EMBRACING UKRAINIAN FASCISM

RAGOZIN: Melnyk reburial signals ideological shift in Ukraine

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy attended the reburial of Andriy Melnyk, one of the leaders of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). / Volodymyr Zelenskiy via XFacebook

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By Leonid Ragozin in Riga May 29, 2026

Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy went to the National Military Memorial Cemetery to take part in the reburial of Andriy Melnyk, Adolf Hitler’s ally in World War II and one of the leaders of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Next to Zelenskiy, stood his chief of staff Kyrylo Budanov, who has been overseeing a visible ideological shift in Ukraine since assuming office early this year. 

In a tweet published on the occasion, Budanov wrote that the reburial heralds the creation of the “Pantheon of Prominent Ukrainians”. The choice of Melnyk’s ashes as an object of national veneration sends a clear signal about the direction of that shift.

Over seven years in the presidential seat, Zelenskiy has undergone a remarkable transformation from a dove seeking rapprochement with Russia to a defiant wartime leader and the Kremlin’s sworn enemy. His attitude to Ukraine’s history has changed just as radically.

Soon after he was elected in 2019 on the promise of peace, Zelensky made a point about celebrating May 9, the Soviet Victory Day, by visiting the grave of his grandfather who fought in the Red Army.

This populist gesture was designed to appeal an overwhelming majority of Ukrainians, in both the east and west of the country, whose ancestors fought on the Soviet side in WWII and who gave their votes to the new president. A memo published by Ukraine’s ministry of foreign affairs in October 2014 cites the figure of 7mn residents of Ukraine who fought in the Soviet army during WWII versus only 240-250 thousand who collaborated with the Nazis.

As his 57th Guard Division was pushing the Germans out of Mairupol, Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, lieutenant Semyon Zelenskiy was avenging the deaths of his father (President Zelenskiy’s great-grandfather) and three brothers, all of whom perished in the Holocaust.

Meanwhile, Melnyk was attempting to set up a fascist Ukrainian puppet state in Ukraine with a constitution, authored by his friend Mykola Stsiborsky, which described future Ukraine as “authoritarian and totalitarian state”. In a letter to Hitler in 1941, Melnyk pleaded that anti-Soviet Ukrainians be “allowed to march shoulder to shoulder with the legions of Europe and with our liberator, the German Wermacht”. Meanwhile, his subordinates in Ukraine took part in Jewish pogroms in Bukovyna and assisted the Germans in killing the Jews elsewhere around the country.

Melnyk’s pleas fell on deaf ears in Berlin since Hitler saw Slavs as an inferior race subject to enslavement and extermination. He was interned by the Nazis in a camp for foreign VIPs, who were treated humanely and respectfully, and released in 1944 when Hitler felt Ukrainian fascists could help him stall the Red Army’s onslaught in western Ukraine. Failing to receive guarantees of a pro-Nazi Ukrainian state, Melnyk ended up offering his services to Western allies in the US-occupied zone.

The World Holocaust Remembrance Centre, Yad Vashem, stated that it was deeply troubled by Melnyk’s reburial in Kyiv. “Honouring the leader of a movement [OUN] that supported and collaborated with Nazi Germany during the persecution and murder of millions of Jews undermines the moral integrity essential to Holocaust remembrance,” its press release said.

OUN’s dream Ukraine

Melnyk died in 1964 and was buried in Luxembourg where his remains were lying peacefully until Zelenskiy’s administration decided to repatriate them in May this year. “Colonel Andriy Melnyk returned to a different Ukraine – not the one he had been forced to leave, but the one he had dreamed of,” Zelenskiy said at the reburial ceremony.

Today’s Ukraine is indeed much closer to Melnyk’s ideals than those Zelenskiy’s grandfather was fighting for.

Built in 1974 and topped with the 102m-tall Motherland statue, Kyiv’s WWII History Museum was designed to commemorate Soviet war heroes like Semyon Zelenskiy. In the WWII cult developed under the Ukraine-born Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, this was one of the three most sacred sites in the entire Soviet country.

