Angry Planet - Eastern Europe's Fascist Salad

Episode Date: March 19, 2022

According to Vladimir Putin, he’s on a quest to de-Nazify Ukraine. But what about the Nazis in his own backyard? Hell, what about the Nazis all over Central and Eastern Europe.Right now, the Azov Regiment in Ukraine is dominating the conversation. Pictures of the ultra nationalist group are circulating online and being used to justify Russia’s invasion. But they aren’t the only fascists in the area. Far from it. But it’s complicated and Azov is part of a broad tapestry of Fascist movements in the region, including in Russia.Here to get into all this is Michael Colborne. Colborne is a journalist working at Bellingcat where he writes about extremist movements in Europe. He’s written a lot about Azov, but his latest is about the fascists in Russia. Male State: The Russian Online Hate Group Backing Putin’s War is at Bellingcat now.Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world with their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello, and welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason Fields. According to Vladimir Putin, he's on a quest to denotify Ukraine. But what about the Nazis in his own backyard? Hell, what about the Nazis all over central and eastern Europe? Right now, the Azov regiment in Ukraine is dominating the conversation. Pictures of the ultra-nationalist group are circulating online and being used to justify Russia's invasion.

They aren't the only fascists in the area, far from it. But it's complicated, and Azov is part of a broad tapestry of fascist movements in the region, including Russia. Here to get into all of this is Michael Colburn. Colburn is a journalist working at Bellingat, where he writes about extremist movements in Europe. He's written a lot about Azov, but his latest is about fascists in Russia. Mail state. The Russian online hate group backing Putin's war is at Bellingat now. Sir, thank you so much for joining us.

Oh, thank you, gentlemen, for the advice. So let's get some basic stuff out of the way, because this has been in the news, and we've actually had some listeners reach out to us asking about it. What is Azov exactly? Are they more than just a military unit? It's when people ask me about as of those four letters, that one word, as of, and when they see it online, I think a lot of the times people are not always talking about the same thing or they're talking about. They're never quite clear exactly what they're even talking about. So for a bit of background, I'm speaking of what is now loosely called the Azov movement, and that's, yeah, I'll get into that a bit more detail in second.

But this entire far right movement in Ukraine, the Azov movement has its roots in a military unit that was first called the Azov Battalion and then became officially the Azov Regiment in 2014 as part of Ukraine's National Guard. So essentially, what happened in 2014 in Ukraine with Putin's intervention then into Ukraine using proxy quote unquote separatist forces, but we all know that they were Russian-backed and in a lot of cases, Russian led. When Russia intervened militarily then, Ukraine's military was after the reign of Viktorianakovich, the military was just completely in tatters. It was disorganized. it wasn't well trained, it was corrupt. Essentially, it was not in a position to fight a war

with anybody, let alone Russia. So into that vacuum, the country's official armed forces, not being up to snuff right away, a lot of volunteer and volunteer battalion stepped into the fray, people who were just, were not part of the armed forces, but were willing to organize themselves and under state sanction take up arms to fight against Russian-led forces. Now, these volunteers came, there were volunteers from across the political spectrum, or at least, you know, not, certainly these volunteer units were not at all exclusively from the far right. But one of these volunteer units was a band of far right figures,

mostly from a sort of football hooligan, soccer hooligan, subculture, but also from a neo-Nazi subculture from a far-right group that had come out of the city of Harkiv. And long story short, they took up arms with the approval, with a sanction of the country's interior ministry under the authority of the interior minister at the time, someone called Arsene Vacch. So with that sanction, they became a battalion in June 2014. they first earned their reputation by helping defend the city of Mariupo against a band of Russian-led forces, Russian-Dak forces. And from then on, this battalion, again, which was not exclusively made up of people from the far right, but was certainly led by and for coming from a core of far-right members. It grew in size. It became

officially a regiment as part of the National Guard under the Interior Ministry. Then that regiment, over time, over the years of the colder, but still occasionally hot phases of the war, the regiment kept its existence, it kept training. But from 2014-15, the regiment became more than just the regiment. It expanded out into a far-right, far-right social movement that comprises a number of things, a political party, the National Corps, sort of other clubs, quasi-paramilitary forces, like Centuria, which used to be called the National Militia. That's probably a unit that an English language coverage of Azul from a few years ago, people might be familiar with.

