The Atlantic: Russia recruits neo-Nazis, radicals and bikers for sabotage in the US and Europe - ForumDaily
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The Atlantic: Russia recruits neo-Nazis, radicals and bikers for sabotage in the US and Europe

In the deep forests of Slovakia, former Russian special forces trained young people from the right-wing militant group "Slovak draftees", writes The Atlantic. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2014, some of these newly-formed paramilitaries went to eastern Ukraine to fight alongside Russian troops, while others stayed at home to campaign against NATO as a “terrorist organization.”

Photo: nightwolves

In June, 2016, on the streets of Marseille in France, Russian football hooligans flaunted tattoos with the acronym GRU, Russian military intelligence, made a brutal attack on English football fans, which resulted in dozens of bloody fans in the hospital. Alexander Shprygin, the instigator-ultranationalist and head of the All-Russian Association of Fans (a football fan club that he claims was created by order of the Federal Security Service of Russia, or the FSB), was arrested during a mass brawl and expelled from France.

In May, 2017 of the Year on the Budapest Cemetery Fiumey Road, a group of Russian motorcyclists - with huge red flags depicting the Soviet sickle and hammer - arrived at the memorial of World War II. There is some discrepancy in the fact that bikers in tattoos, who got off their motorcycles, along with diplomats from the Russian embassy, ​​dressed in strict protocol suits, laid red carnations on the memorial, and then posted a video about this video on the Internet.

It looks so strange that it is hard to believe that the fight clubs in the western countries, the neo-Nazi hooligans and motorcycle clubs act as conductors of the Kremlin’s influence in Western countries. This is more like an episode from the television series “Americans” interspersed with shots from Mad Max and Fight Club. But this is exactly what is happening all over Europe and in North America, since the Russian special services, in trying to undermine Western democracies from the inside, use radicals and "angry young people." And not only in the virtual world, but also in real life.

The attractiveness of this strategy is partly due to its very absurdity. It may seem incredible that Russian intelligence services can recruit or radicalize skinheads or outcasts in the West. The Kremlin can easily declare that whatever the links between the ultra-right groups in Russia and in the West, they arise spontaneously and have nothing to do with the Russian state. But whether the Serbian ultranationalists in Montenegro or the neo-Nazis in Hungary, the hand of the Russian special services has already been exposed in many cases. The ongoing war in eastern Ukraine, which Russia is waging, using separatist henchmen fighting under tough command and control of the Russian military, creates the basis for recruiting right-wing fanatics from other countries - from Brazil to Belarus.

After the Kremlin stepped up the secret war against the Western democracies that followed the invasion of Ukraine, the Russian secret services sharply stepped up "active events" (in the jargon of Russian special services "active events" mean a wide range of covert actions to influence and / or subversive operations) using right-wing and radical groups. These groups serve as ideal involuntary agents for Moscow to achieve its dual goal of destabilizing Western societies and attracting representatives of Western business and political elites to their side.

By forging links with radical far-right groups (and sometimes with ultra-left factions), the Kremlin “processes” convenient mediators who can spread its theses, while rhetoric aimed at aggravating differences in the society that such groups spread on the Internet strengthens Russian trolls.

However, it would be a mistake to assume that partnerships between the Kremlin and these groups are always “marriage of convenience”. Many of them are true partnerships based on a general rejection of liberal democracy and a desire to undermine it. Kremlin recruitment of skinheads, biker groups, football hooligans and street fighters is usually not done with the goal of armed overthrow of democratic governments. More often, recruiting, ideological processing, and manipulation of right-wing radical groups seem to be aimed at causing political chaos in Western democratic countries and discrediting or weakening democratic institutions. But sometimes, for example, as in Ukraine, these “intermediaries” act directly to support the operations carried out by the Kremlin.

Impressive Alexander Zaldostanov, a former dental surgeon as high as ninety meters tall, with shoulder-length hair and a beard, is now the leader of the Russian Night Wolves biker club. Zaldostanov, who is usually depicted in photographs in black leather biker gear, is a famous figure in Russia. At the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, he carried the Olympic torch, Russian President Vladimir Putin awarded him the Order of Honor "for his active work in the patriotic education of youth." As an ardent nationalist, Zaldostanov is trying to awaken the spirit of romantic imperialism and conquest, inspired by the images of the famous Russian Cossack riders, as well as rebellion, rejecting cultural values ​​and designed to attract representatives of the Russian generation of zero and young people. The unifying "ideology" of the Night Wolves, in the form in which it exists, is based on contempt for the West. He is portrayed as weak, decadent, rootless, immoral and licentious. Zaldostanov once stated that the “Antimaydan” movement, created by him together with the ultranationalist politician Nikolai Starikov and others, would be more suitable for the title “Death to …… .m!”.

