazeta.ru her former husband had found leaving active combat difficult.

"It was very hard for him to adapt. It bothered him a lot not to be fighting. He wanted a military career as a combat officer, not to wear out the seats of his pants sitting in some HQ somewhere."

Wagner's murky origins It is unclear how Utkin met Prigozhin and how what would become the Wagner group was founded in around 2014.

But the mercenary outfit was given Utkin's call sign -- Wagner.

Adolf Hitler was a huge fan of German composer Richard Wagner and many observers see this nom de guerre as another indication of Utkin's Nazi sympathies.

Several Wagner mercenaries have insignia and tattoos inspired by the Third Reich.

The Wagner group was deployed in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine in 2014, where Moscow was stirring up a separatist rebellion against Kyiv.

The Kremlin needed to have men it could trust on the front line and, at the same time, be able to deny that Russian soldiers were operating on Ukrainian soil.

Utkin, Prigozhin's right-hand man, was responsible for commanding Wagner's military operations.

Prigozhin, who had known Putin since the early 1990s, took care of finances and relations with the Russian state.

The entire mercenary operation was carried out with utmost secrecy.

It flourished and in under a decade, Prigozhin, Utkin and their mercenary outfit had become notorious worldwide.

• Dead 'because of traitors' -

They continued to operate in the shadows, while all the time being accused everywhere they went -- in the Central African Republic, in Libya, in Syria, in Ukraine -- of widespread abuses.

Initially, Russia's military offensive against Ukraine in February 2022 changed nothing.

But when the Russian army was forced to retreat in the east and south of Ukraine in autumn 2022, Prigozhin became a public figure.

After years of denial, he finally acknowledged that Wagner did exist and started recruiting tens of thousands of convicts from Russian prisons to fight on the front line.

Wagner mercenaries led the assault on Bakhmut, a bloody battle that has been ongoing for a year now and has forged the image of Wagner as the most efficient of the Russian military forces on the ground in Ukraine.

Utkin remained out of sight. He appeared in no videos and posted nothing on Telegram -- unlike Prigozhin, who regularly berated and insulted the Russian military top brass.

Utkin is believed to have taken part in the short-lived mutiny in June when Wagner seized control of the army command centre controlling Russia's military operations in Ukraine and marched on Moscow, demanding the sacking of the army chief of staff and the defence minister.

Many observers see the fatal plane crash as an assassination. Putin had, after all, called the mutineers traitors.

"Dmitry Valerievich Utkin was a Hero of Russia," the Wagner-linked Telegram channel Grey Zone said on the night of the plane crash.

"He was awarded the Order of Courage four times and was known the world over by his call sign 'Wagner'. (He) died because of the work of traitors to Russia."

As Russian soldiers marched into Ukraine, the question on everyone’s mind was: “What does Putin hope to achieve with such a massive invasion?” Of the many fanciful distortions manufactured as justification, the pressing need for Ukraine’s “de-Nazification” is the most ludicrous.

In making his case for entering Ukrainian territory with armoured tanks and fighter jets, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared the “special military operation” was undertaken “to protect” victims of the Kyiv regime’s “genocide,” and that Russia “will strive for the demilitarisation and de-Nazification of Ukraine.”

On its face, Putin’s slander is farcical, not least because Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish, and members of his family were killed during World War II. There is also no proof of mass killings or ethnic purges undertaken by the Ukrainian government. Marking adversaries as Nazis is a typical political tactic in Russia, particularly as leaders benefit from disinformation crusades.

Implying Ukraine is strongly allied with Nazism has been a regular feature of Russian media coverage. The Russian Foreign Ministry posted on Twitter that Ukraine and America voted against a Russian-endorsed UN resolution that would condemn the veneration of Nazism. This neglects to clarify that both countries declined to support Russia’s resolution because they believed it was advancing Moscow’s propaganda objectives, with the U.S. claiming it was a “thinly veiled attempt to legitimise Russian disinformation campaigns.”

Despite a long history of anti-Semitism and pogroms, on the eve of World War II, Ukraine was home to one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe. When German soldiers took control of Kyiv in 1941, they were greeted with “Heil Hitler” banners. Not long after, nearly 34,000 Jews were assembled and trudged to fields outside the city to be slaughtered in what became known as the “Holocaust by Bullets.” Following World War II, because of the policy of state anti-Semitism, all Jewish organisations and institutions were shut down across the Soviet Union from the late 1940’s until its dissolution.

Nowadays, Ukraine’s Jewish community can rejoice in liberties and protections unconceived of by previous generations, including a recent law criminalising anti-Semitic actions. But this law was not introduced without reason — it was designed to tackle a marked increase in public demonstrations of intolerance, specifically Swastika-littered defacement of synagogues and Jewish monuments, and unnerving demonstrations that saluted the Waffen SS. In another unfavourable development, in recent years the country has put up a plethora of monuments venerating Ukrainian nationalists whose legacies are polluted by their undeniable history as Nazi proxies.

The idea that Ukraine is in desperate need of “de-Nazification” is a well-established Russian nationalist narrative. It emanates from World War II, when some Ukrainian partisans aligned with the Nazis against the Soviet Union. Today, Putin has interlaced this history into his fundamentalist visualisation that Ukraine is not a legitimate sovereign country. For Putin, Ukraine is not simply a historically Russian territory incorrectly detached from the motherland. Rather, Ukraine is the successor of a neo-Nazi practice that perpetrated atrocity in Russian in World War II.

