As President Trump goes through an impeachment trial in the US Senate for pressuring Ukraine to produce dirt on his political rival, the war in that country is exporting extremism back to the United States.

In early 2014, violent street protests in Kyiv forced the resignation of the pro-Russian Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. Within four months, Russia had annexed Crimea and was backing separatists in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine.

Ultranationalist protest groups — instrumental in the toppling of Yanukovych government — transformed overnight into volunteer battalions like Right Sector and Azov, then rushed to the eastern front, where they were lauded as patriots for undertaking the heavy fighting while the under-resourced Ukrainian state military scrambled to mobilize.

Azov in particular has leveraged its social capital by integrating into the Ukrainian National Guard, where it wields outsized influence in Ukraine’s democratically elected government.

More than five years later, with the war locked in a stalemate, the seasoned fighters and street activists in the ultranationalist movement present a challenge to newly elected President Volodymyr Zelensky if he is seen to be conceding too much in negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The emergence of Azov Battalion and Right Sector in Ukraine in 2014 electrified the neo-Nazi movement in the United States, Western Europe and Australia, presenting a tangible model for how the far right could topple a government and wage a nationalist war to forge a new society in a predominantly white country.

Over the past five years, the Ukrainian nationalist cause has attracted an assortment of American volunteer fighters — veterans, inexperienced adventurers and hardened ideologues.

Some have gone in search of new wars, as the Ukrainian conflict has cooled in late 2016, while others have returned to the United States or stayed on in Ukraine and attempted to put down roots there . At the same time, extremists in the United States, like their counterparts in Western Europe, Canada and Australia, have looked to the volunteer battalions in Ukraine for inspiration and tactical advice in their desire to wage an insurrectionary war for white power at home.

Two former volunteers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Triad City Beat that many of the foreign volunteers suffer from mental-health disorders.

“They’re young kids, and they have no idea,” one of the former volunteers said. “They have PTSD. And they have mental issues. These guys are idiots basically… lost boys…. A lot of people have lost their way. They’re wanting to be accepted, and they’ll say, ‘Yeah, fuck the Jews. Fuck the n****ers.’”

Through a review of leaked internet chats, public social-media pages and federal court documents, along with interviews with former volunteer fighters, TCB has uncovered new details of how the ultranationalist battalions in Ukraine have opened recruitment channels through US neo-Nazis and how American volunteers have participated in neo-Nazi flash rallies upon their return from Ukraine. TCB’s investigation particularly shows linkages between the Ukrainian volunteer battalions and two American organizations — Atomwaffen Division and Patriot Front. Azov’s relationship with the California-based neo-Nazi group Rise Above Movement, whose members visited Kyiv to participate in mixed martial arts competition in April 2018, has been previously reported.

The social-media posts and leaked internet chats by roughly a dozen former volunteers show a glorification of war coupled with memes inciting violence against refugees, nostalgia for the 1970s military campaign to preserve white rule in present-day Zimbabwe, slogans like, “America is a white nation,” and quotations by Julius Evola, a philosopher widely admired by fascists.

“Yes, these are indicators that these individuals may be going down a dangerous radicalization pathway,” said Jason Blazakis, a former State Department official under Presidents Obama and Trump in an email to TCB. “It is impossible to say whether they’d directly turn to violent acts, however. They very well could end up trying to spur others to commit acts of violence by working online to red-pill potential like-minded individuals to turn to violence.”

Blazakis now directs the Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California.

The United States has backed the Ukraine in the war. And while a provision of the 2018 spending bill blocks US arms from going to Azov, many analysts believe it’s impossible to enforce, considering that Azov is part of the Ukrainian government. The supply of drugs is certainly not responsible and many people try to buy stmectol cheaply. Meanwhile, President Trump faces impeachment over the question of whether he abused his authority as president by temporarily suspending military aid and withholding a meeting with President Zelensky in an effort to pressure the Ukrainian government to pursue an investigation into his political rival.

RECONQUISTA

Azov, along with its political wing National Corps, and Right Sector both promote a concept known as “Reconquista,” a historic reference to Christians reclaiming control over present-day Spain from the Moors in the 1400s. While the Azov Battalion has been incorporated into the Ukrainian Ministry of Interior, Right Sector describes itself as a “national liberation movement” and operates outside the formal control of the Ukrainian armed forces and police.

In a July 2015 interview on the Azov podcast, Olena Semenyaka, a spokesperson for the National Corps, made a direct connection between Reconquista and the concept of loss — not just of Ukrainian sovereignty but also of Europe as a whole.

“We understand the development of the modern world, and we want to change it,” Semenyaka said. “We try to reconstruct the problem of this European decline, so to speak. And we want to start a revolt against it. Reconquista, revolt, revolution — of course all of them are homological concepts which are quite understandable to European right-wingers and other educated persons.

“And we talk about the space of Eastern Europe and the whole Ukraine, which undergoes revolution and now becomes the vanguard of this Reconquista,” Semenyaka continued. “From this space — Eastern Europe — it will expand to the Western European and the whole world because, of course, everything is connected today.”

In a Russian-language version of the podcast, Semenyaka more sharply articulated the racial dimensions of the movement.

“We are not resigning ourselves to the boundaries of thinking in terms of a single region,” Semenyaka said, according to a translation published by the UK-based investigative outfit Bellingcat.