Arriving in February 2014 in Sevastopol, Zaldostanov led the Night Wolves squad and set up roadblocks around the city. A couple of weeks later, bikers helped storm the headquarters of the Ukrainian Navy with the aim of forcing the under siege to surrender, which was a decisive turning point in the half-secret Russian operation to annex the peninsula. As for the practical participation of the Night Wolves in this armed seizure, only the infamous Russian “green men”, the forces of the Russian special forces without insignia, played a more important role. But if we talk about the psychological operations of the GRU, the "Night Wolves" played a leading role in them.

Photo: nightwolves

The Russian state media and some Western journalists who followed their example portrayed Night Wolves as patriotic locals who spontaneously and voluntarily come out in support of the Russian putsch, reveling in an attractive storyline and accompanying photo and video materials depicting bikers in tattoos . Kremlin news reports about the "tough guys" who took matters into their own hands were carefully staged to divert attention from what the Kremlin did not want to talk about - the coordinated attack of Russian troops on Ukraine.

Although the true nature of the Night Wolves relationship with the Russian special services is still not entirely clear, the US government believes that their operations in Crimea from February to March 2014 were carried out, at least in close cooperation with the GRU.

When in December 2014, the United States imposed sanctions on the Night Wolves, the Ministry of Finance said in a press release that the Night Wolves are closely associated with the Russian special services. ” The statement listed the activities of the biker club in support of the seizure of the Crimea, including intimidation, criminal activity, abduction, storming of the gas distribution station and removal of members of the government of Viktor Yanukovych from the territory of Ukraine.

However, the relationship of "Night Wolves" with the Kremlin is obvious. Starting in 2009, Putin met with bikers many times, and in August 2011 also saddled the three-wheeled Harley Davidson to ride along the port city of Novorossiysk (though the question of choosing a motorcycle arises here). Whatever the original reason for creating the club, by 2010, it was completely transformed. According to Peter Pomerantsev, an information war specialist being waged by Russia, Kremlin political strategist Vladislav Surkov, who later oversaw Russia's secret operations in eastern Ukraine, supported the idea of ​​using the Night Wolves as an anti-Western "performance" for forcing nationalist sentiments in Russian society. According to available data, it was thanks to Surkov that the reports about the biker shows "Night Wolves" were broadcast on Russian television in prime time, as a result of which every little family is now known about the little-known biker club.

According to the Guardian, one of the bike shows for children run by Night Wolves (and financed by the Kremlin) featured Russian characters who chastised Americans for threatening Russia with sanctions, boasting about their country's nuclear weapons and " exposed the “stupidity of the West.” Today, “Night Wolves” often hold carefully prepared concerts and shows throughout Russia, replete with all sorts of unusual numbers. These shows are both nationalist rallies and extravaganzas (like those put on by Cirque du Soleil), during which they sell branded biker gear and promote their clothing line.

With the strengthening of ties with the Russian special services after the Crimean operation “Night Wolves”, they expanded their activities to a number of European countries.

According to the New York Times, the Night Wolves' visit to the Republika Srpska, which is part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, was made in March 2018 thanks to a grant from the Kremlin in the amount of 41 thousand dollars. The visit had a clear geopolitical goal: to provide visible support to the pro-Kremlin President of the Republika Srpska Milorad Dodik and tacitly support his calls for secession of the Republika Srpska from the rest of Bosnia. (The branch will lead to the disintegration of the fragile multinational state of Bosnia and will deprive it of the opportunity to become a member of NATO and the European Union, which is the key foreign policy goal of the Kremlin). Outside the Republic of Serbian and Serbian, the Night Wolves are viewed with suspicion, if not with open hostility. Georgia, Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic countries have banned the Night Wolves from entering their territory, realizing that the mission of bikers is to incite confrontation and create chaos in Western countries in the interests of the Kremlin. Slovak President Andrei Kiska recently described the Night Wolves as “an instrument of the Putin regime” and a “serious security threat” for Slovakia.