And even though the movement certainly had its ups and downs, especially in 2019 and 2020, it eventually became what I would describe right before the war as Ukraine's primary far-right presence, far-right movement, that may be commanded, at best about 10,000 members, but with more people who might have taken part in events or initiatives at certain times to make it a bit hard to gauge membership. So when people talk about Azov, are they talking about the military unit, the regiment that, and now the sort of other affiliated forces with Azov that are fighting right now in the war, or are they talking about the broader social movement around the regiment, or are they talking about both? So I think a lot

Sometimes people aren't necessarily clear about what they're talking about or what they're seeing because they don't know. Why do you think they've become, of my far left friends that reach out to me concerned about what's going on in Ukraine, it's like the number one thing they want to talk about is, and usually they're sending me pictures of the military units. They get somebody with a patch or a symbol they don't like and they're frightened and they say, what about this? my response is especially right now with the invasion is what about it? Yes, I write about the movement because I'm critical of the far. And I think far right forces in general, far right movements in general, a threat to our democracies, even if they're not dropping bombs on us and sending soldiers into our city as Vladimir Putin's Russia is right now. I still think the far right is a threat to our democratic societies. But I don't understand, especially over the last few weeks,

since the invasion started. I don't understand why people think that there are some on the left, unfortunately, who think that because Azov exists and because Azov has been able to do some of the things that they've done, whether they're reading articles like mine or my colleagues have written that discuss some of these things in detail, or whether they're reading more sort of propagandist sources and sharing all these pictures of these guys with these symbols, Hitler salutes and things like that. Yes, all these, those things aren't good. But right now, if one wants to talk about it this way, they're the far right in Ukraine right now is so

much the lesser of two evils. If one thinks that just because there's a far right issue in Ukraine, that it means they shouldn't support Ukraine as a whole in in repelling the Russian invasion and bringing peace to the country, well, I just don't get where they're coming from with that. Lanmer Putin's Russia is not, is not some sort of benevolent, left-wing force meant to bring good to the world. Anybody who takes that Putin's quote-unquote denazification rhetoric seriously about Ukraine is, well, just wrong. I had a question about how the Azopraged is becoming so popular.

I'm just wondering if it isn't the success of the Russian propaganda. machine. Isn't that the narrative they want to push? To some extent it is, but in my view, what Kremlin propaganda wants Azov to be, or what they would like a far right movement in Ukraine to be for their propaganda purposes, it's not something that Azov necessarily gives them. If you look at a lot of the propaganda, even leading up to the invasion, one comment I was making to people at the time, even though there's all this propaganda coming out of, you know, Kremlin's sources and, you know, state media saying all these kind of ridiculous things about Ukraine in the West, the far right in Ukraine wasn't actually being mentioned all that much. And then

all of a sudden, it magically becomes an issue talking about denotification. But the Kremlin has this kind of stereotyped idea of what they want the Ukrainian far right to be like for their own purposes. It's they want a far right in Ukraine that somehow would commit genocide or persecute anybody who speaks Russian or anybody who's quote unquote ethnic Russian. They want a far right in Ukraine that somehow is essentially anti-Russian to the core. And that is not what Azov is. That's not what it gives them. I think it probably surprises a lot of people when they learn that a lot of the foreign presence in Azov from the earliest days, the plurality, the plurality, of it is are made up of Russians, far right Russians who left Russia because they were, you know,

being squeezed up by Vladimir Putin and they went to the Ukrainian side. There's no, Azov is not some force that is going to go around. Like the Kremlin wants to see, wants images like people with Azav logos going around and beating up people who speak Russian or hurting people who, people from a Russian speaking village into some bus or something and driving them off over the horizon. That's not what Azov is going to give them because they'd have to be doing that to a lot of their own members and their own leaders. There's no shortage of figures within Azov, of course, even figures from Ukraine whose primary language of communication, even now is Russian. One can be a Ukrainian nationalist on the Ukrainian fire and still mostly

use Russian as a day-to-day language. There's no contradiction in contemporary Ukraine about that. And the Kremlin, I don't think, understands that. This is why I wanted to talk to you, I think all this stuff is so complicated in that part of the world. And let's talk a little bit more about the far right movements in Russia itself. You just wrote about male states. What exactly is this? I would describe male states as a, it's a loose network of far right men. It's men, as the name probably makes clear.

