ExtremismRebuttal: Ukraine Is Emerging as Critical Node for White-Supremacy Extremists

By Mollie Saltskog and Colin P. Clarke

Published 1 October 2020

Foreigners are still networking, training and fighting on both sides of the conflict in eastern Ukraine, cultivating skills and connections that strengthen the transnational white-supremacy extremist networks of today—which, though far from monolithic, are more violent, more organized and more capable than even five years ago.

In his recent article “Is Ukraine a Hub for International White Supremacist Fighters?” Huseyn Aliyev argues that the phenomenon of foreigners traveling to join the conflict in eastern Ukraine has died down since late 2014, largely due to Ukraine’s process of disbanding paramilitary groups and integrating them into the country’s official security forces. He strongly suggests that the threat posed by neo-Nazis and others with far-right views who have connections to Ukraine is overblown. The Soufan Center’s research, to which both authors of this rebuttal have contributed, suggests the opposite. We find that foreigners are still networking, training and fighting on both sides of the conflict in eastern Ukraine, cultivating skills and connections that strengthen the transnational white-supremacy extremist networks of today—which, though far from monolithic, are more violent, more organized and more capable than even five years ago. By focusing on the waning number of foreign ultranationalist fighters present in Ukraine, Aliyev downplays both the immediate dangers posed by radicals with battlefield experience and the threat that comes from Ukraine’s new significance as what we believe to be a hub for far-right groups to network and exchange expertise. Just as Salafi-jihadists have used conflicts in Afghanistan, the Balkans, Chechnya, Iraq and Syria to gain combat experience, so too do white supremacists use Ukraine as a battlefield laboratory in the present day. And as the conflict in Afghanistan gave birth to a transnational Salafi-jihadist organization, al-Qaeda, with members of different nationalities, so too could the dynamics of the Ukraine conflict enable a right-wing equivalent, in our view.

Extremist Elements in Volunteer Battalions
Volunteer battalions have served an important purpose in the Ukrainian conflict and, as Aliyev notes, many of these battalions included a diverse cadre of fighters, including Muslims and ethnic Tartars and Chechens, as well as European, American and Georgian nationals. However, Aliyev’s argument that the battalions are not monolithic and thus cannot be labeled as traditional white supremacist organizations does not negate the formidable presence of extremist ultranationalist elements within some of the battalions’ ranks.