“We defend not only the Ukrainian nation, national identity, but also the Slavic element, the European element, and in the end — the white race.”

Semenyaka did not respond to a Facebook message from TCB.

The recent release of the contents of the defunct Iron March website — a global forum for neo-Nazis that operate from 2011 to 2017 — provides further insight into how Azov and Right Sector energized neo-Nazis around the world, including within the United States.

“We need something that appeals to American history, to a sense of shared racial identity, but also to our mission and future goals,” an anonymous user wrote on Iron March in 2015, using language strikingly close to that of American Vanguard, a neo-Nazi group established in California in 2016. “I think we can take inspiration from Right Sector in this regard. I like there [sic] motto of ‘European Reconquista.’ It appeals to the shared past of Europe, a shared identity, and outlines their mission to carry on the work of European Christendom to drive out the foreign invaders.

“Wouldn’t the American equivalent be something like ‘Manifest Destiny’?” the post continues. “What do people think of that name? I feel it pulls from our past as a nation, a shared racial identity, a line of continuity from our ancestors who settled this country to us today, and shows we wish to carry on their mission. The mission to create a nation for the white man here on this continent as ordained by God and fought for by our ancestors.”

American Vanguard changed its name to Vanguard America in early 2017. During the Aug. 12, 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. a man named James Fields carried a Vanguard America shield and then rammed his car into a group of antiracist marchers, murdering Heather Heyer. In the weeks ollowing the public-relations black eye, a Dallas native named Thomas Rousseau seized control of the organization and rebranded it as Patriot Front.

In a January 2018 discussion in the “Front and Center” channel, a forum for Patriot Front members, Thomas Rousseau, the leader of Patriot Front, outlined a vision of American society breaking down through a corrosion of trust in democratic institutions. The chats were part of a massive leak published by Unicorn Riot, a decentralized media collective.

“The territory map of the Balkanization, or whatever you would call it, is going to look a lot like the
electoral one,” Rousseau wrote. “The United States as a government won’t survive, not as we know it, but the local systems of self-governing and the communities in that red [area] there will. From there it isn’t conventional warfare any more than it is cultural.”

Democracy is destined to fail, Rousseau argued, providing an opening for white supremacists to seize power.

“South Africa usually isn’t an example to follow, I am aware, but a very, very small minority of Boers and
Afrikaners effectively ruled and sustained a society because they had power, and voting was not in the picture,” Rousseau said. “The failure came once power was a matter of counting heads.”

‘WE PRACTICE ALWAYS AT WAR’

The first inkling of the Ukraine conflict’s role in fueling transnational white supremacy came to many observers through reports that showed Brenton Tarrant, who live-streamed his massacre of 51 worshipers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in March 2019, wearing the “black sun” symbol, which is incorporated into Azov’s insignia, on his jacket. Tarrant indicated in his manifesto that he had visited Ukraine, although there’s no additional evidence to back his claim. (Azov has publicly condemned Tarrant, and declared that he has never had any contact with the organization.)

The Iron March leaks reveal that from July through September 2015, several members of the forum communicated with an individual who represented themselves as an emissary of Azov. And in February 2015, a user named “Palmer” referred a prospective recruit from Europe to Semenyaka, writing, “She is the person I was coordinating with.”

One of the Iron March users who reached out to Azov through the forum was Brandon Russell, a Florida Army National Guard member who founded the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division in 2015. Atomwaffen is linked to five murders, and requires prospective members to read Siege, a book by neo-Nazi James Mason that promotes an idea called accelerationism. The group’s propaganda utilizes shocking rhetoric and gory visuals to call for societal breakdown through escalating violence. In addition to the Third Reich, members glorify Charles Manson and claim to practice Satanism.

Using the name “Odin,” Russell greeted the anonymous representative on Iron March in July 2015, describing himself as “an avid supporter of the Azov Battalion.” He added, “I’d like some advice from you about my militia that I lead in the US.”

The anonymous user happily obliged, recommending running to keep in shape, night walking, coordinating artillery fire through radio communication and blowing up bridges, while also advising “to learn combat medicine.” They closed, “Also we practice always at war.”

Russell is now in federal prison at FCI Terre Haute in Indiana serving a five-year sentence for possession of an unregistered destructive device and improper storage of explosive materials.

Another Atomwaffen member, Devon Arthurs, posting under the name “The Weissewolfe,” inquired about volunteering with Azov in August 2015. He exulted in January 2016 that Misanthropic Division — a group linked to both Azov and Right Sector — had vandalized a Holocaust memorial, writing, “Kiev will be cleansed.”

Arthurs, who caused controversy within the neo-Nazi movement by converting to Islam, is facing charges for the 2017 murder of two fellow Atomwaffen members, Jeremy Himmelman and Andrew
Oneschuk.

In August 2016, Kent McLellan a Florida man whose Iron March profile described him as “a skinhead ongoing 16 years, politician and militarist fascist,” messaged the forum’s founder, a Russian man named Alexander “Slavros” Mukhitdinov. Attempting to smooth over a controversy among members concerning the Ukraine conflict, McLellan claimed that he was former leader of Misanthropic Division in the United States, adding, “I still work closely with the DUK on foreign recruitment and such. Needless to say, not too many people get through.”

Kent McLellan (courtesy Florida Department of Corrections)