How right-wing extremists spin Russia's war in Ukraine to their own ends

Analysts reveal far-right narratives, including support for Kremlin propaganda

Ukraine's far-right Azov Battalion group is attractng interest from online extremists. AFP

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Right-wing extremists are using the war in Ukraine to spread conspiracy theories, echo Russian propaganda and drive a wedge between groups of refugees, according to analysts in Germany.

A report by the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, which monitors extremism on platforms such as Telegram, identified five ways in which the far right had spun the crisis to suit its political narratives.

It said the far-right scene had developed competing views on whether Russian President Vladimir Putin was a figure to be admired or a pawn in a wider conspiracy after he ordered the attack on Ukraine.

“The bogeymen remain the same, but current events are re-interpreted accordingly,” analysts said in their 14-page findings.

One example of this, they said, was a theory shared on Telegram that the war was part of an imagined Jewish conspiracy, possibly aimed at reducing the world population or establishing a new world order.

The attraction of this for neo-Nazis is that they “do not have to choose one side or the other, but spread their traditional stereotypes of the enemy”, researchers said.

A second narrative is that a caricatured global elite wants to distract people from the coronavirus pandemic, which has long spawned its own web of conspiracy theories.

One extremist magazine in Germany argued that the “corona narrative” of the past two years was falling apart and that elites had concocted the war in Ukraine as a new way of stirring up fear.

While those interpretations regard the war as a bad thing, a third school of neo-Nazi thought welcomes the opportunity for a fight and for possible alignment with Ukraine’s far-right Azov Battalion.

The Azov group is fighting against Russia and is often invoked by pro-Kremlin media to back up Mr Putin’s claims that the invasion is designed to “demilitarise and de-Nazify” Ukraine.

That claim is rejected as nonsense by Ukraine and its President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a Jew whose grandfather saw three of his brothers killed during the Holocaust.

But since the war broke out, the Azov fighters have appealed for new recruits in far-right channels, including in English and German, analysts said, leading to fears of European extremists going to fight for the group.

On the Russian side, a fourth far-right narrative lauds Mr Putin as a fighter against the modern West, which extremists see as tarnished by the rise of liberal social norms.

One post on Telegram said that “if Putin marches into Berlin … men will be men, electricity will be cheaper, Islamisation will be ended”.

A similar strand of pro-Kremlin opinion tries to justify Russia’s invasion by echoing its propaganda about Ukraine developing biological weapons or having no right to sovereignty.

The Kremlin’s theory that Ukraine is developing sensitive weapons was described this week as “just another lie” by the head of Nato.

Russian state media “continues to enjoy a great popularity in the conspiracy theorist scene”, the German report said.

A fifth line of argument focuses on Ukrainian refugees and distinguishes them in what analysts say is a racially motivated manner from the typically non-European arrivals in previous flurries of migration.

A branch of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party said the country was right to take in “genuine war refugees” from Ukraine but that space should be freed up by deporting earlier migrants.

Such a viewpoint “spreads the narrative of refugees who only have a right to temporary safety if they are white”, the analysts said.

Almost 3.3 million people have fled Ukraine since the war broke out, according to the UN’s refugee agency, with Poland taking in more than half of those and many others crossing into Romania, Moldova, Hungary and Slovakia.