The Ukrainian Far-Right: A Legitimate Concern of Russia or Controlled Opposition?

In the Fall of 2021, the Illiberalism Studies Program published a study that found that the extreme right-wing collectives of the Ukrainian political environment had been cooperating with pro-Russian actors despite the fact that Ukraine and Russia had been enemies within the same period of time. In that study, they not only found that the Azov Assault Brigade likes to draw support from a specific Russian Nazi organization called Wotanjugend, but that Ukraine’s Nazis in general had some kind of connection either with Russians or with people who’ve been known to be supporters of Vladimir Putin in the past. This sounds really bizarre. Why would a Ukrainian fascist want to associate with someone who potentially supports the national interests of the Kremlin? What does this mean for Russia’s narratives regarding the presence of Nazis in Ukraine?

To answer the first question, we need to understand the way right-wing authoritarians in Ukraine and Russia work and then see what we can find from there. The roots of the Far-Right in Ukraine and Russia go back to communism losing its power in Europe. When communism in the Soviet Union was demonstrated to be a model that wasn’t working for the benefit of the common people it was supposed to benefit, a lot of people from Ukraine and Russia became disillusioned with left-wing policies altogether. They began to resent socialism and started imagining a better past waiting to be resurrected by fighting for pre-communist tradition. This false sense of nostalgia is what continues to animate post-Soviet fascism to this very day, as it is a core hallmark of fascism that it uses to draw support from a normal crowd that would otherwise reject the reactionary politics of an ideologically over-the-top demagogue.

So we now have a case of commonality for both Ukrainian and Russian right-wing extremists, but when did they start to work together? The first instance of collaboration between Ukrainian ultra-conservative contacts and Kremlin-backed political dissidents was when members of the Ukrainian National Assembly’s Ukrainian National Self-Defense unit sided with Transnistria’s rebels in their war against Moldova in the early 1990s. In that war, many of the pro-Russian separatists were actual native speakers of the Ukrainian language, so the Ukrainian fascists felt a sense of cultural commonality for them. Needless to say, supporting a Ukrainian diaspora in another country was something that would obviously boost the Ukrainian Far-Right’s popularity. Fascism thrives on ethnocentric policies in order to draw support from the general public.

Okay, that makes sense. But what other examples do we have of pro-Ukrainian reactionaries fraternizing or otherwise consorting with pro-Russian actors? Well, take Richard Spencer. Okay, technically he’s not a Ukrainian nor is he heavily involved in Ukrainian politics in the same way that someone like Andriy Biletsky might be. But he is a man who is pro-Ukrainian and he has been known to speak positively about Vladimir Putin in the past. For one, he has been known to have been married to Nina Kouprianova, Alexander Dugin’s translator. Rumor has it that he even attended dinner parties with Alexander Dugin himself. Go figure!

Anatoliy Karlin, a Russian Nazi who also supported Vladimir Putin in the past, has also been known to attend Nazi Conventions with Richard Spencer and even publicly supported the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally that Richard Spencer was specifically the face of in the state of Virginia although he wasn’t personally there at the time it took place. In 1999, Dmytro Korchinsky founded the Ukrainian Brotherhood, an organization that he had proclaimed as a “Christian Hezbollah.” When the Orange Revolution took place in 2004, the Ukrainian Brotherhood was one of the few examples of Ukrainian organizations within the Far-Right that opposed its goal of abolishing the pro-Russian government. But the Ukrainian Far-Right’s connections to pro-Russian political actors don’t stop there. The Ukrainian Freedom Party has also been known to have overt and covert support from Victor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian politician, and the Party of Regions, a pro-Russian political party of which Yanukovych was a known member.

Victor Yanukovych was not only known to have connections with the Freedom Party, he was even known to have funded the Freedom Party through dark accounting. Dark accounting, or black box accounting as it is also referred to, is when an individual or a collective deliberately uses complex bookkeeping methodologies to make interpreting financial statements time-consuming and difficult to interpret. Yanukovych was publicly accused by Vitaliy Atanasov, an editor for a left-wing political magazine based in Kiev called Commons, as well as other political commentators, of doing just that. However, the full extent of his corruption would not be known until after he was removed from power following the Revolution of Dignity in 2014. The Party of Regions even increased the media presence of the Freedom Party by platforming them on their own TV channels.