And what male state is, or it was a, it started up as a group on the Russian social networking site to VK in 2016. And it basically became a place where angry, nationalistic, leaning men, maybe not necessarily men who would be part of, you know, organized far right movements. it became a place where they could basically docks women who pissed them off somehow and encouraged harassment of women. And then from there, it moved to taking on this, how they ended up describing their ideology, describing it as national patriarchy is what they ended up calling it. So it just became this cocktail of hardcore misogyny, really homophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, combined with this sort of old-school Russian imperial ethno-nationalism that sees Russia and Russians as this almost amazing superior force. Look how awesome we are. So, MailState, that VK group

on the Russian social network was shut down in 2020 for hate speech. And from there, they moved, like a lot of people on the global far right, do they moved to Telegram. And over, they built up kind of a loose network of channels there, led by the founder of mail state itself, somebody by the name of. And so over 2021, they actually really started to get a lot more headlines, not just in Russia, but they started getting Western English language headlines as well because of some of the ridiculous things they started doing in Russia. They, like, just stuff that is just so offensive and ridiculous. They, for example, they would encourage harassment of retailers or outlets who used black models

in their ads to the point of, you know, to the point where some retailers had to remove those ads or they bowed to that pressure. There's instances that they really amped up that pressure over the summer last year in 2021 to the point where I believe that there's so many, unfortunately, so many examples of this. But one example, a few examples where, I think it was a sushi restaurant chain in Moscow that has a lot of locations across Moscow because obviously it's a pretty damn big city. And this sushi chain had apparently said something positive about LGBT plus people. It somehow had done something that upset these hardcore homophobes and racists from male state.

So they basically, they organized like ordering fake orders and canceling them just to totally try to throw off their business for their day or two. But then they were also calling in fake bomb threats, just this campaign. of harassment, and even in some cases over the years, this has crossed over into offline harassment with assaults and confrontations in public, that sort of thing. But long story short, they soon became too much even for some Russian authorities. And in October 2021, they were ruled as officially extremist by a Russian court. And so that effectively banned their activities in Russia. They said they're trying, they would appeal. That appeal, obviously, whether they've even done it or not has not happened yet.

So technically, this network of people is banned in Russia, but literally, I was at my computer at the time watching it because I knew this ruling would come down and I was writing about them at the time. The main male state channel, literally minutes after the court ruling was made public, they had their name change to male legion, I think, is what they ended up, the name that they ended up choosing. And, you know, fast forward a few months to Putin's invasion of Ukraine, these network of male state or male legion channels, I still refer to them as male state because it's the same group. It's the same message. It's the same de facto leader. That's who they are. Still keep using that term male state. They turn their energies to being just the hardest core boosters and supporters of Putin's intervention in Ukraine. And for anybody who knows Russian, whether native or non-native, scrolling through some of what male state says about Ukrainians, using, frankly, like, almost genocidal language to talk about Ukrainians, talking about, ironically talking about, oh, these bad Ukrainian Nazis, Ukronos is the term they would use, but at the same time being hardcore anti-Semites themselves, like phrases and turns of phrase that I'm not going to translate into English.

in this because you can probably imagine what some of the, what some of the anti-Semitic slurs are. And they, on these channels, they've basically supported or cheered attacks on civilians, all the while claiming that there's no attacks on civilians, spreading disinformation, like spreading rumors that Zelensky had fled Ukraine, which I think anybody who watches TV anywhere following this war knows that he hasn't. And just really, even though it's, it's banned in Russia becoming this hardcore online chauvinistic force to back up Putin's war.