In 2026 however, it housed an exhibition dedicated to the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC), a military unit formed by fugitive Russian neo-Nazis who believe that today’s Ukraine is much closer to their ideals than Russian President Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian regime. They see Putin’s Russia as a continuation of the Bolshevik internationalist project, citing Putin’s tolerance to mass immigration from Central Asian countries as proof.

In its propaganda and symbols, RVC draws inspiration from Gen. Andrey Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army which fought on Hitler’s side in WWII. Featuring prominently in the exhibition, RVC’s symbol is called Spayka, best translated as fascia. It was designed in the 1930s by the Russian emigre organisation White Cause which later joined the Russian Fascist Party. 

The exhibition was officially curated by RVC’s khorunzhy (ideological officer), Aleksey Lyovkin. Having served a sentence for racially motivated attacks on migrants in his native Tver in Russia, Lyovkin founded a band called M8L8TH (which translates as Hitler’s Hammer and contains the numerical symbol 88 that stands for Heil Hitler in skinhead jargon) before moving to Ukraine in 2015.

Although it existed in Russian imperial forces, khorunzhy is not an official rank in the Ukrainian army. It originally meant flag-bearer in the Cossack troops, but it resurfaced in the Russo-Ukrainian war as an equivalent of the Soviet politruk, a political officer. 

Officially non-existent in the Ukrainian army, khorunzhy is used as a rank in politically autonomous units that form what its members call the “Azov family” or “movement”. Born out of the original Azov battalion, this far right mega-group currently controls Ukraine’s 3rd Army Corps commanded by Andriy Biletsky, its founder and political leader. 

The 3rd Corps runs its own school of political officers which is named after Yevhen Konovalets, Melnyk’s predecessor as the OUN leader. Its political bible is Natiocracy, an ethnonationalist teaching of OUN ideologist and Melnyk’s ally, Mykola Stsiborsky.

The Azov battalion in its original forms had a significant presence of Russian neo-Nazis, like Lyovkin or the most prominent living Russian neo-Nazi leader Sergey “Malyuta” Korotkikh, who was in charge of the battalion’s intelligence. 

These Russians (though not Korotkikh) eventually formed the core of RVC, which ideologically is a part of the Azov family but operates under the auspices of Ukraine’s military intelligence, the HUR. The latter was headed by Zelenskiy’s chief of staff Budanov from 2020 to 2026.

An ideology for New Europe

Melnyk’s reburial would be hard to imagine under Zelenskiy’s previous chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, who graduated from secondary school in the Soviet times and whose father served at the USSR’s embassy in Kabul during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. His Russian-born mother grew up in Leningrad. Hardly famous for political restraint, he still displayed some ethical red lines when it comes to history and politics.

But Yermak took upon himself the role of chief scapegoat in a massive anti-corruption investigation that targets Zelenskiy’s immediate entourage. He has been formally charged in a multilayered corruption case which involves four mansions, one of which belongs to him and another one likely to Zelenskiy himself. 

Budanov is another story. Born in 1986, he is largely a product of post-independence Ukraine with all of its geopolitical ambivalences and mafia state realities. An ideological orphan, he was provided with a social lift when he joined unit A2245 of the HUR whose members were trained by the CIA. 

A Washington Post investigation, published in 2023, revealed that the military intelligence agency Budanov would become the head of was created under the CIA’s supervision from scratch and hermetically sealed from other Ukrainian spy agencies to avoid Russian interference. The HUR is “our baby”, the newspaper’s CIA source boasted. Since the end of WWII, the CIA’s Ukrainian operation has been defined by the influx of OUN cadres who previously worked for the Germans. 

Ideology is a swear word with the liberal-democratic paradigm which Ukraine is still ostensibly pursuing, but Zelenskiy’s chief of staff is not shy about using the word. 

“Ukraine today embodies true Europe — both geographically and, above all, ideologically,” he wrote on May 9, the day of the Soviet victory over the Nazis, also marked as Europe Day in the EU. “We are defending the security and values of the entire continent: freedom, respect and the right to one’s identity,” he continued, adding the word “identity” where centrist politicians would normally mention human rights or social justice. 

