After the invasion of Ukraine in 2014, a group of pro-Russian French volunteers was formed under the name Continental Unity. The group has managed to have a relative media presence, with the arrest of some of its members even allowing the Russian news agency Sputnik to portray Ukrainian detention centers as Nazi concentration camps. This contribution from French nationalists relates more to psychological warfare and work towards opinions than to military operations strictly speaking.
The quality of Russian propaganda is that it knows how to play on a plurality of ideological resonances. The heart of the Americanophobic, illiberal and authoritarian message accommodates a plurality of ideological options, from the extreme left to the extreme right, even if human networks are largely structured around the right-handed side of the spectrum.
Indeed, an address to white nationalists, from France and elsewhere, was also deployed. This time it was a question of using the Imperial Russian Movement, founded in 2002 in the continuity of the hard line of the White Russians (the exiles after the revolution of 1917), by adding racist and Islamophobic dimensions, but by having links with the Russian Ministry of Defense, and its paramilitary appendage, the Imperial Legion, founded in 2008.
Partisans of Great Russian and Orthodox nationalism, the legionnaires engaged in the fighting in the Donbass region, where several died in 2014 and 2015. In January 2016, the Legion announced that it was renouncing armed combat in Ukraine but maintain its objective of “release” kyiv to give birth to the “New Russia”.
This term of “New Russia” is used to describe a border of more western Russia; it dates from the 18th centurye century, had been brought back into fashion by the separatists of Transnistria in the 2000s, and is taken up by the Ukrainian separatists and the Russian neo-Eurasianist theorist Alexandre Douguine in 2014 (which theorizes an authoritarian regime covering Eurasia and its multiple peoples and cults). By playing on tsarist nostalgia, the aim is to affirm the historical artificiality of the Ukrainian state.
In truth, the Legion is redeployed in Syria and Libya, in parallel with the Wagner groupand she returns to Ukraine to participate in the 2022 assault. Nationalist and religious messianism go hand in hand here: she presents a millenarian and eschatological conception of politics. According to her, we would be in the last days, globalism would be the work of the Antichrist, Islamism would be demonic, while the Covid-19 pandemic would be the work of globalists in order to strengthen the kingdom of the Antichrist .
This conception of the world and of time implies that nationalists cannot remain confined behind their borders: the Legion affirms that it does not want to create cells only in Russia, but everywhere in the Russian diaspora, according to a formula which brings it closer to the subversive structures of the interwar period such as the Brotherhood of Russian Truth or the All-Russian Fascist Organization.
At the same time, from 2015, the Russian Imperial Movement has been working on its international networks by founding a national-conservative World Movement with the Russian far-right party Rodina (“Fatherland”), support of Vladimir Putin and from which his vice-premier comes. Minister Dmitry Rogozin.
The “national-conservative” manifesto asserts that there is a global Jewish plot to destroy traditional nations and values, and its leader takes responsibility for the fight against “the Jewish oligarchs” de Kiev.
The organization does not want to limit itself to the defense of the white race or Christians, and invitations to participate in the movement are extended to fifty-eight groups around the world, including from Thailand, Japan, Syria and Mongolia – for the United States the relationship is established with the white supremacist Jared Taylorclose to the French theorist Guillaume Faye.
For France, she had launched invitations to Action Française, to French Renewal (a small neo-fascist group that has since disappeared, from which came a young Frenchman condemned by Ukraine in 2018 for his trafficking in arms and explosives, two others French radicals having been sentenced in 2023 for similar trafficking), Continental Unity and the Nationalists of Yvan Benedetti (which followed the dissolution of the Œuvre française in 2013) – only the latter have chosen to maintain a relationship with the movement.
The “national-conservative” manifesto asserts that there is a global Jewish plot to destroy traditional nations and values, and its leader takes responsibility for the fight against “the Jewish oligarchs” from kyiv. However, it is still a stopgap: this radical movement was set up at the end of 2015, while at the beginning of the year Rodina had tried to bring together populist parties such as the Front national for France – cautiously, the FN had declined…
The grip is not likely to loosen: spring 2020 saw the United States classify the Russian Imperial Movement and the Imperial Legion in its list of “international terrorism”, accusing them, among other things, of having trained neo-Nazi terrorists Swedish.
The fact remains that the Azov regiment had a magnetic effect on the radicals, especially since in 2015 a new current appeared, accelerationism, which can be defined as a totalitarian subculture of a sectarian nebula neo-Nazi to millenarian terrorism (we owe him numerous attacks including those in Christchurch, El Paso, Buffalo, etc.).
The trend emerged thanks to a transnational English-speaking forum, founded by a Russian aficionado of Italian theorist Julius Evola and Guillaume Faye, whose American neo-Nazi members created the organization AtomWaffen Division. The latter popularized a fascination with Azov, and several of its members were still expelled by Ukraine in 2020.
If between 2014 and 2019, right-wing extremists of fifty-five nationalities volunteered in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, their side has radically evolved.
We still find her among the accelerationists of the French group WaffenKraft, two members of which dreamed of joining Azov while others wanted to go there to meet the militiamen as part of a neo-Nazi music festival and buy weapons from them. According to them, Ukraine is a place of fighting “defensive” but also and above all a “land of origin” in which it would be possible to live independently during the collapse caused by the imminent general outbreak of racial war – they were arrested before their terrorist act; this case is the first ultra-right case tried at the assizes, with convictions ranging from one to eighteen years of imprisonment at first instance; The appeal trial opened on September 16.
The most extremist tendency of white nationalism thus ended up turning the arguments of neo-Eurasianism against Russia: if the latter represents the meeting of diverse traditions and ethnic groups, then the white cause is Ukrainian.
Thus, if between 2014 and 2019, right-wing extremists of fifty-five nationalities volunteered in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, their side has radically evolved. According to French intelligence, in 2022, the fifty or so French radicals present were now overwhelmingly in the Ukrainian camp. For them, the fight of 1942 is replayed, when the invasion of the USSR was presented as the fight between Europe and Genghis Khan. When a French fighter dies in the spring of 2022, his comrades from the Misanthropic Division pay tribute to him by evoking his fight against the “Bolshevism” and the “Asian hordes”.
This presence allowed Moscow to denounce France’s pseudo support for the “Ukrainian Nazi regime” in January 2024, ensuring that the French state would thus send its mercenaries, according to an official press release relayed by pro-Russian French associations such as SOS Donbass… of armed engagement, we also note that if the members of WaffenKraft were unable to go to the Ukrainian neo-Nazi festival, this was not the case for activists of the GUD and the Zouaves (dissolved by the State in 2022).
This article is republished from The Conversation sous licence Creative Commons. Lire l’article original.
Source: www.slate.fr