And just a final point to stress about them is that their followings on these telegram channels have all increased from the time they were banned. It's not like they were banned and their following went down. They've all gone up. So even if it's a minority compared to other mainstream telegram channels or informal groups of activists or whatever. A male state is not like in the millions or anything like that, but still hundreds of thousands of young men who take in these hardcore, misogynist, hyper-masculine messages wrapped up in this jingoistic nationalism that doesn't see Ukraine as a

real country and doesn't see Ukrainians as like a real people, a real identity. Your story mentions the one about male state or male legion, as it calls itself now. mentions that Russia has its own Nazi regiments. Can you explain that? Yeah, I think for, again, for anybody, no matter what they're, no matter where they are in the political spectrum, don't take Putin's denotification rhetoric seriously when we know, we all know because that's information is public, that there are fighters from the Wagner group that are in Ukraine, a military unit founded by somebody with SS tattoos.

Related to that, one of the forces that fought on the Russian side in 2014-15 was this military unit called Task Force Rus. That unit is affiliated with Wagner as well. But they are an explicitly far-rights, arguably neo-Nazi military unit using the symbols that are just unambiguously neo-Nazi posting videos in the past of their members making Hitler salute. So basically being, be Nazis. I have a question about that, though. Just simply so much of the Russian identity in like Putin's like whole philosophy is around, where are the people who beat the Nazis? Yes.

And that's what we do. We beat Nazis. I just wonder how like they fit in and why Putin doesn't beat them up. That's, uh, the way that I would describe it is that when, Putin talks about Nazis when he uses that word Nazi or Nazism or any derivation of the word because it's essentially the same word in Russian as it is in English. He's not talking about the same thing that we are. I think in his mindset in the sort of Russian nationalist, particularly this old school Russian imperialist

nationalist mindset that harkens back to World War II, like you said, but also harkens back to the pre-revolutionary Russian Empire, but then ironically, takes some inspiration from the Soviet Union in terms of imperialism. When Putin talks about Nazis, when these kinds of people talk about Nazis, they most, now it's become a term in that kind of Russian imperialist imagination. A Nazi is simply somebody who has, in their view, opposes Russia or somehow opposes Russia's role in the world. And so therefore, in the Ukraine context,

when Putin talks about these Nazis in Ukraine, he's not just, even though their propaganda likes to throw Azov out there, they're not just talking about Azov or they're not just talking about other far-right groups or individuals that have been brought up in propaganda over the years. In Putin's mind, anybody who asserts a Ukrainian identity, you know, see anybody who thinks that Ukraine is and should be an independent country that doesn't necessarily have to have some sort of, quote, unquote, brotherly relationship with Russia. Anybody in Ukraine who, you know, no matter what, whether they're nationalist or not,

prioritizes using Ukrainian and daily life over Russian, in Putin's imagination, all these people are Nazis because somehow they're opposed to Russia's. somehow they're an obstacle or opposed to what Putin feels is Russia's rightful role in the world, which is that these territories, to him, their territories of like Belarus and Ukraine, he sees them, he doesn't see them as brotherly people. He sees them as part of the same people of Russians, which they are not. And thus, anybody who opposes that is compared to the literal Nazis from World War II and talked about in terms of, oh, these nationalistic chauvinists who didn't want to dare speak Ukrainian or actually have TV in Ukrainian.

Like those people are Nazis. People who I know who are on the left, but speak Ukrainian are Nazis. It would be Nazis according to him because they believe in an independent Ukraine. No matter that they are actually properly, they are opposed to the far right in Ukraine or opposed to actual Nazis in Ukraine. So what? And Putin's imagination, none of that matter. So that all white stresses that when Putin talks about Nazis and mentions that word, it's not this, it doesn't mean the same thing for him as it does for us. I want to go and talk about some of these other countries that you cover.

But before we do that, can you, we've touched on it a little bit, but I was wondering if you can get a little bit more in depth in this idea of the Russian imperial conception of the people of Ukraine. I think that's very important. I think the history here is very important, like what happened to Ukraine and Poland. Basically, these countries stuck between Germany and Russia and World War II and how historically they were viewed as people or not as people at all. Can you talk about that? Yeah, for most of in the Russian imperial imagination said, Ukrainians are treated as the translation of the word that used to be used. in Russian as little Russians, Ukraine being referred to as Maladossia.