His ideology reveals itself in commemorative events like Melnyk’s reburial, which he organised. Zelenskiy named Budanov first when listing officials who helped to make it happen. It also spills into his sometimes surprising statements, like when he mused on the meaning of Rus, the Kyiv-centred medieval state which gave its name to Russia. “Rus is Ukraine. But Rus is more, much more and Ukraine is the motherland of everything, even of those who we are fighting against,” he told the audience at the Kyiv Stratcom Forum this month. “You see where is the issue: We have handed over much of our history to them, we did it voluntarily. They privatised it, although they are nobody. We are the Rus, we should rule them.”

These imperial sentiments hark back to the ideas first expressed by Azov Movement ideologists back in 2014-16. They boil down to recreating the Russian Empire, only with the capital in Kyiv rather than Moscow.

Budanov’s effort to build the pantheon of Ukrainian heroes is expected to bring more results in the coming months and years. Negotiations are underway with the US and European countries about the repatriation of prominent Ukrainians who died in exile, prominently featuring OUN leader Stepan Bandera and Simon Petlyura who led Ukrainian nationalists in the Russian civil war. 

But Zelenskiy mentioned only one figure who is going to be reburied for sure. It is Yevhen Konovalets, who headed the OUN before Bander and Melnyk and after whose name the Azov Movement’s ideological school bears.

Leonid Ragozin is a freelance journalist based in Riga. He covered Russia, Ukraine and other countries for leading global media, including the BBC, Bloomberg and Al Jazeera. Leonid co-authored “En eiropeisk tragedie”, a book about the roots of Russo-Ukranian conflict published in Norway.

The Feminization of Poverty: A Socialist Feminist Perspective

By Bayan Saleh

April 28, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image by Atibrarian/Wikimediacommons, licensed via CC BY 4.0

When we speak of poverty in political or academic discourse, we often tend to treat it as a neutral phenomenon, as though it falls upon everyone equally and in the same way. Yet a critical class-based lens exposes the falsity of this supposed neutrality, affirming that poverty is not distributed evenly, and that women bear its burden in a more acute and enduring way.

This is precisely where the concept of the feminization of poverty comes in, not merely as a statistical description, but as a critical analytical tool that reveals the structural relationship between the capitalist economic system and gender relations, and the multiple forms of exclusion and marginalization that arise from both.

The concept emerged in the 1970s to describe the ongoing rise in poverty rates among women, particularly as the number of women bearing sole responsibility for supporting their families grew. Since then, it has become clear that poverty is neutral neither in terms of gender nor in terms of class, and that it is tied to power structures that determine who holds resources and who is denied them.

The latest data from UN Women indicate that 9.2% of women and girls live in extreme poverty, compared to 8.6% of men and boys, with the gap worsening in the 25 to 34 age group, where women are 25% more likely to live in extreme poverty. World Bank reports show that the global gender wage gap stands at 23%, rising to 47.9% in regions of the Global South such as South Asia. These figures confirm that poverty is not gender-neutral, yet numbers alone are insufficient for understanding what is happening, as they describe symptoms without digging into the roots.

When Exploitation Is Twofold

The feminization of poverty cannot be explained by focusing solely on the wage gap; it must be understood within the framework of a deeper economic structure that systematically reproduces gender inequality. Capitalism does not merely produce class disparity, it also reproduces gender disparity through the organization and division of labor in ways that serve the interests of capital above all else.

This is what Clara Zetkin saw with clarity when she argued that the working woman faces a twofold exploitation, neither dimension of which can be understood without the other: she is exploited as a worker paid less than a man in the labor market, and she is exploited within the family through unpaid domestic labor that guarantees the reproduction of the workforce without costing capital a single penny. Anuradha Ghandy reaffirmed this analysis, noting that this dual exploitation takes even sharper forms in Global South contexts, where class, caste, and gender intersect in a single system of domination.

One of the most important manifestations of this system is the separation between economically recognized productive labor and the unpaid labor necessary for the continuation of life. The domestic and care work performed by women forms the foundation for social reproduction, yet it receives no economic recognition, which diminishes its value and excludes women from economic independence. When socialist feminism demands recognition of this labor and its transformation into a collective responsibility, through public nurseries, care facilities, and social services, it is not calling for a partial reform. It is calling for a fundamental reorganization of the relationship between production and social reproduction at the heart of the economic system.