Putin’s accusations of genocide also reflect this nationalist narrative. Ukraine includes large ethnic Russian populations, particularly in the east, and many Ukrainians of all ethnicities speak Russian. Putin depicts these people as not simply rightful Russian citizens unjustifiably partitioned from the motherland, but as possible casualties of an ethnic cleansing crusade by the so-called Nazi Ukrainian government.

This is not to deny the far-right threat in Ukraine. Ukraine has a genuine Nazi problem. The most noteworthy, the Azov Movement, is a militia that was instrumental in countering Russia’s incursion in eastern Ukraine in 2014. Initially established as a volunteer group in May 2014, the Azov Battalion developed from the ultra-nationalist Patriot of Ukraine gang and the Social National Assembly. Its inaugural commander was white nationalist Andriy Biletsky ‒ dubbed White Ruler by his supporters ‒ who infamously declared in 2010 that Ukraine’s national purpose was to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen [i.e., inferior races].”

Azov gained a reputation with the 2014 Battle of Mariupol, when the Battalion recaptured the eastern Ukrainian city from pro-Russian separatists, establishing its reputation as fierce defenders of Ukraine, willing to fight back against severe odds. Its integration into the Ukrainian National Guard has afforded it a degree of impunity, and made Azov the crème de la crème of its international far-right, neo-Nazi peers. Since, Azov has exploited Ukraine’s predicament to make itself appear more conventionally mainstream by providing public civil defence training gatherings.

Although Azov denies it adheres to Nazi ideology as a whole, its uniforms continue to bear Nazi symbols including SS regalia and the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel symbol, used by Nazi units during World War II. Since 2014, Azov has actively fomented international links, courting support from global far-right, neo-Nazi networks, and outside Ukraine, Azov have seized a principal role in a network of extremist groups that extend from the U.S., Europe, and New Zealand.

Putin has seized upon far-right currents within Ukraine’s militias as evidence of reactionary Nazism while simultaneously cultivating far-right, ultranationalist sentiments. Russia’s most infamous military proxy, the Wagner Group, operates in support of Russian foreign policy objectives, and is trained on installations of the Russian Ministry of Defence. Moscow has utilised their expeditionary forces to wage deniable war and promote the Kremlin’s interests in places like Libya, Syria, Mozambique, and Mali.

The Wagner Group is named after 19th century German composer Richard Wagner, whose music Adolf Hitler adored. In a photo that first emerged on Russian VK accounts and a Telegram group associated with the mercenaries, the group’s leader, Dmitry Utkin, dons neo-Nazi tattoos, including a swastika, Waffen SS lightning bolts, and a Reichsadler Eagle. Wagner mercenaries have reportedly left behind neo-Nazi propaganda in the conflict zones they have meddled in. In Libya, pictures appeared of Wagner combatants, some garbed in German World War II uniforms, purportedly re-enacting scenes from Rommel’s operation against British troops in Libya in 1942.

The Wagner Group been heavily involved in Russia’s protracted war on Ukraine. Its units aided Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 and rebelled alongside pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine. They have also been operating in the present conflict, with dozens of Wagner mercenaries pulled from the Central African Republic to join Russian forces amassing in Ukraine.

There is also the neo-Nazi, white supremacist group the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM), which the U.S. State Department designated a terrorist organisation in 2020. With the Kremlin’s implicit authorisation, the RIM operates paramilitary camps near St. Petersburg, in which neo-Nazis and white supremacists from across Europe are instructed in terrorist tactics.

Putin also utilises neo-Nazi organisations beyond warfare operations. An essential element of the Kremlin’s crusade to manipulate cracks in the West is exploiting transnational white supremacist movements to endorse racially and ethnically inspired violent extremism. Russia serves as a sanctuary and networking hub for far-right extremists, with one of America’s most infamous neo-Nazis finding refuge there. Rinaldo Nazzaro, leader of The Base, an American neo-Nazi, white supremacist paramilitary organisation, lives in Russia and guides the group from St. Petersburg.

Among the virtual ecosystems populated by far-right, white supremacist extremists, Russia’s wanton invasion of Ukraine has been a considerable focus of conversation. Opinion is split — the far-right, white supremacist online environment has never been a monolith. While some ally with Putin, others support Ukraine, or simply hope for carnage and mayhem. Putin’s mission has found a receptive audience among far-right extremists in America, who often look to Putin’s Russia as the last bastion of white, Christian purity. Moscow and its proxies have provided finance and other assistance to these far-right populists across Europe and North America since long before Russia’s invasion. Even before the invasion, as tensions increased between Russia and Ukraine, some far-right groups were already disseminating pro-Russian, anti-Western, anti-Semitic propaganda.

Putin’s weaponisation of neo-Nazis was always a dicey tactic, but it was not illogical. Unlike mainstream nationalists, who often support the concept of free elections, neo-Nazis repudiate democratic institutions and the very idea of egalitarianism. For a dictator disassembling democracy and engineering an authoritarian regime, they were perfect accessories. In Ukraine, Putin is not combating neo-Nazism. The country most in need of “de-Nazification” is Putin’s Russia.

This article was one of the top ten most read articles published in 2022.

Fiona Ballentine is a student at the Australian National University, studying a Bachelor of International Relations and a Bachelor of Arts, with a major in Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies. Fiona was an intern at the AIIA National Office from February-April 2022.

This article is published under a Creative Commons Licence and may be re-published with attribution.

Putin's claim of fighting against Ukraine 'neo-Nazis' distorts history, scholars say Updated March 1, 20223:02 PM ET By

Rachel Treisman

Russian President Vladimir Putin invoked World War II to justify Russia's invasion of Ukraine, saying in televised remarks last week that his offensive aimed to "denazify" the country — whose democratically elected president is Jewish, and lost relatives in the Holocaust.