And that's obviously calling a Ukrainian a little Russian or referring to Ukraine as little Russian now is even before the invasion, considered offensive and rightfully. But the issue in Putin's mind, the issue in the Russian imperial imagination is they don't see, because Ukraine, because Ukrainians, people who ended up, you know,

speaking over the centuries, speaking Ukrainian, speaking in East Ukrainian as an East Slavic language that certainly is related to Belarusan and Russian and related to Polish as well. Russian imperial imagination does not see, because Ukrainians didn't really ever form their own nation state until, with only a few exceptions, the first proper Ukrainian nation state was 1991, was after the fall of communism.

So Ukrainians for Russia have always been these not just a separate people that are a bit close to us, say Czechs and Slovaks, for example, but seeing Ukrainians as like Russians who have almost lost their way that have been taken in by these nationalist ideologies and wanting their own country. They have been taken in by this, what they think is like a fake Ukrainian language, something that's devolved from Russian over the past hundred years. And Ukrainian is certainly not a devolved form of Russian. It's a related Slavic language, but it's like Spanish and Portuguese, maybe even further. So in the fact that Ukrainians, whatever, their political stripe right now,

want more than ever to be independent, to be their own country now, to be just simply Ukrainians. Putin and people like that just cannot accept that these people are not Russian. All right. Let's put all this in the broader context of what's going on in central eastern Europe. So you mentioned offline when we were talking that the scene in Serbia is pretty similar. In some ways, it's not that the scenes are similar because, Serbia, I think when people think of Serbia and far those two phrases together, they immediately think of pro-Russian and they're usually not wrong. On the one hand, Serbian far-right figures and Ukrainian far-right figures are, in some ways, they're pretty different in terms of who,

you know, who they might support. But one thing that I really dawned on me spending more time in Serbia particularly, after having done a lot of research on the Azov movement in Ukraine, Just to go back to Ukraine for a second, I mentioned it earlier, that as of O's its rise to its relationships with the interior minister at the time and becoming essentially integrated into the interior ministry, which in a country like Ukraine, in countries in the, well, in central and Eastern Europe, an interior ministry is usually one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful ministries, even if in countries like Canada, my own country, the U.S. anywhere else, we don't. use the terms of interior ministry in the same way. So the fact that as of long had, that it owes its success to having built relationships with mainstream state actors, that's also what's happened in Serbia, maybe not on the same scale and from a different context, but it has happened. There are fire right groups in Serbia, one of them that I wrote about for Bellingat in 2020, was that long to go now about this far right animal rights group Leviathan is the name in English.

And I would really recommend people. I'm going to plug my own article from two years ago, but I think people would honestly be fascinated to read about this weird gang of far right or in some cases neo-Nazi dudes who cloak their anti-Roma and anti-everything rhetoric in animal rights work. But this Leviathan... Hitler was a vegetarian. Forget that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And he liked dogs, so everything's...

Exactly. Why I mentioned this here particularly is because I, when I wrote about them at the time, and I still believe this now, that this interplay between the far right and animal rights animal protection is one... I'm surprised we haven't seen more of yet, but I think, unfortunately, in all of our countries, we're going to see some more of that. But anyways, it's Leviathan group, and it's leader, somebody by the name of Pavli Bihili, And he's somebody who's had a long history on Ukraine's far right, on Serbia's far. My country's mixed up here.

And somebody who's allegedly been involved in criminal activities over the years, again, even though I didn't mention it earlier, that something similar with Ukraine is a lot of far right figures have, bracketing this very carefully, allegedly, you know, an involvement, alleged involvement in criminal activities and schemes. There's public news stories about arrests and allegations of being part of this and that. And in Serbia, this Beihili character was allegedly involved in that sort of thing. But he also, according to people who used to be part of his organization and just other journalists and researchers in the country, he has a very strong relationship with the country's interior ministry with police. So it's certainly not just this group. But I think it's something in some ways it could be compared to in some ways.

