When announcing the February invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin said that one of Russia’s aims was to “denazify” the country. In the months since, Kremlin propaganda has continuously pushed the notion that Russian troops are “destroying” and capturing “nationalists,” “Banderities,” and “neo-Nazis” in Ukraine — painting all Ukrainian soldiers as far-right radicals and eliding the fact that thousands of innocent civilians have died as a result of the invasion. What the Kremlin’s propagandists have conveniently ignored, however, is the fact that several avowed ultra-right nationalists are actually fighting on Moscow’s side. Meduza tells the story of how Russian neo-Nazis were drawn into Vladimir Putin’s war to “denazify” Ukraine. In June 2022, snapshots of a young man standing in front of a German flag began circulating on Ukrainian Telegram channels. He had a shaved head and a number of memorable tattoos, including an intricate portrait of Adolf Hitler on his shoulder, the emblem of the Third Reich on his chest, and, on his forearm, the phrase “Jedem das seine” — the motto displayed over the main gate of the Nazi’s Buchenwald concentration camp. The man in the photograph is Anton Raevsky, a well-known Russian ultra-nationalist who, in 2014–2015, fought alongside Russian and Kremlin-backed forces in the Donbas. In April 2022, he went off to war once again — this time, to take part in what Vladimir Putin had dubbed a “special military operation” to “denazify” Ukraine. (…) In the 2000s, Raevsky tested out three ultra-nationalist groups, but he soon cut ties with all but one — the Black Hundred (Chornaya Sotnya, in Russian). As his acquaintance recalled, the group’s tenets combined all of Raevsky’s core views: anti-Semitism, support for monarchy as a form of government, and Russian Orthodoxy. According to the acquaintance, Raevsky eventually made a special trip to St. Petersburg to meet with the group’s founder, Alexander Shtilmark, who granted him permission to open a Black Hundred branch in Oryol. Upon returning home, Raevsky took it upon himself to cover the city with Black Hundred-themed graffiti.
via meduza: Dying to kill The Russian neo-Nazis fighting Vladimir Putin’s war to ‘denazify’ Ukraine