"The purpose of this operation is to protect people who for eight years now have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kyiv regime," he said, according to an English translation from the Russian Mission in Geneva. "To this end, we will seek to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine, as well as bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including against citizens of the Russian Federation."

Russian officials have continued to employ that rhetoric in recent days.

Russia's Foreign Ministry last week accused Western countries of ignoring what it called war crimes in Ukraine, saying their silence "encouraged the onset of neo-Nazism and Russophobia." Russia's envoy to the United Nations reiterated over the weekend that it is carrying out "a special military operation against nationalists to protect the people of Donbass, ensure denazification and demilitarisation."

And Putin has accused "Banderites and neo-Nazis" of putting up heavy weapons and using human shields in Ukrainian cities. Banderites is a term used — often pejoratively — to describe followers of controversial Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera, and Ukrainian nationalists in general.

The Russian invasion, and the language of "denazification" as a perceived pretext for it, quickly drew backlash from many world leaders, onlookers and experts alike.

Criticisms of Russia's perceived hypocrisy grew even louder on Tuesday, when Russian strikes hit a memorial to Babyn Yar — the site where Nazis killed tens of thousands of Jews during World War II.

Ukraine's official Twitter account posted a cartoon of Putin and Adolf Hitler gazing lovingly into each others' eyes, writing that "This is not a 'meme,' but our and your reality right now." The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, among others, said Putin "misrepresented and misappropriated Holocaust history."

A lengthy list of historians signed a letter condemning the Russian government's "cynical abuse of the term genocide, the memory of World War II and the Holocaust, and the equation of the Ukrainian state with the Nazi regime to justify its unprovoked aggression."

They pointed to a broader pattern of Russian propaganda frequently painting Ukraine's elected leaders as "Nazis and fascists oppressing the local ethnic Russian population, which it claims needs to be liberated."

And while Ukraine has right-wing extremists, they add, that does not justify Russia's aggression and mischaracterization.

Putin's language is offensive and factually wrong, several experts explain to NPR.

It's a harmful distortion and dilution of history, they say, even though many people appear not to be buying it this time around.

Laura Jockusch, a professor of Holocaust studies at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, told NPR over email that Putin's claims about the Ukrainian army allegedly perpetrating a genocide against Russians in the Donbas region are completely unfounded, but politically useful to him.

"Putin has been repeating this 'genocide' myth for several years and nobody in the West seems to have listened until now," she says. "There is no 'genocide,' not even an 'ethnic cleansing' perpetrated by the Ukraine against ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers in the Ukraine. It is a fiction that is used by Putin to justify his war of aggression on the Ukraine."

She adds that his use of the word "denazification" is also "a reminder that the term 'Nazi' has become a generic term for 'absolute evil' that is completely disconnected from its original historical meaning and context."

The baseless claims are part of a broader pattern The scholars characterize Putin's claims about genocide and Nazism as part of a long-running attempt to delegitimize Ukraine.

The Soviet Union used similar language — like calling pro-Western Ukrainians "Banderites" — to discredit Ukrainian nationalism as Nazism, explains José Casanova, a professor emeritus of sociology at Georgetown University and senior fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs.

"And now we see [Russia is] doing it every time the Ukrainians try to establish a democratic society, they try to say that those are Nazis," he says. "You need to dehumanize the other before you are going to murder them, and this is what's happening now."

Olga Lautman, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis and co-host of the Kremlin File podcast, says Russia amped up the Nazi narrative after seizing Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.

Ukraine is home to ultranationalist movements, including most prominently the Azov Battalion, which formed in 2014 and later joined the country's National Guard after fighting against Russian-backed forces in eastern Ukraine.

But Lautman estimates nationalists make up about 2% of Ukraine's population, with the vast majority having very little interest in anything to do with them.

She said the U.S. probably has a higher percentage of white supremacist and Nazi groups, while Casanova also says Ukraine has a smaller contingency of right-wing groups than other Western countries.

They also note that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish, as is the former prime minister, Volodymyr Groysman.

Zelenskyy was elected in 2019 with a whopping 73% of the vote — a considerably larger share than his predecessors — and won a majority in every region, including the most traditional and conservative, according to Casanova.

"In no other European country could you have ... a president, a prime minister being Jewish without having a lot of antimseitic propaganda in media and in newspapers," he says. "It never became an issue."

The Holocaust took a personal toll on Zelenskyy's family. Three of his grandfather's brothers were killed by the Germans, he said in a January 2020 speech.

"He survived World War II contributing to the victory over Nazism and hateful ideology," he said of his grandfather. "Two years after the war, his son was born. And his grandson was born 31 years after. Forty years later, his grandson became president."

Experts and observers criticize Putin's "mythical use of history" Putin's claims contradict and distort important parts of 20th-century history while furthering his own agenda, the experts tell NPR.

They characterize it as an effort to hark back to the Soviet Union's heroism in fighting fascism during WWII.

But Casanova notes that Ukraine "suffered more than Russia from Nazi tanks," saying it lost more of its population during the war than any other country (without counting Europe's 6 million Jewish victims as a nation).

He calls Putin's tactics "simply a mythical use of history" to justify present-day crimes.

It's true that many Ukrainian nationalists initially welcomed the German invaders as liberators during WWII and collaborated with the occupation, a fact that Ukraine's small far-right movement is quick to emphasize. Putin's claims seize on that kernel of truth but distort it — a classic Soviet propaganda tactic.

Lautman, who is Ukrainian and Russian, says Russia considers WWII its biggest victory and places a big emphasis on its defeat of the Nazis, celebrating WWII Soviet holidays many times a year.