compared to what you see there in the U.S. with sort of far-right infiltration or cooperating or just working with relatively sympathetic police officers in a city or town. But in the context of Central and Eastern Europe, I think it's much more institutional because of the way that these interior ministries are structured, the way that they encompass so many different facets of society from police forces to gender armory like the National Guard in Ukraine. I don't know what an American equivalent for that would be, but it would be like the RCMP in Canada, police collaboration or working with elements of police, also with elements of state security as well. Usually that's a different

ministry, but also that's another ministry that comes up in the, or not ministry, but the Department of the Interior Ministry that comes up in allegations related to Serbia's far right or some of these specific actors that they get de facto protection from authorities because they have these relationships with the Interior Ministry, and they are useful for the powers that be for somebody like Serbian President Alexander Vujic, who should be stressed, actually also comes from Serbia's far right, even though his fashion himself is a sort of right-wing populist leader now.

But what's allowed the far right to have its presence in a place, like Serbia, where it can act with some degree of openness in a place like Ukraine where before the war, and especially during the times when I was covering it in detail, able to operate with a degree of impunity. These things just don't magically happen. And I just mentioned these two examples, but of course there are plenty of other examples, maybe some smaller scale examples. But this is how the far right gets ahead everywhere, is by working with state actors, getting some

level of acquiescence from state actors, infiltrating them in some way, just building relationships with them and convincing them that they're not a threat. So I think that when I mentioned Serbia and Ukraine, again, like I said a few minutes ago, the Serbian Ukraine don't seem like similar countries in terms of the far-right scenes, but the amount of time that I've now spent in both those countries specifically, some of the institutional factors that allow the far-rights act are similar in both of those examples. Do you find that repeated all over Central and Eastern Europe right now? Like, I know you've also written about Poland and Slovakia.

Is it similar? To some extent, yes. I think that if there is, it's hard to, even though I focus on countries in Central and Eastern Europe. And for my work with Belinket right now, I actually lead our far right monitoring and research project, which focuses on 20 plus countries across Central and Eastern Europe, essentially post-communist slash post-socialist Europe is the best way to put across most of those countries. It's hard to say that there's or to, you know, say that there's common themes between all of these countries universally because all of these countries have some similarities,

but they're all obviously quite different. But one overarching theme that I've seen in all of these countries that I've covered is that those groups that are groups or movements or tend to. that are, I guess, successful, that are allowed to expand, that are given a degree of impunity for their activities so that they can do some things, not all things, but some things without fear of punishment, their rallies are permitted to go on. Their members seem to avoid getting arrested for certain types of things, or they get in fights or they confront protesters at an opposition rally or event. In all of these countries,

there's always a risk of the state using, exploiting the far right for its own purposes. Now, like in the Hungarian example, Victor Orban, of course, is somebody who occupies enough of the Hungarian far right spectrum on his own. But somebody like him who's crafty can use the far rights, use parties further right than him, make his own ideas seem less extreme. And going back to Serbia, and I mentioned Serbia again as an example, just because this is a context I'm more familiar with, where far-right groups or individuals are basically used as paid ducks. You saw this in Serbia a few months ago with there were protests about murals of war criminals, the Rakhumladic, one in central Belgrade. And the fact that they're both known far-right figures and state police forces guarding this thing and talking to each. other. And the use of these far-right forces to essentially intimidate, like, protesters who want to get rid of these, these murals, the state can use these sorts of far-right groups to

help expand or put it into place its own agenda. Like, Orban in Hungary can't send some of his party members to go vandalize an LGBT-plus center or go protest some book that they think is gay propaganda, very much an inverted commas there. But he could, in theory, just nudge somebody on the far right, nudge somebody who nudges somebody who nudges somebody to be like, hey, you know what your little neo-Nazi, Legia, Hungarian group should go do? You guys should. This is hypothetical. I don't think, I don't have, this is not a specific example, but just a hypothetical. You're like, you guys should. And you guys go protest outside Aurora and cause a lot of trouble or rip down and burn their LGGD flag, intimidate the shit out of them. And so they can

use these far right forces. Putin did that in Russia, to be clear. I feel like I've heard this story before. Yeah. There's a reason you've heard it before. The government kind of coesies up to institutional figures cozy up to far right figures, attempt to use them as cudgels for various things. And then how does this usually end?