At the same time, women are integrated into the labor market in an unequal manner, concentrated in low-wage, precarious sectors with little stability or protection. Rather than becoming a vehicle for economic liberation, paid work frequently becomes an extension of dependency, particularly in the context of persistent wage discrimination and limited professional advancement. This situation is compounded by the double burden women carry as a result of combining paid labor with unpaid domestic work, without any fair redistribution of roles. This duality is neither a biological fate nor a culturally neutral inheritance; it is the product of a class-based economic system that needs to keep women in the position of the flexible worker who can be pushed to the margins when the market demands it, then recalled when cheap labor is needed.

Crises and Austerity: When Women Pay for Crises They Did Not Create

What makes the picture more complex is that economic crises, conflicts, and climate change deepen the feminization of poverty, with women disproportionately affected by these shifts, particularly in the most fragile societies. In a global context where economic exploitation intersects with historical forms of domination, women across vast regions of the world become more exposed to the harshest forms of poverty and marginalization.

Yet the issue does not stop at exceptional crises. The austerity policies imposed by international financial institutions on Global South countries over decades represent a glaring example of the feminization of poverty as a deliberate political decision. When public services such as education, health, and welfare are cut back, they do not disappear. Instead, their burden shifts onto women, who compensate with their bodies and time for what neoliberal policy has stripped from state budgets. Austerity, in this sense, is not a neutral policy; it is a gendered policy whose costs women pay first and most heavily.

The struggle against austerity policies and the struggle for women’s rights cannot be separated. The woman who loses access to public education when schools are privatized, the woman forced to leave work when public nurseries close, the woman who bears the care of the sick when health budgets are slashed; all of them pay the price of economic decisions made in international institutions that are neither elected nor held accountable. For this reason, confronting the feminization of poverty is inseparable from confronting the global capitalist economic system that produces and reproduces it.

This gap is equally visible in the realm of employment, where women’s participation in the labor market is lower than men’s, and where a large proportion of working women are in precarious, low-wage jobs with limited protection. Women suffer to a greater degree from food insecurity and the absence of social protection systems, a reality that deepens their economic vulnerability and makes any external shock more capable of pushing them below the threshold of subsistence.

From Diagnosis to Change: Toward Radical Policies, Not Superficial Ones

What makes this phenomenon particularly dangerous is that it is not confined to individual suffering; its effects extend to household welfare, contribute to the intergenerational reproduction of poverty, and constrain development potential by marginalizing women’s roles and excluding their economic and social contributions. The feminization of poverty thus becomes an expression of a structural dysfunction requiring radical treatment, not partial solutions that soothe symptoms without touching the roots.

This is where the divide between the class perspective of socialist feminism and liberal reformist feminism becomes apparent. Liberal currents limit themselves to demanding women’s empowerment within the existing system without challenging its structure, focusing on individual empowerment through education, training, and access to microfinance. The socialist feminist perspective, by contrast, holds that these tools are insufficient unless accompanied by fundamental change in relations of production, property, and power. The woman who obtains a small loan in a society that excludes her from education, burdens her with unpaid domestic work, and subjects her to precarious labor laws remains a prisoner of the same structure, even if her situation improves marginally.

Confronting this phenomenon demands policies grounded in both gender equality and the elimination of class exploitation together. This includes achieving wage equality, guaranteeing women’s legal rights at work, broadening social protection to cover the most vulnerable groups, and investing in education and training to economically empower women. It also requires recognition of the economic value of care work, the provision of public services that reduce its burden, and a redistribution of roles within the family and society that allows for more equitable participation in both paid and unpaid labor.

Yet these measures, however necessary, remain insufficient unless they bring about a change in the nature of property relations that structurally make women’s labor cheaper, more precarious, and less protected. Full recognition of care work does not mean merely including it in GDP calculations; it means transforming it into a collective responsibility borne by the state and society, not by women alone. And achieving wage equality does not mean only raising the minimum wage; it means dismantling the class hierarchy in the labor market that makes women, particularly those from the lower classes, the most vulnerable in every crisis.