Russian television channels played WWII movies on the day of Putin's announcement about invading Ukraine, Lautman says, which she describes as an appeal to the older generation.

And Russian leaders have successfully rewritten parts of that history, she says. For example, Putin signed a ban on comparisons between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany last July. That means someone could be jailed for mentioning the collaboration between Hitler and Josef Stalin, Lautman explains.

Jockusch notes another gap in Russia's retelling of its 20th-century history. "Stalin perpetrated a man-made famine that can be called a genocide in Ukraine 90 years ago, the 'Holodomor' which Russia still does not recognize and which claimed some 3 million Ukrainian lives," she says.

So why would Putin use this particular language to justify an invasion now?

Lautman says Putin has long mourned the collapse of the Soviet Union and has "nothing to show" despite having been in power for two decades.

"If he's able to reclaim some of this lost territory, on top of having a few satellite states, which he's been attempting to do over the past decade ... then at least he would have a legacy to leave in the history books of Vladimir the Great," she says.

What this distortion of history can teach us While the West may not have been paying close attention before, many critics in Europe and beyond are now pushing back on Putin's claims.

Lautman says Ukrainians are used to this kind of language, since it's consistent with what Russia has been putting into the information sphere over the last eight years. And despite strict media censorship in Russia — where outlets aren't even allowed to refer to the current incursion as a war — citizens are risking imprisonment by protesting in the streets.

Yale historian Timothy Snyder described the charge of denazification as a perversion of values, telling CNN that it is "meant to confound us and discourage us and confuse us, but the basic reality is that Putin has everything turned around."

He said Putin's goal appears to be to take Kyiv, arrest Ukraine's political and civil leaders to get them out of power and then try them in some way. That's where the language of genocide comes in, he added.

"I think it's very likely, and he's said as much, that he intends to use the genocide and denazification language to set up some kind of kangaroo court which would serve the purpose of condemning these people to death or ... prison or incarceration."

Casanova and Lautman praise the strength and determination of Ukrainians, noting they are putting up a resistance. If Russia does succeed, Lautman says she is confident it would round up and execute political leaders and journalists there.

The experts point to the importance of learning from history and the present moment, something that the U.S. and other countries have not always done.

Casanova says the current moment proves that the world must create an equitable security system that is "not manipulated by the superpowers."

And both he and Lautman call for the world to hold Russia accountable, including by trying it for war crimes in international court. (The top prosecutor at the International Criminal Court said on Monday that the body would open a formal investigation into alleged war crimes "as rapidly as possible.")

"[We have to] understand that Ukraine today is the sacrificial lamb for all the unwillingness of the West to act united in defense of its own norms and values, in defense of the world security system that they tried to establish," Casanova says. "And if they can't fight for that, I don't know for what they can fight."

Russian soldiers deliberately kill Ukrainian kids, new film says Terror against civilians is part of Russian military strategy, experts say.

KYIV — Russia’s army has killed more than 500 children in Ukraine since the start of its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukrainian prosecutors say.

In the new documentary “Bullet holes,” journalists from the Kyiv Independent — a Ukrainian English-language news website — tell stories of three children killed by Russian troops in Ukraine: 10-year-old Kateryna Vinarska; 12-year-old Vladyslav Mahdyk; and 15-year-old Mykhailo Ustianivsky.

All three were shot dead by Russians at close range, according to Kyiv Independent reporters.

Vinarska was killed by Russian soldiers as they shot at a civilian car belonging to her grandparents at a checkpoint in an occupied village in the Kharkiv region. Mahdyk was shot dead by a single Russian bullet that also wounded his older sister as the family was trying to evacuate from Russian-occupied territory in the Kyiv region. And Ustianivsky was shot in the back for running away from a Russian armored vehicle in his village in the Kherson region, also occupied by Russian forces.

Their killers remain unpunished, and the children’s families are devastated — and want justice.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of the Center for Civil Liberties — a Ukrainian watchdog documenting Russian war crimes — who is also featured in the film, said that Russia is deliberately using terror against civilians to break Ukraine’s resistance.

“These crimes are committed in all regions and they continue. We are ready to prove it in court. Because it is time to break the circle of impunity and cruelty that has become part of Russian culture,” Matviichuk told the Kyiv Independent in the film.

As of September, 504 children had been killed in Ukraine as a result of Russian aggression, Ukrainian prosecutors say.

Russia has repeatedly denied committing war crimes in Ukraine and even blamed Kyiv for killing its own people, claiming it only invaded Ukraine to prevent genocide.

Ukrainian officials have long fumed at Moscow’s accusations.

“Can a state use false allegations of genocide as a pretext to destroy cities, bomb civilians, and deport children from their homes? When the Genocide Convention is so cynically abused, is this court powerless? The answer to these questions must be no,” said Ukraine’s representative Anton Korynevych, during the recent World Court hearings in The Hague, where Kyiv has sued Moscow for abusing the Genocide Convention.

In turn, Kyiv says that Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine show signs of genocide. But the U.N. Commission of Inquiry has not yet found enough evidence to conclude Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine.

“This a matter of intent, the intent of the criminals, there must be a ‘need’ to destroy a certain group. And such destruction, according to the Genocide Convention, must be physical or biological,” Erik Møse, chair of the U.N. commission, said during a press briefing in Kyiv.

However, the commission has already found evidence of wilful killings, torture, sexual violence, unlawful transfers and deportations committed by Russian troops, the commission said in a statement.

Even though officials find it hard to prove Russian intent behind the killings of civilians, journalists believe that public attention to these crimes can help to bring justice.

