We Applied to Join a Neo-Nazi Group Fighting in Ukraine

It’s no secret that the social media platform Telegram is home to a huge part of the global radical right. This happens due to the possibilities it offers to the user and the alleged protection of data it offers from government interventions. Much has been said about how the radical right uses the platform to initiate violence, spread propaganda and indoctrinate new members to their beliefs. But what about recruiting people to fight in the real world? One neo-nazi group, the Atomwaffen Division, has been doing just that, according to a Unicorn Riot investigation.

Atomwaffen Division (AWD) is a violent neo-Nazi terrorist group created in 2015 in the U.S. and responsible for at least five murders. Although the group consists of few members, it managed to include former and present members of the Armed Forces of the United States of America in its ranks. Members of the group have been arrested for murder, preparation of terror attacks and other crimes. Although the group was originally based in the U.S., they have established branches all over Europe. 

In 2020, due to the pressure the group received because of the alleged decision of the U.S. State Department to declare the group as a foreign terrorist organization and numerous arrests of it’s members by the F.B.I, Atomwaffen Division announced its dissolution. A few months later it was re-created under the name of “National Socialist Order.” In 2021, this new group was declared as a terrorist organization in the United Kingdom and was banned in Australia and Canada.

AWD was known for trying to recruit mainly young individuals in university campuses, by posting propaganda flyers. Beyond that, the group tried to recruit and spread its hateful ideology online via social media, such as Telegram and YouTube, and the neo-nazi website called “Iron March,” which was active until 2017. Through this kind of online activism, the group was believed to organize military style training camps in the U.S. However, there haven’t been any other reports of AWD trying to openly recruit fighters online to get involved in an ongoing war, such as the one in Ukraine. The majority of AWD’s online presence, and more specifically on Telegram, was limited to ideological propaganda and cohesion, networking as well as glorifying violence and promoting hate speech against political opponents.      

See our 2020 report on leaked neo-Nazi chats related to Atomwaffen Division

AWD in Russia/Ukraine

There has been an AWD cell in Russia since 2020 and it has close relations with the paramilitary, radical right group known as the Russian Imperial Movement. Many of the members of AWD have received military training from the latter.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, while there were some indications of an AWD affiliated branch in the country, named AWD Galizien. AWD started actively organizing its local group since the beginning of the official Russian invasion in Ukraine.

In 2020, the Ukrainian authorities and the secret services of the country managed to arrest neo-Nazi individuals who were related to AWD in Kiev and Odessa. And in October 2020, two U.S. citizens who were members of AWD were expelled from the country for trying to join the Azov Regiment and for the incitement of murders and terrorism. However, a 2020 investigation revealed AWD members were sent to train with neo-nazi militias in Ukraine. 

We cannot be absolutely certain when a group of AWD members first started operating in Ukraine, but one thing is clear: they are now trying to recruit fighters to join them on the ground through Telegram. How do we know it? While investigating the terror group, we tried to join it via social media. 

Attempting to Join AWD

Everything started within the Telegram channel entitled ‘Atomwaffen Division.’ In a post, the channel announced that a recruitment period for the AWD Ukraine group began and stated that “everyone can join.” It continued by giving specific instructions to every individual who was interested to send a message in a bot channel, writing “I want to join the team.”

While it’s an escalation in tactics, the overt call for participation fits in with the channel’s history of glorifying far-right ideas and actions. The channel is full of neo-Nazi propaganda, including Hitler-era flags, Nazi salutes and pictures of AWD members fighting alongside the Azov Regiment, a unit of Ukraine’s National Guard, in Mariupol. That being said, there has been reported another relationship between Azov and AWD, back in 2016, concerning Americans who were willing to join Azov in Ukraine. It is worth mentioning that until the announcement of the recruitment, this AWD Telegram channel was only used for propaganda reasons. It was the first time it publicly announced a recruitment call. 

The channel’s posts leave no doubt about the Nazi ideology of the group, which called for the recruitment of new members for the Ukrainian branch in the same channel it uploaded the above neo-Nazi propaganda. However, it is not unheard of for the microcosm of the European far-right to promote the recruitment of fighters via Telegram since the beginning of the Russian invasion. 

For the needs of this investigation, we detected at least one more channel called ‘Ultras not Reds’ promoting the new recruitment campaign of the far right Azov, back in August, commenting: “For White Europe.” Of course we should point out the qualitative difference between AWD and Azov, with the latter being an official branch of the Ukrainian military and thus having much more strict criteria for its recruitment, while on the other hand AWD is an informal, non-state affiliated and organized group and thus necessarily having way looser criteria concerning who is capable of joining, training and gaining combat experience.

Back in the AWD channel, when we sent the message to express our interest in joining the team, the answer came almost immediately. A few minutes later it was announced that the candidates for membership will have a personal interview with the AWD leader in a few days’ time. When we tried to obtain additional information and asked what we should do in the meantime, the answer was laconic. “Wait.”

So we waited. But the interview with the AWD leader did not occur and the chat was deleted a few days later.

Radical Right Recruitment Leads to Violence

While radical right and neo-nazi groups may exist and operate in most armed forces of European countries, there is no doubt that AWD Ukraine is marginal, and its members are a few dozen at best. But the fact that an open neo-nazi group is pushing a global recruitment campaign, as evidenced by its translating messages to multiple languages, to fight and gain real battle experience with real weaponry, is at least worrying.

Nobody can guarantee that the recruited individuals will not return to their countries, determined to use their newly acquired military training and experience, to train like-minded people or to commit violent attacks and hate crimes. AWD offers individuals the opportunity to gain real combat experience, by joining its openly neo-nazi ranks, and thus be much more physically, psychologically and ideologically ready to commit acts of violence afterwards in their home countries. 

In fact, before the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, there were dozens of cases of foreign fighters who fought in Ukraine, returned home and were criminally charged with intending to or committing acts of violence. This includes a double homicide in Florida in 2018 by a man who deserted the U.S. Army and fought for far-right extremists in Ukraine in the late 2010s. 

It’s up to the Ukrainian authorities and the European community to intervene and stop the action and recruitment of such extreme groups. Otherwise, there is the danger of Ukraine becoming a laboratory for the global far-right, a place where extremists from all around the world travel in order to train and gain combat experience. Groups such as AWD and its recruitment attempts contribute to such a direction and pose security issues not only for Ukraine, but for the rest of the world. 

Cover image contributed by Chryssa Mavrokefalidou.

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The post We Applied to Join a Neo-Nazi Group Fighting in Ukraine appeared first on UNICORN RIOT.

by Unicorn Riot via UNICORN RIOT