Ultimately, eliminating the feminization of poverty cannot be separated from a critique of the capitalist economic structure that produces it. The issue is not merely about improving living conditions; it is about a fundamental reconsideration of how labor is organized and how resources and power are distributed within society. As long as women bear the burden of reproducing life without recognition, without wages, and without protection, any talk of equality remains a discourse suspended in the air, never touching the ground on which millions of women stand every day.

Statistical Sources

• UN Women, Gender Snapshot 2025: https://www.unwomen.org/en/node/476303
• UN Women, Women aged 25-34 face higher poverty rates (2023): https://sundiatapost.com/2bn-women-girls-lack-access-to-social-protection-un-women/
• UN Women, Equal Pay (CSW61): https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/csw61/equal-payEmail

Bayan Saleh

A Danish leftist-feminist activist and writer of Iraqi origin, Bayan Saleh is a feminist activist, writer, and long-time leftist organizer. She co-founded the Independent Women’s Organization in Erbil in 1991, was active in the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq and the Committee for the Defense of Iraqi Women’s Rights, and represented the committee at the UNHCR in Turkey. Since 2001 she has been a member and candidate of the Danish Red-Green Alliance, and since 2003 she has served on the editorial board of Al-Hiwar Al-Mutamaddin. She coordinates the Center for Women’s Equality, is a member of Amnesty International, and has served in leading positions in the Danish Women’s Council. Bayan has led multiple projects on migrant and refugee women’s rights in Denmark, Kurdistan, and the Middle East, and frequently participates in Scandinavian and international conferences on women’s rights, migration, and equality. Her educational background includes a BSc in Agriculture (University of Mosul, Iraq), diplomas in administration and IT (Denmark), and professional qualifications in psychotherapy and family counseling. She currently works as a family counselor and project manager supporting migrant women in Denmark.

Women in Conflict Zones

By World Beyond War

April 30, 2026

Source: World Beyond War

Webinar: Women in Conflict Zones

Retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel Ann Wright will open the webinar with the latest update on U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) activities in the region. Dr. Jamila J. Ghaddar will talk about her work archiving conflicts across the region.

This webinar aims to create a space for examining the gendered impacts of war and violent conflict for all people who experience gender-based oppression. 

Speakers

Hanan Awwad has been the President of WILPF Palestine since she started the Section in 1988. An academic, writer, editor and cultural advisor by profession, her main expertise lies in various areas including (resistance) literature, human rights and women’s rights. Hanan received a PhD from Oxford University, has published twelve books and received multiple awards for her work in defending human rights and dignity. Hanan is also a member of the Palestinian National Council and has represented Palestine in more than 700 conferences.

Nagham Al Baba is a student and youth activist from Gaza. She is engaged in raising awareness about the impact of conflict on young people, especially women, and speaks about the realities of life and education in conflict-affected areas.

Dr. Parisa Babaali is an Iranian American data scientist in the US Tech industry whose work bridges science, ethical AI, and human-centered innovation. She was born and raised in Iran during the 1979 revolution and travels regularly to Iran and keeps in contact with activists in Iran. She is an advocate for peace and uses her voice to speak against violence and the human cost of conflict. Passionate about advancing women in STEM, she mentors and supports the next generation of female leaders in the society. Parisa works extensively on addressing social determinants of health and advancing equity, using data and AI to uncover disparities and drive more inclusive outcomes across communities.

Hania Bitar founded The Palestinian Youth Association for Leadership and Rights Activation (PYALARA) in 1999, and she continues to lead it until today.

She started her career as an English teacher at Bethlehem University, then worked as a business manager at the weekly Jerusalem Times newspaper.

In 2005, she co-founded the International Women’s Commission for a Just and Sustainable Peace between Israel and Palestine with Palestinian, Israeli, and international women leaders.

In 2006, she ran in the Palestinian Legislative Council elections as part of the “Third Way” list. She also served as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Arab American University in Jenin, and on the boards of several Palestinian NGOs such as MIFTAH and the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling (WCLAC).