Speaking of TV channels, something else really weird took place in March 2018. When anti-Russian activists in Kiev protested against the sale of the Ukrainian TV channel ZIK to the pro-Russian politician and oligarch Victor Medvedchuk, the National Squads, an affiliate of the Azov Assault Brigade’s National Corps, offered protection services to the TV station in order to shield them from getting caught up in a riot. The crowd later left the area. Offering protection services is a common practice among Ukraine’s far-right paramilitary groups, but what makes this case rather unusual is that pro-Ukrainian Nazis actually stood up for a TV channel that was being purchased by a Ukrainian politician and oligarch who was pro-Russian. Easily reminiscient of the collaboration between Ukrainian Nazis and the Transnistrian rebels warring against Moldova.

In August 2016, just two years after the Euromaidan demonstrations, a Ukrainian man who was known to be an investigative journalist, an anticorruption activist, as well as a member of parliament at the time by name of Serhiy Leshchenko made the evidence of the Party of Regions’ black box accounting practices available to the general public. The evidence was found in the former estate of Victor Yanukovych in Mezhihiria just around Kiev in 2014. What Serhiy Leshchenko did was that he published a photo of a table of unofficial expenses of the Party of Regions that listed payments to various sources, including a 2010 transfer of US$200,000 to the Ukrainian Freedom Party, its most aggressive political adversary. When Leshchenko shared this document, he indicated that this wasn’t the only time this had happened and that there may have been more transactions made between 2007 and 2009 before Yanukovych became Ukraine’s president in the spring of 2010. It might seem tempting to view Victor Yanukovych as opposed to Nazi ideology as well as fascism in general because of how he publicly opposed the Ukrainian Far-Right’s overt stances for anti-Russian political positions, but what people forget is that this man himself has been known to legitimize memorials for infamous people like Stepan Bandera and other fascists who collaborated with the Nazis who formed the backbone of the Third Reich during World War II.

The most shocking case of collaboration between Ukrainian actors within the Far-Right and supporters of the Kremlin is how Edward Kovalenko founded a splinter faction of the Ukrainian National Assembly, also called the Ukrainian National Assembly, and supported the Orange Revolution only to turn on the Ukrainian government for mobilizing the Ukrainian army to fight against pro-Russian separatist forces in Luhansk and Donetsk. This case, however, seems to be engineered rather than spontaneous like the other examples that have been illustrated in both my article here and the study published by the Illiberalism Studies Program. According to a report by Halya Coynash from May 2017,

“[A] court in the Kherson oblast [...] passed sentence on Edward Kovalenko, a Ukrainian whose involvement in fake far-right movements dates back to at least 2004. The Henichesk District Court found Kovalenko guilty of obstructing the legitimate activities of Ukraine’s Armed Forces and other military formations (Article 114-1 of the Criminal Code) and sentenced to 5 years’ imprisonment. Kovalenko was taken into custody in the courtroom. The criminal charges against Kovalenko were brought over an anti-mobilization rally which he organized on January 27, 2015. During the rally, he issued an ultimatum, threatening that, if mobilization did not stop in Ukraine, the protesters would block roads and seize control of the military recruitment office, police and administrative buildings. In November 2016, [Kovalenko] was reported as being behind a petition to Serhei Aksyonov, installed as Crimean leader by Russian soldiers in February 2014, with Aksyonov in turn writing to Putin with a request to ‘help Henichesk with gas.’ In July 2016, he was directly implicated in the fabrication of a supposed demand from local Ukrainian Bulgarians for a Bulgarian autonomy. The report from July 4, 2016 was entitled ‘Ukraine’s Bulgarian diaspora demands territorial autonomy from Poroshenko’ and attached a letter allegedly signed by Yuri Palichev, who in the report itself is described as one of the leaders of the Bulgarian diaspora.”

The study goes on to list more examples of collaboration between pro-Ukrainian Nazis and pro-Russian political commentators and politicians and I encourage you to read the article for yourself. I hope what’s been written has shed some light on a topic that you previously did not know about and I will see you in the next entry.