It never goes well. Yeah, that's generally why I think it's a bad idea in any context. But to go back to Russia, again, despite Putin's nonsense denatification rhetoric in the early 2010s, even actually going back to the late 2000s, Putin was more than happy to exploit or use the Russian far right for his own purposes. There were Russian neo-Nazis who this group called Born is the acronym in Russian, a neo-Nazi group who committed murders. And they've long been very strongly alleged to have links to Kremlin figures. And they were allowed to do their thing and be used as intimidation of certain types of opposition figures for a while. There have been, again, before Maidan and in Ukraine in 2013, 14, in the early 2010s, you'd see these Russian far right figures, like one figure who used to run this movement called Occupy Petit.

Phelia, which despite the name was maybe you've heard of it or listeners might be familiar with it, if they remember some of the media coverage at the time. But these were guys who would set up dates with men setting up dates without clandestinely with other men because Russia unfortunately is still a very deeply homophobic society. So pretending to be a man organizing a date with another man, then go and like film and intimidate that man or extort film themselves extorting money from them. using them and being a pedophile. It was basically just a, not explicitly state-backed anti-LGBT violence campaign,

but the fact that the leader of this Occupy Pedophilia would be brought on to Procrammeling TV networks to talk about his activities. Putin was more than happy to allow some of these forces to do their thing if it advanced his hardcore anti-LGB agenda, which was the case, particularly in the early 2000s, with the quote-unquote anti, the quote-unquote gay propaganda law, which basically equates homosexuality and LGBT plus lifestyles with pedophilia, that sort of thing. But once these forces, I think, became less useful to Putin,

but also as these forces expanded and became strong, I think Putin, he saw them both as less useful, but also as a threat. So he started prosecuting some of them, some of these same figures who'd been on Kremlin TV or, were able to do their thing for so many years or at least a few years, all of a sudden they were getting prison sentences and thrown in jail. And even those who may not have been explicitly, explicitly some of these actors exploited by the Kremlin, a lot of these figures in those kinds of networks, especially when Maidan happened in late 2013, early 2014, they became essentially anti-Pooten far-rayed Russians

and they went to Ukraine. So that's why even now, there are some fairly prominent, Russian far-right figures who have been in Ukraine since 2014-15. And if you look them up, they have their long histories on the Russian fire. They were getting prosecuted. They, of course, always claim it's illegitimate. And maybe there's a grain or several grains of truth to that because even to actually give some benefit of the doubt here, it's not like Putin's regime has ever been fair in the way that it prosecutes people.

But, so that's an example of Putin is the best example of somebody exploiting the far right, exploiting neo-Nazis, and then just discarding them when they became too worrisome. It really is wild how complicated all of this is. It really, like, we have these kind of narratives in the press, I think, and online especially, where you say one side is fascist. the other side is fascist, but it's really way more complicated than that. Oh, it is.

It's, if anybody wants to put a conflict in Central and Eastern Europe, any conflict, I am using conflict in a very loose sense of the terms, whether the all-out, bloody invasion that we're seeing now or anything else. Just to say something like the tanky world on Twitter likes to basically say, oh, Ukraine is fascist.

because there is a far-right movement and, you know, tendencies within, that as of another, you know, movements exist. Somehow it invariably makes an entire country of 40, 45 million people, a quote-unquote Nazi country. And I think a good example, good but bad example, given the context, is in the wake of the invasion about three weeks ago, what I saw in the immediate, aftermath of that once it really became clear how severe the invasion was going to be in that it was going to be like a literal cult arms whatever cliches we can use a literal call to arms where there were people lining up in Kiev they were handing out literally thousands of rifles to maybe almost anybody with a ukraine and ib or passport who wanted one and one

one thing that you saw in the it was even in just the first few days after the invasion started these volunteer units that would form are people who were talking about, were taking up arms to resist the invasion. It sure as hell wasn't just the far right who was doing it. There were instances of multiple far left. Ukraine does not exactly have the most robust left wing seen in the world, but so many people from little subgroups, I think like the only anti-fascist football hoologun firm took up arms,

So there's multiple far left figures. There's people I personally know who are very far from the far right, shall we say, who posted about and talked about trying to join their territorial defense battalion and take up arms. And these are not Nazis or fascists doing this. Yeah, I just was wondering if we put the Nazis and the tankies in the same room, would they kill each other? And would that be a problem? I don't think they'd kill each other.