She founded the Global Solidarity for Peace in Palestine, which now includes more than 150 organizations, networks, and activists working worldwide to support Palestinian rights and issues.

In 2025, she was awarded the Seán MacBride Peace Prize by the International Peace Bureau (IPB) in recognition of her outstanding work in promoting peace, human rights, and resisting injustice under difficult conditions.

She is a founding member of the Media and Information Literacy Experts Network (MILEN). She was also selected as one of the Young Global Leaders and Young Arab Leaders.

In early 2026, she was elected as the representative of Arab Region to the UNESCO Global Alliance for Media and Information Literacy (MIL).

She is the author of many articles and a keynote speaker at various national and international conferences. In addition to her leadership skills, she is a professional media figure and an influential personality.

Jamila Ghaddar is a South Lebanese archivist and historian of liberation movements and the Arab region. She has been organizing in the anti-Zionist struggle her whole life. Jamila is co-lead of the Fighting Erasure-Digitizing Gaza’s Genocide & the War on Lebanon project; and Assistant Professor at University of Amsterdam. She lives between Lebanon and Netherlands, learning more about the bloody trail of Dutch empire and how to fight erasure in active zones of genocide and war.

Shirine Jurdi is a highly accomplished expert in Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) with over 20 years of experience in peacebuilding, conflict resolution, and gender equality across the MENA region. Her career is marked by a deep commitment to empowering women and youth in conflict-affected areas, ensuring their voices are heard in peace processes and recovery efforts. Shirine has collaborated with renowned organizations such as WILPF, MENAPPAC (GPPAC), Arab States CSOs and Feminist Network, Choueifat Women’s League, Local Mediators Network Marj’oun Hasbaya to design and implement programs that bridge global agendas with local implementation.

Shirine’s work spans a diverse range of initiatives, from documenting peacebuilding initiatives to the impact of war on women and youth to advocating for gender-sensitive policies in post-conflict recovery. She has led groundbreaking projects, including murals on UNSCR 1325; storytelling documentaries on WPS in Libya, Tunisia, Iraq, and Lebanon, and policy papers on the role of women in peacebuilding amid war. Her expertise also extends to environmental impacts of militarization, where she has championed women’s leadership in addressing the environmental consequences of conflict.

As a skilled facilitator and trainer, Shirine has conducted workshops on WPS and Youth, Peace, and Security (YPS) in countries like Lebanon, Iraq, Tunisia, Libya and Georgia. She also fostered collaboration among civil society organizations and integrating climate change and small arms prevention into peacebuilding agendas. Shirine’s contributions have been recognized globally, and she has been invited to speak at high-profile events such as the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), COP28, Conference on Conventional Weapons (CCW), Control Arms and others.

Shirine holds a master’s degree in International Affairs from the Lebanese American University and has pursued doctorate studies in Peace and Conflict Studies at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. She is a passionate advocate for amplifying voices, aiming to contribute to a more peaceful and inclusive world. Awarded certificate on ceasefire in negotiation from UNDPPA. Recognized for her dedication, Shirine was awarded the International Young Women’s Peace and Human Rights Award from Democracy Today in 2019.

Ann Wright is a retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel and a 29-year veteran of the Army and Army Reserves. She was also a diplomat in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan, and Mongolia. She received the State Department’s Award for Heroism for her actions during the civil war in Sierra Leone. She resigned from the Department of State on March 19, 2003, in opposition to the Iraq war. She is the co-author of Dissent: Voices of Conscience and appeared in the documentary “Uncovered”. Ann is a board member of CODEPINK and an advisory board member of Veterans For Peace, International Peace Bureau, World BEYOND War, Gaza Freedom Flotilla, NO to NATO, Hawaii Peace and Justice, Pacific Peace Network, and Women Cross DMZ.

This article was originally published by World Beyond War; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.