“If we keep documenting, if [we] remember, if we keep talking about these crimes, Russians will pay for that,” said Olga Rudenko, the Kyiv Independent c

The course of Russian development over the past decade has explicitly shown that both internal milieu and foreign policy domain have expressed staggering signs of radicalization and growing division between “us” (ethnic Russians) and “them” (non-Russian citizens and foreigners).

The grim irony of contemporary Russia extensively appealing to the legacy of the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945) as a pivotal aspect of Russian identity is that xenophobia, racial hatred and ultra/far right nationalism have by far outgrown the level of street radicals and in one form or another have penetrated various layers of Russian multiethnic and multicultural society. Currently the number of nationalist organizations actively operating in the Russian Federation may have reached 53: 22 of them being ultranationalist and 8 completely prohibited. In addition, according to numerous estimates half of the world far right radicals currently reside on the territory of the Russian Federation. From my prospective, this poses a grave challenge to both Russian society and European peace and security.

Ultranationalist ideology and Russian public consciousness: looking into the past, thinking about the future

Lessons drawn from Russian historical experience have explicitly pointed out one curious tendency: facing a vital necessity of reforms Russian ruling and intellectual elites have usually opted for relying on a fuzzy notion called “conservatism” that served as the main vehicle of anti-reformist, reactionary and anti-democratic forces.

The issues of “conservatism” extensively promoted during the Romanov dynasty reached its apex when the Monarchy encountered with a broad array of challenges brought about by urgent necessity of modernization and reforms that coincided with humiliating defeat in Russian - Japanese war (1904-1905) and the First Russian Revolution (1905). This resulted in growing appeal to “conservatism” emanating from the ruling elites that translated into surging xenophobia, anti-Semitism vividly seen in the “Black Hundreds” movement and ethnic pogroms that had to a certain extent predetermined Russian historical development in the beginning of the twentieth century. As a result, explicit and derogatory discrimination of ethnic minorities pushed members of various ethnic groups onto the road of radicalization and underground revolutionary activities.

That is why today, when Russia is pursuing Eurasian integration and facing proliferation of non-Russian population, historical experience and current level of xenophobia that is acquiring much deeper influence and significantly more sophisticated forms should not be undermined. After all, approximately 53% of Russians are currently supporting the slogan “Russia for Russians!”

Russian far right movement in 1990s – early 2000: menace on the march

Disintegration of the Soviet Union was accompanied by total economic impoverishment of wide layers of Russians, political degradation and raging separatism. On the other front, ideological vacuum that emerged after the demise of the Communism resulted in growing perplexity over the future trajectory of development. The ruling elites at the time were unable/unwilling to clearly formulate national idea – in a country with historically weak civil society, absence of pluralism and clear tilt towards the guidance from above, this was a dramatic and in many respects fateful episode. This ideological void triggered a torrent of ideas and distorted historical narratives that swooped on Russian society. That is why the process of ideological and spiritual renaissance did not acquire forms commensurate with the task of ideological and cultural transformation.

The sense of moral degradation, skyrocketing criminality, growing economic inequality, the bloody Chechen War (1994-1996), the ensued outbreak of terrorism and growing number of migrant workers from the Caucasus and Central Asia facilitated further radicalization of wide masses of Russians engendering emergence of various types of far right and neo-Nazi organizations. On the other hand, the war in Yugoslavia (especially the active involvement of the NATO forces), growing disenchantment with the West that was blamed for dismal economic performance and political failures resurrected anti-Western sentiments within Russian society and promoted the idea of incompatibility between liberal-democratic norms and values and Russian identity with distinct historical mission.

It ought to be mentioned that traditions of far right nationalism in contemporary Russia go back to the times of the Soviet Union, when in the year 1980 “Pamyat” (Memory) was formed from a number of smaller groups (though it was not very numerous and disintegrated in 1985). Ultranationalist/xenophobic movement in Russia in 1990s and the early 2000th did not constitute a homogeneous body and was represented by a patchwork of various forces that varied from underground militarized organizations, open neo-Nazis (skinheads), left wing extremists, Orthodox–Christian nationalists (the “Black Hundreds”; the Russian National Union; the Union of Russian Orthodox People) and national-Imperial (the Communist Party of the Russian Federation; the Liberal Democratic Party; Russian All-People's Union) groups.

In the early 1990s the most visible and well-organized actor among Russian far rights was the Russian National Unity (the RNU). Its militarized underground structure (which may have assembled as many as 100,000 active members in both the Russian Federation and other countries of post-Soviet area) held attributes and symbols similar to the ones used in the Nazi Germany and slogans such as “Glory to Russia!”. Sentiments that defined the conceptual outlook of this group did to a significant extent reflect the pervasive moods and feelings within Russian society: resurging anti-Semitism, explicit anti-Caucasian stance and anti-Americanism.

Another branch, so-called Nazi-skinheads did not have a core organization and was mostly represented by a wide range of incoherent organizations enjoying various extent of popular support. Three main factors contributed to exponential growth of this type of neo-Nazi groups:

• The First Chechen war (surrounded by aggressive anti-Caucasian information warfare orchestrated by Russian mass media)

• Economic collapse and plummeting level of education (which resulted in a staggering growth of youth criminality)

• Distorted understanding of the Second World War

Coupled together these factors created a fertile ground for the most unsophisticated xenophobic ideologies (easily manipulated from above) based on crude violence, ethnic hatred and intolerance. At certain point major Russian cities got submerged under the wave of uncontrollable violence committed by neo-Nazis. Foreigners (especially from countries whose appearance differed from the Slavic one) were afraid of visiting Russia and embassies of countries whose citizens could be targeted on the first place were instructed how to act while being in Russia. Unfortunately, these derogatory actions received tacit support from numerous representatives of Russian political elite. For instance, the Mayor of Moscow Yuri Luzhkov (a notorious nationalist) tried to hush down violent crimes with clear ethnic background. Moreover, in many respects militia and prosecutors as well as certain share of intellectual circles (several noticeable newspapers were not keen to portray skinheads and their crimes in negative light) expressed compassion with actions of violent neo-Nazis. According to numerous estimates by the year 2005 the total number of Nazi-skinheads in Russia may have reached 80,000 members. Victims of neo-Nazi criminals were counted in hundreds – although the accurate number remained unknown because local militia was not interested in classifying crimes as ethnically motivated and great number of migrant workers from Central Asia (who were main target of neo-Nazis) opted for not complaining to the state security services because many of them worked in Russia illegally.