They agree on far as many things. Yeah, they don't agree with that sense. That's what's so funny about it is they really are the same people. They fed this fetishizing of authority. Yeah. And the ability to see the world in completely black and late terms. Oh, there are this, these Azov guys exist in Ukraine. They're bad.

Therefore, we should not support UK. Russia's doing this good. That kind of idiot logic that it's something that unites tankies and the far right world that I cover, which is full of enough nonsensical, conspiracy theories and interpretations of the world to, yeah, I don't know. I don't want to imagine them all in the same room

because I think that would just be, oh, so painful. Physically and emotionally and mentally. Yeah, I'd be getting the hell out of that, really, I could tell you that. Yeah. I do want to, this has been on my mind, you know, we talked to, we did a pretty in-depth history of the Jews in Ukraine last episode. And I've just been wondering,

We haven't even really talked about anti-Semitism on this particular episode that much. Is Azov anti-Semitic? And what do they think of the president of Ukraine? In terms of Azov and anti-Semitism, like every answer that I could be given about Azov, it's complicated. I think it's very clear that the Azov movement, its leaders, senior people who come from its predecessor group that was called Patriot of Ukraine, They undoubtedly have held anti-Semitic views and made some pretty crass anti-Semitic statements in the past. Worked for anti-Semitic institutions.

I forget the acronym off the top of my head, but the same place that David Duke got a quote-unquote PhD from places like that. But what really happened after 2014 is that because a lot of these accusations of anti-Semitism became so prominent. from Kremlin propaganda, there really has been, not just in the far right, but across Ukrainian society of really, one, pushing the argument that there's not as much anti-Semitism in Ukraine as people think, which I think is actually true. But what you saw from the far was this take, you know, whereas other groups on the international and American far right, some will be coded but obvious in their anti-Semitism. Some will be very crass in it. But it's usually it's not, like, it's not hard to find the little code words or even, like, we'll look across the border at male state.

Their anti-Semitic rhetoric was unsubt, using the most common slur for a Jew in Russian, using the triple parentheses, talking about shekels, everything. But with Ukraine's far right, at least with a lot of the more senior leaders or the more public faces of the Azov movement and even other far right movements in Ukraine, you don't see that kind of overt anti-Semitism. I don't think that means it's necessarily that anti-Semitism has vanished among the far right. I think that it's one, a conscious strategy to downplay it because everybody wants to downplay anything related to anti-Semitism in Ukraine. But it also comes from the fact I think that for a lot of these figures on the far, I think they still hold on to anti-Semitic views, but it has become maybe less central to their day-to-day ideology, as it were. It's almost like where anti-Semitism before 2013 was higher up on their list of priorities, whereas once everything changed in 2014, when there was a war to be fought, and also there was a bit of some PR exercises to do to get rid of this nasty or past of anti-Semitic statements,

it went lower down the ladder to the point where, again, I don't see as much overt anti-Semitism from Ukraine's far right that I do from the far right, say next door in Slovakia, in Hungary, and of course, in Russia. Michael Colburn, thank you so much for coming on Angry Planet and walking us through this. Where can people find your work? We can find my work now at bellincat.com. I'm on staff there, and what I do is I lead our far-right research and monitoring project in Central and Eastern Europe, but also help out with a lot of the other work that we're doing right now,

and I can assure you we're pretty busy these days. Yeah, I've seen what's coming out of there, and it's some pretty incredible stuff. Hello, with their Angry Planet listeners. Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. It's created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, AngryPlanet.substack.com or Angry Planetodd.com. Kick us $9 a month. You get commercial-free versions of the mainline episodes and two bonus episodes a month.

Those are going to be unlocked this month, given the war in Ukraine, and how many people have been reaching out to us to ask questions. We've already released once about nuclear anxiety. The next is going to be about tanks. Do they still matter? We've got another one already in the tank that will be coming out next week. It's a mainline episode about the history of Russia's view of the West. And we will be back next week.

Another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then.