However, despite the fact that some Western countries have banned entry to their territory by individual members of the Russian Night Wolves club, including them in visa blacklists, according to the constitution, they cannot prevent their citizens from creating local Night Wolves. These local branches exist in Ukraine, Slovakia, Latvia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Germany, Serbia and Bosnia. Most of these departments belong to Russian émigrés, many of whom are most likely to have dual citizenship. In the United States, according to the Miami Herald newspaper, a former FSB officer, Svyatoslav Mangushev, founded a biker club in South Florida called “Special Forces”, which is basically created in the likeness of “Night Wolves”.

In the 2014 year, at the same time that the Night Wolves led the armed attacks in order to capture the Crimean peninsula, one of the Spetsnaz members turned to the Night Wolves headquarters in Moscow with a request to officially establish the Night Wolves branch in the United States. According to the Miami Herald, one of Mangushev’s business partners at the time was a Russian official who invested nearly eight million dollars in real estate in South Florida (although it remains a mystery where he took the funds for such investments, given the amount of his civil servant salary). Today, the Special Forces motorcycle club is not functioning, possibly because of the high media attention that it has attracted to itself. But the curious case of the existence of this pro-Kremlin biker club in South Florida testifies to the broad geography and opportunistic nature of the tacit influence operations conducted by Russia.

To understand how radical ultra-right groups can be used by Russian intelligence services, it is enough to consider the case of Montenegro, where, according to the authorities, the GRU tried to organize a coup d'état to kill the country's prime minister and wreak havoc during the last parliamentary elections in the country in October 2016. . The GRU plan, in the words of the main special prosecutor of Montenegro, investigating the coup attempt, included cyber attacks to hack popular messengers such as Viber and Votsap, and spread false rumors that the vote was rigged by the ruling party. With the help of this misinformation, according to the prosecutor's office, the GRU tried to force the protesters to take to the streets. Then a group of mercenaries dressed in the stolen form of the Montenegrin police would burst into the parliament building and opened fire on the protesters to wreak havoc and unrest. In the conditions of chaos, it was planned to kill the Prime Minister, leave the country without leadership.

In order to hide its participation in such a daring operation against a country on the threshold of joining NATO, the GRU reportedly turned to radical right-wing groups to carry out the planned attack. According to Alexander Singelić, a prosecution witness who collaborates with the investigation, he was one of the leaders of the conspirators. Singelić identified two Russian GRU officers, saying that they organized and financed the plot, and described the operation in detail. Singelic, who is wanted for murder in Croatia, is a Serbian ultranationalist who fought in the Ukraine on the side of the pro-Russian forces.

At home in Serbia, Singelić was a member of the local Serbian branch of the Night Wolves motor club. His accomplices, the radical nationalists, had a similar past, and many of them were either petty criminals or did “hard work” commissioned by local organized criminal groups. After Montenegro made public the alleged conspiracy, Putin’s national security adviser Nikolai Patrushev immediately flew to Belgrade to get the operatives hiding there from Serbia. The next day after this visit, two people returned to Moscow - Edward Shishmakov and Vladimir Popov. They are currently being tried in absentia, together with 12 persons imprisoned in Montenegro. The trial is not over yet. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump, after meeting with Putin in Helsinki, publicly questioned the US readiness to defend Montenegro in the event of an attack, despite the fact that this country joined NATO.

Russian fighting clubs are another example of how mostly harmless groups that exist independently of the Kremlin can become tools in the hands of Russian special services and act in their interests.

One such martial arts club, based on the art of hand-to-hand combat "system", originating in medieval Russia, is popular with Russian special forces. The “system” uses an ever-changing and improvisational style of combat, less constrained by rules than judo or karate, and intended to cause the enemy maximum pain and inflict death blows on him. Apart from the particularly harsh nature of the “system” fans, clubs that practice this style work in the same way as regular judo or karate clubs, conducting classes and trainings in Russia and many other countries - including in the USA.

In the West, most clubs practicing the “system” are just what they seem. Nevertheless, according to an investigation conducted by the online publication EU Observer, a number of fighting clubs practicing the “system” in Europe and North America openly demonstrate their ties with Russian special forces and even use symbols of the GRU or FSB in their promotional materials. They arouse interest among nationalist-minded members of the diaspora, such as military veterans, and use a special subculture of Russian nationalists, who - like the “Spetsnaz” club in South Florida - are praised by the special services. Many of those who practice the “system” regularly go to Russia to improve their skills.