Another force - National Bolshevik Party (NBP) known for its neo-Imperialist, openly xenophobic and anti-liberal activities and ideology represented a peculiar combination of far-right and far-left dogmas. Frequently members of the party have been charged with ethnic crimes, terrorism, seizure of administrative buildings and inducement for separatism in Kazakhstan, Ukraine and the Baltic States. The party had cells and representatives not only in the countries of the post-Soviet area (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Kirgizia and the Baltic States) but also in Israel, Sweden, Canada, Serbia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the UK and Poland. Perhaps, this party should not have been mentioned in scopes of this paper if it was not for Alexandr Dugin (notoriously known neo-Fascist and xenophobe) – one of the most noticeable representatives of contemporary Russian ultranationalism and neo-imperialism who happened to be a founding father of this organization.

In the final analysis, it ought to be mentioned that by the year 2005 xenophobia, racial hatred and ethnic crimes committed by ultranationalists in Russia had become a serious obstacle and a matter of international criticism that the Kremlin (already seeing Russia as an independent pole in international relation) was to somehow mitigate.

In January of 2006, while visiting Auschwitz Vladimir Putin openly acknowledged that anti-Semitism and the skyrocketing of neo-Nazi ideology had constituted a major problem for Russia. Similarly, the Amnesty report, entitled "Russian Federation: Violent racism out of control” explicitly voiced dissatisfaction with race-motivated crimes in Russia.

Taming the dragon or creating Frankenstein? Kremlin and Russian far right nationalism (2005 - 2011)

Visible dangers emanating from uncontrollable violent far right nationalists induced the Kremlin to accept a new tactics that would have marginalized most atrocious groups and promote creation of a layer of “conservative patriots”. On the other hand, increasing antagonism with the US and their European allies (over the invasion of Iraq, expansion of the EU and a parade of “color revolutions”) were exploited by the Kremlin in the process of creation of an imitation of direct participation of masses in political process. In this juncture, nationalist forces were perceived as the most convenient vehicle of communication that could be used both in terms of suppression of opposition and (most importantly) aggressive propaganda campaigns.

This period in development of Russian nationalist movement primarily coincided with emergence in 2003 of “Rodina” (“Motherland”) political project (as a coalition of 30 nationalist and far-right groups that was established by Dmitri Rogozin, Sergey Glazyev, Sergey Baburin and other representatives of nationalist forces), “Nashi” (Ours) youth movement (2005 date of initiation) and breathtaking success of such controversial figures as the already mentioned A. Dugin and Sergey Kurginyan, MikhailLeon­tiev, Maxim Shevchenko, Nikolai Starikov, Alexandr Prokhanov, Nataliya Narotchnitskaya. The range of ideas represented by this new stronghold of Russian “conservatism” varied from neo-Stalinism to most notorious forms of ethno-nationalism, xenophobia and neo-Fascism.

Nonetheless, ideas promoted by the Kremlin did not yield results tantamount to the expectations. First, “Rodina” party managed to gain much more popularity than it was supposed to. Moreover, youth “patriotic” organizations did not relieve Russian society of raging xenophobic sentiments: on the contrary, starting from the year 2005 Russia experienced an avalanche of ethnic crimes and the rift stipulated by racial discord became even more apparent. More importantly, newly emerged organizations acquired traits of nationalist groupings and started to actively promote ethno-nationalist agendas.

Another clumsy and ill-calculated attempt to “harness” far right movement was the so-called “Russian March” (first celebrated in 2005) – it turned out to be an openly neo-Nazi action initially extensively supported by officials. Incidentally, one of the main organizers of the event was the Eurasian Youth Union (guided by A. Dugin). Later on, this gathering embraced various reactionary elements within Russian society, ranging from neo-Nazis, monarchists, to neo-pagans and Cossacks.

An uneasy alliance: what went wrong?

Very soon however, numerous mistakes in the aforementioned approach became evident. First, imperial nationalism (that was to have acquired predominant positions and pave the way towards re-emergence of the new Russia) was supplemented by growing in popularity ethnic nationalism. Moreover, Nazi-skinhead movement and other military radicals did not cease to exist. International attention was brought to the hideous assassination of Stanislav Markelov (human right activist) and Anastasia Baburova (well-known activist of Russian anti-Nazi movement) that was said to have been committed by the neo-Nazi BORN (literary “Combat Organization of Russian Nationalists”) – this was one of numerous crimes perpetrated by members of this far right group. In addition, in order to boast with significant aggrandizement in the rank-and-file (to attract more financial support) such organizations as “Nashi” tacitly recruited neo-Nazis, skinheads and football hooligans. Most certainly, this jeopardized the Kremlin-inspired project.

