Europe’s Neo-Nazis Support Putin’s War in Ukraine, Vishnevsky Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 27 – Vladimir Putin and his propagandists repeatedly insist that Russia is fighting neo-Nazis in Ukraine, but the real neo-Nazis in Europe, people and groups with whom the Kremlin has maintained good relations for some time, are backing Russia not Ukraine in Putin’s war, according to Boris Vishnevsky.

            The opposition deputy in St. Petersburg’s legislative assembly points out that “over the last eight years and especially since the start of ‘the special operation’ in Ukraine, Kremlin propagandists, politicians, diplomats and officials have not stopped calling  for an uncompromising struggle with neo-Nazism” (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2022/03/27/gde-iskat-neonatsista).

            “There is no disputing the fact that neo-Nazism is evil, that neo-Nazis exist including by the way in Russia and that the struggle with them is an important task,” Vishnevsky says. But Moscow has a problem in making this appeal with respect to Putin’s war in Ukraine: these groups are backing the Kremlin not Kyiv in this fight.

            Still worse from Moscow’s perspective, many of these radical right individuals and groups now supporting Putin have been identified not only by independent experts but by the Russian foreign ministry as extremist even though they are “not opponents of the Russian powers that be and their policies but their supporters and allies.”

            The extreme right parties now supporting Putin in his war in Ukraine also are against the expansion of NATO, routinely label the US “a world evil,” support the Anschluss of Ukraine’s Crimea, and have sent their representatives as election observers to voting Moscow backs but no one else does, Vishnevsky continues.

            And many of them assembled at Moscow’s call in St. Petersburg in 2015 at an International Russian Conservative Forum where they worked out an even broader common agenda “with Russian nationalists, imperialists and neo-Nazis,” the opposition deputy and commentator notes.

            “Of course,” Vishnevsk says, “among the European allies of the Russian powers are more respectable but also nationalistic, xenophobic and anti-immigrant parties, such as the French National Front of Marine LePen or Germany’s Alternative for Germany,” some of which have also close ties and have enjoyed funding from Moscow.

            But “it turns out that the main if not the only ‘European allies’ [of the Kremlin on Putin’s war in Ukraine] have turned out to be neo-Nazis, nationalists, ultra-rightwing extremism, racists and anti-Semites.” That must be remembered every time Moscow asserts that it is fighting Nazism.

            “Obviously,” Vishnevsky concludes, “something has to change in Russian politics to mean that its declared battle with neo-Nazism will involve something real.”