Boris Raitschuster, a German expert who writes a lot about fighting "system" clubs in Europe, argues that even if the overwhelming majority of members are ordinary enthusiasts of fight clubs, these groups are actively used by Russian intelligence services for recruiting agents. Reitschuster cites the assessment of one of the Western intelligence agencies, according to which in Germany alone, through the clubs practicing the “system”, about 250-300 agents were recruited.

However, in such cases, the term "agent" can be misleading. Although Russian intelligence officers can operate in the “system” clubs in the traditional sense of the word (that is, officers on active duty), many others are likely to be “agents of influence” who do not necessarily serve in the GRU, have the title and formally are his employees. Such agents of influence usually do not have access to classified information, and many of them are unaware that they are being manipulated by a foreign intelligence service.

If in some Russian fight clubs in Europe and North America there are a small number of agents associated with the GRU who are introduced into the street environment as “tools” to serve as guides for anti-Western (and pro-Russian) ideas, then they do not differ much in their activities. from the trolls working in the Russian "Internet Research Agency". The main difference is that the ideological processing and recruitment is carried out not through the Internet, but in the course of personal contacts.

Neo-Nazis, skinheads, football hooligans and similar right-wing groups that are prone to violence can also act as available and often unwitting agents of Kremlin influence who can be manipulated to undermine Western democratic institutions. The Kremlin uses far-right groups for a number of reasons. Firstly, these groups can be manipulated and subjected to psychological processing using social networks, which makes them ready targets for organizations such as the Internet Research Agency, which employs trolls who can mobilize their members with the help of thoughtful posts. Secondly, these groups are likely to find the Kremlin ideology of “traditional Russian values” attractive, especially when compared to Western liberal values, such as individual rights, tolerance and self-expression. Right-wing groups are more easily drawn into Russia's orbit with its rhetoric directed against immigrants, representatives of non-traditional sexual orientation, antifeminism and ideological concepts, which emphasize the importance of a world view based on the principles of collectivism, tribalism and racial exclusivity.

And finally, Western right-wing radicals are attractive to the Kremlin not only because agents (often embittered young white men) can be recruited among them to incite social protests, but also because their environment serves as a loophole for establishing links with far-right political parties and anti-establishment politicians. The Kremlin believes that politicians such as Marine Le Pen from France, Frauke Petrie from Germany and Matteo Salvini from Italy are rams that can be used to destroy democratic institutions and counteract the political establishment that supports NATO, the European Union and transatlantic ties. Although the actions of the Kremlin in attracting Western politicians to their side and using them are not the topic of this article, they are the main reason that Russia is investing in the "processing" of the Western radicals.

But for obvious reasons, the Kremlin is trying to conceal that it supports ultra-right groups both in Russia and abroad.

In a documentary film about Russian neo-Nazi football hooligans, filmed by BBC, the words of the ultras leader, secretly recorded for Spartak Moscow, are heard in secret, explaining that his army of companions is “Putin’s infantrymen”. Shortly after the documentary was screened, the Russian police turned to anyone interviewed in the film, demanding that they immediately report it to local stations across Russia and sign statements that the BBC journalists forced them lie.

Despite attempts to hide these ties, a growing number of facts indicate that the Russian state supports representatives of far-right circles throughout Europe. Istvan Gjorkos, a Hungarian neo-Nazi leader of the ultra-right militarized National Front, is a perfect example of this kind of radical militant "object" of the activities of Russian special services. This is a neo-Nazi xenophobic organization that glorifies SS troops and regularly attacks the United States, Jews, members of non-traditional sexual minorities and liberals. She conducts combat training of paramilitary units and praises the movement of the Hungarian fascists, founded by the Party of Crossed Arrows, which carried out its activities in the 1930-s and during the Second World War. Although it is unclear exactly how Gyorkos was first established with Russian intelligence, in 2012, Gyorkosh launched the website hidfo.net, which glorified Putin's Russia, and began to spread Kremlin propaganda.

In October, 2016, the Hungarian law enforcement officers arrived at Gyorkos’s home to check information on the illegal use of weapons in his territory. There was a clash during which Gjorkos shot one of the policemen, which led to a large-scale investigation, during which the Hungarian authorities found that in the forest near his home Gjorkos regularly conducted combat training for members of the Hungarian National Front. But even more shocking was the fact that the authorities became aware of the participation in these exercises of the GRU personnel, who were actually serving and working under diplomatic cover in the Russian embassy in Budapest.