What made matters even more complicated was that the role of nationalists in Russia changed dramatically: previously they occupied marginal positions but growing participation in politics made them a convenient ally (in certain respect a tool) of various political forces that tried to manipulate public mass conscious. Such ideas as “Russia for Russians”, “Let us clean Moscow from the garbage”, “Glory to Russia!”, “Say no to migrants from Central Asia”, “Moscow for Muscovites” acquired exponential support. Most perplexing for the Kremlin was that politicians and intellectuals closely associated with ruling elites also abused such slogans and mottoes. Interestingly enough, yet in the year 2013 V. Putin himself explicitly acclaimed the idea of implementation of further restrictions for work migration to Russia – an obvious attempt to use national-populist agendas and gain support from growing nationalist movement. Moreover, in October 2014 during the Valdai Club meeting in Sochi V. Putin openly stated his adherence to nationalism, which he juxtaposed to chauvinist ideology (though conveniently obfuscating the red line between two concepts).2

This picture would be incomplete without pointing out the grave inconsistency and ambiguity in steps taken by the Kremlin. On the one hand, V. Putin and other officials have criticized xenophobia and ethnic intolerance as inadmissible activities for the Russian Federation. Nonetheless, on the other, state sponsored/orchestrated anti-American, anti-Georgian, anti-Ukrainian and anti-Baltic campaigns and a number of popular TV shows (such as “Nasha Russia” –“Our Russia”) that ridiculed population of Central Asia -in particular Tajikistan- clearly suggested that xenophobia and racism emanated from the very top of Russian political architecture. This incoherence and clumsiness raise a logical question: if one sort of xenophobia and racism is to be tolerated and approved, why should its different branches be prohibited?

Putin’s return to office, the war in Ukraine and Russian neo-nationalist dilemma

In the final analysis, it was the decision of V. Putin to return to power that triggered a new lap of frictions within Russian nationalist circles. Certain groups openly opposed this idea. For instance, the so-called “ethnic-nationalists” assumed hostile attitude towards the Kremlin primarily because of alleged discrimination of ethnic Russians as a result of illegal migration and financial support to the North Caucasus. Such organizations as the “Russians Movement”, the “Movement against Illegal Migration”, the “Russian National-Democratic Party”, the “Slavic Alliance” and the “Northern Brotherhood” extensively supported by Slavic neo-pagans, neo-Nazi groupings, explicitly voiced their concern over the trajectory of development of the Russian society.

The most noticeable figure of the neo-nationalism became Alexei Navalny who based his program on criticism of corruption intertwined with “ethnic factors”. Such slogans as “Stop feeding the Caucasus” have enjoyed outstanding rates of popularity especially among young and educated citizens of Moscow – a clear contrast with ill-educated violent have-nots. Moreover, explicit anti-Kremlin stance of A. Navalny and his associates posed a serious problem for aging Russian regime. Worsening economic situation coupled with the dramatic raise of Ramzan Kadyrov underscore not only the fact that the North Caucasus is drifting away from Moscow in each and every sense, yet generates number of serious questions regarding financial means injected in ailing corrupt economies of the region. Indeed, such issues do have powerful effect on many Russians, especially considering that the society has been suffering a malaise called “ethnic division” for a long time and symptoms thereof are likely to progress even further. The issue of populism and crude manipulation with masses based on primitive distortion of facts and ideas currently offered by liberal-nationalists are not new. After all, was it not Vladimir Putin whose breathtaking ascension to power was handsomely saturated with the same ingredients?

The so-called “Russian Spring” was meant to significantly upgrade V. Putin’s plummeting popularity and achieve consolidation of wide layers of Russian society through“rectifying historical injustices” and practical steps aimed at creation of the “Russian World”.Indeed, initially the popular support of V. Putin skyrocketed and visible consolidation of Russian society including nationalist forces seemed to have been achieved. Nevertheless, the “post-Crimea” hangover was starting to fade away with the advent of economic crisis and the outbreak of war in the Southeast of Ukraine. One of the most surprising outcomes for the Kremlin was the actual rift within Russian ultranationalist forces that (primarily due to the lack of knowledge and mostly distorted information provided by Russian mass media) started to perceive the ongoing conflict from two diverging prospective. Naturally, the larger part of Russian nationalist forces fully supported pro-Russian rebels in Donbass, whereas certain layers were in favor of Euromaidan because of its alleged tilt towards ethnic nationalism (in this juncture, the “Azov” battalion was hailed as a force representing genuine ideas of Slavic ethno-nationalism). The most evident corroboration of this tendency was the fact that in 2014 Russian nationalists took part in three different sections of “Russian March” (ideologically adverse to each other) and with visible ideological countercharges expressed by all sides.

Perhaps, another matter of deep concern lies within the following: it is not a secret that Russian far right nationalists are fighting on both sides of the front line. In case the conflict subsides, many militants are likely to return home. The impact of their “re-integration” into the peaceful life could yield unpredictable results. After all, experience of the two Chechen wars clearly showed that many solders could not easily return back to normal. On the other hand, it would be safe to suggest that the “heroes” of the war in Ukrainian Southeast, such as Igor Strelkov (Girkin), have accumulated visible support within radical circles – especially those who accuse the Kremlin of inability/unwillingness to conduct coherent policy in respect to the “Novorossiya” and Russian speaking minority in Ukraine. Strelkov might appear as a new phenomenon within Russian nationalist milieu – his outlook consists of a combination of Imperial–Orthodox line and inevitability of re-emergence of the new Russia under the dictatorship of a Stalinist/Tsarist model. For this type of nationalists Vladimir Putin is seen as weak and indecisive leader and the political opposition is perceived as national traitors to be done away most decisively. These nationalists are not populists interested in accretion of wealth – they are idealist with fanatic creed in their historic mission. This could be extremely dangerous combination given Russian (and European) historical experience of the first half of the 20th century.

Generation 3.0: far right ideology in the changing Russia

In order to understand the role of nationalist ideology in post-2012 Russia, one need to take closer look at both internal and external factors that have played crucial role in transformation of the Kremlin’s goals and strategies related to this phenomena. Aggressive perception of the “outer world” reflected in the “spheres-of-influence” approach and explicit anti-West sentiments have contributed to the changing role of xenophobic and ultranationalist groups and organization in the Russian Federation. In this regard, two key dates should be discerned: the year 2007 (notorious Munich conference) and 2008 (the war between Russia and Georgia). Starting from these two events that shook the essence of European and post-Soviet countries European ultranationalists have been providing support for Russian foreign policy actions aimed at re-integration of former Soviet republics into the Kremlin’s sphere of influence. For many radicals in Europe Russia and Vladimir Putin appear to be the only remaining custodian of conservatism, Christian values and self-sufficient foreign policy. Moreover, given the great role of anti-Americanism (and anti-NATO moods) in Europe, radical forces admire V. Putin for being able to openly challenge the unipolar post-Cold War world dominated by the US. In addition, allegedly tough subordination of Chechnya (though the image promoted by mass media does not reflect the real state of affairs) by the means of decisive military measures provides an erroneous image of Russia in Europe. Acting in scopes of “divide and rule” tactics the Kremlin has been willing to engage in close relations with European far rights using Russian nationalist organizations and individuals for establishing and maintaining close contacts. These ties have been secured by personal active contribution of the Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin (one of the founding fathers of “Rodina”), Anatoly Zhuravlev (representative of the United Russia), A. Dugin and other notorious Russian nationalists who have been able to establish cordial relations with and attain broad understanding and support from the European far rights. Clearly such relations have been coordinated and guided from the very top of the existing power architecture in the Russian Federation. International mass media have also unraveled extensive evidences3 of significant financial support the Kremlin is ready to provide for major European far right organizations. Moreover, the dialogue with European far rights is particularly vital for the Kremlin in countries strategically important from energy security point of view – this is easily deducible from the map of Russian oil/gas pipelines stretching to the EU and the state of relations between the local and Russian far rights.

It appears however, that the strong desire to derive support from the side of European nationalists may have resulted in a number of miscalculations. For instance, the first International Russian Conservative Forum that took place in Saint Petersburg on March 22 2015 attracted open neo-Nazis and criminals – to the extent that even Marine Le Pen (a well-known admirer of V. Putin) turned down the invitation in order not to be involved in such a derogatory assembly. The event was also severely criticized by the majority of Russian liberals and anti-fascists, whereas the Kremlin opted to dissociate itself from the event.

From the other prospective, the Kremlin does not shy away from using the scary image of Russian violent Nazi-skinheads and radicals responsible for crimes and ethnic pogroms (such as in Kondopoga and Birylevo) hinting that the current elites are by far more civil and predictable than other far right nationalist forces and that the potential raise to power of far more ultranationalist forces could bring about irreparable damage not only to the Russian Federation itself yet for the entire continental security architecture. In the final analysis, Russian historical experience of the first quarter of the 20th century might be seen as an argument compelling enough for the European elites to continue cooperation with current political regime.

On the domestic front, the Kremlin has inspired a new project called “Antimaidan”whose purpose is “to prevent ‘color revolutions’ in Russia”. It assembles a broad array of forces under the banners of “conservatism”, “patriotism” and “inadmissibility of Maidan in Russia”. Incidentally, leader of this group include not only well-known intellectuals and civil activists with far going connections with the Kremlin (such as Nikolai Starikov and Dmitry Sablin), but also the leader of the Russian motorcycle club-gang “the Night Wolves”, Alexander “the Surgeon” Zaldostanov, who enjoys personal friendship with the Russian President V. Putin.

In certain respect, it might appear as a reiteration of moves previously conducted by the Kremlin, although there are crucial differences that need to be taken into account. The composition of this project drastically differs from the previous ones: youth, sportsmen, intellectuals, Cossacks, military veterans and nationalists have been merged together into an organism that will be able to act in broad scopes and without any remorse. The main justification of any actions (as though and derogatory as they might be) will be the fuzzy concept of “public good”. Many experts have already come up with a historical similarity between the “Antimaidan” and German SA paramilitary forces or the infamous “death squads” in Latin America and even the Red Guards in China.

The question however appears to be much more sophisticated and perilous than it seems on the surface. By now it remains unclear if this new project signifies yet another attempt to use nationalist forces for specific goals or whether this move is an inception of a new chapter of Russian history with a long lasting tradition of authoritarianism and repressions against opposition.

We infiltrate the Russian Neo-Nazi group “Autonomous Nationalists”, one of most brutal right-wing, extremist groups in the world. Shocking footage shows them attacking foreigners, setting fire to buildings and training to use knives. Even more worrying are the ties between Autonomous Nationalists and other extremist groups in Germany and Europe. One member describes how they would regularly train with Neo-Nazis from Europe. “There was a real program with target practice . We showed the Europeans how to use our weapons most effectively and exchanged experiences” In candid interviews, members are quick to praise the Third Reich. “I support the theory of the supremacy of the white race and the superiority of the Russian people” states Dimitry. Another describes how he attacks foreigners, who he blames for spreading ’drugs and death’. And it’s not only men attracted to this dangerous ideology. At the training camp, we film some of the women attending and learn how they were recruited. We also see how the neo-Nazis use seemingly harmless web pages and youth affine topics to spread their radical views.

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.”