Similar cases have been recorded in other European countries. In Sweden, in January 2017, when law enforcement agencies investigated the bombing incident at the refugee center in Gothenburg, they discovered that the neo-Nazis who had attacked had received gun training from a Russian paramilitary group. This group, called Partizan, is operating freely in Russia, and the authorities there are tolerant towards it. Her weapons training courses are conducted on behalf of an ultranationalist organization called the Russian Imperial Movement, which actively participated in the Russian war in eastern Ukraine, and whose current geopolitical goal, according to one of its members, is to create the Right International. In Denmark, law enforcement agencies learned that the leader of the Danish ultra-right National Front, Lars Agerbak, also received gun training in Russia. After Agerbak was convicted in Denmark for violating gun laws, he moved to Russia. Although it may seem that these cases are sporadic, the ultra-right community in Europe is numerous and the number of its members is growing, and its ties with the Russian state are commonplace. In 2015, in the Czech Republic, the number of members of ultra-right groups, as well as Czechoslovak reserve soldiers, strongly adhered to pro-Russian views, which, like the Hungarian National Front, regularly conduct combat training, was six thousand people.

American alternative right and Kremlin ideologues also share a common cause. Although many of these ties are the result of mutual admiration, rather than active recruitment, the charges brought recently by Maria Butina, a defender of weapons rights for her activities as a Russian agent, argue that the Kremlin is actively seeking to maintain good relations with American right-wing organizations.

Ultra-right groups already consider the Kremlin to be their ally. At the rally of the alternative right, held in August 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, the chanted slogans “Russia is our friend!” Were common. Richard Spencer, the organizer of the rally in Charlottesville and the leader of the Institute for National Politics, an organization of alternative rights, praised Putin as a defender of the white race. His website altright.com publishes such articles as “Why the movement against racism is nothing but a lie”. As well as materials in defense of the association of alternative rights with Putin, which state that "Russia is one of the few countries that support pro-European values, such as strength, unity, racial consciousness, and others." Similarly, Alex Jones, an activist of the movement of alternative right-wingers, is fawning before Putin, who invited Alexander Dugin, Kremlin court ideologist, to his program. American right-wing organizations are even loyal to the Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, and, following the propaganda line of the Kremlin, portray him as the savior of the Christian minorities. Matthew Heimbach, an American white nationalist who praises Putin greatly, summarized the views of the alternative right, saying:

"I consider Russia to be a kind of pivot for nationalists, ... and these are not only white nationalists - these are all nationalists."

To understand how radical groups like football hooligans, neo-Nazis and tough lovers of fight clubs could get the attention of Russian intelligence, it is important to understand that Russian intelligence has been using representatives of radical movements for a long time. In the Soviet Union, the KGB had entire departments involved in penetrating radical and marginal groups, and, if necessary, eliminating these groups. These departments worked independently of the state, and their work did not require the permission of the CPSU. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the KGB was no longer able to maintain a huge GULAG system and increasingly preferred to cooperate with groups hostile to the state (although, of course, the Russian authorities have extensive experience in using their own interests Soviet and even tsarist times). Instead of constantly chasing criminal groups, trying to arrest their members only to discover new members appearing in other places, the Russian special services at some point decided that it was easier to allow several officially banned groups to exist until activities can be monitored and (at least partially) monitored.

The conclusions to be drawn by the United States and its allies are clear. The manipulation of far-right factions is part of Russia's carefully thought-out strategy aimed at undermining Western democratic institutions. Russian trolls and intelligence agencies are hunting for outcasts, marginalized members of society, in order to radicalize them and recruit them to wage war against the liberal institutions in their countries. To this end, the Kremlin strengthens their conviction that liberal democracy is rotten, and feeds in their reigning souls a feeling of bitterness and inclination to violence. In addition to inciting bitterness and discontent, the Kremlin also uses covert funding for its destructive agenda. This activity is carried out both in the course of personal contacts through martial arts clubs and motorcycle clubs, and in the virtual world of social networks, where it is largely imperceptible to law enforcement and the general public. Consequently, the strategy to combat this radicalization must combine the known methods of counteracting internal xenophobic organizations inciting racial hatred and the latest methods of counterintelligence. Finally, the work of identifying, exposing and curbing the actions of Russia manipulating anti-democratic groups will probably succeed only when it will be carried out beyond state borders with active interaction between all democratic states that are subject to precisely this kind of hostile and destructive influence.

Text translation prepared edition InoSMI.

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