UKRAINIAN NATIONALIST ARMY OUN–UPA AND THE NAZI GENOCIDE

RAGOZIN: The unholy alliance between Ukraine’s far right and the Western defence industry

Battle-hardened commander Mykola “Makar” Zynkevich appears at a large event organised on the sides of the Munich Security Conference. / Snake Island Institute via Facebook

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By Leonid Ragozin in Riga March 4, 2026

A look at Ukrainian units dealing with cutting-edge unmanned technology reveals an unholy alliance between far-right extremism and the Western defence industry. It came into the limelight during the latest Munich Security Conference, the world’s most prestigious gathering of global security practitioners and military industry bosses. 

Here is the backstory. At the end of May 2017, a group of far-right activists stormed Lviv region’s legislature and briefly detained its deputies inside the occupied building. They demanded amnesty for the veterans of the Russo-Ukrainian war who had been jailed for violent crimes inside and outside the war zone.

Only one of the attackers was charged at the end of the day — Mykola “Makar” Zynkevich of the National Corps, the political wing of the Azov Movement, as its members themselves call their vast network of large military units and paramilitary groups. 

Fast-forward seven years and the battle-hardened commander Zynkevich appears at a large event organised on the sides of the Munich Security Conference. Zynkevich's unit deals with cutting edge war technology, namely terrestrial robotic systems which aid — and may one day replace — soldiers on the battlefield.

The unit is called NC13, in which NC likely stands for Zynkevich’s political alma mater, National Corps. Number 13 is defined by the Anti-Defamation League as a white supremacist symbol Aryan Circle (A being the first and C being the third letter in the alphabet).

NC13 is part of the 3rd Detached Assault Brigade which currently makes up the core of Ukrainian army’s 3rd Corps. The brigade was founded by the political leadership of Azov Movement, which grew out of Patriot of Ukraine, a white supremacist group at the core of Azov battalion formed in 2014. Its leader, Andriy Biletsky, is now 3rd Corps commander and gets regularly listed among presidential hopefuls in the polls. 

The event on the sides of the Munich conference was organised by Snake Island Institute, a Ukrainian think-tank set up by Vladyslav Sobolevsky, formerly the chief of staff at Azov Regiment and deputy chief of staff at the National Corps, the political party. 

War beneficiaries

Back in his days as National Corps official, Sobolevsky helped to organise various protests aimed at disrupting the Paris agreements between presidents Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Vladimir Putin that led to a near-full ceasefire throughout 2020 and 2021. These protests were a part of the “No to Capitulation” campaign, announced by Azov Movement leader Andriy Biletsky in October 2019 in response to Ukraine and Russia agreeing upon the Steinmeier formula — an algorithm for the implementation of Minsk agreements proposed by German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

On March 12, 2020 Sobolevsky led National Corps activists who violently attacked Zelenskiy’s ally and Security Council deputy head, Serhiy Syvokho, when he attempted to present a pro-peace political platform. Two days later, Sobolevsky led a march of Azov veterans to the Russian embassy. The participants tore up a Russian flag and shot at the embassy from flare pistols in a show which helped to convince the Kremlin that Zelenskiy is helpless against far-right thugs and hence of little value as a negotiator.

The campaign against “capitulation” has succeeded in swaying Zelenskiy who effectively rejected peace on conditions that look infinitely better than what Ukraine can hope for now, after four years of Russia’s brutal all-out invasion. Under the Minsk agreements, Ukraine would have retained full sovereignty over most of its Donbas region as well as formal sovereignty over the smaller part, then de-facto controlled by Russia.

Zelenskiy made a U-turn on relations with Putin at the beginning of 2021 (it coincided with Joe Biden moving into the White House). He embarked on crossing Putin’s key red lines, clamping down on his previously untouchable Ukrainian ally Viktor Medvedchuk and launching a loud campaign to join Nato. Putin responded by starting to deploy troops on the Ukrainian border in March that year.

Despite the president succumbing to the pressure, relations between the Azov Movement and Zelensky’s administration remained tense during the buildup to the all-out invasion in 2021. That year, Sobolevsky led protests against Ukraine’s Security Service arresting a large group of Azov Movement activists in Kharkiv on charges of racketeering and extortion — a pointed attack at the movement’s fledgling business empire. The arrested activists were released at the start of the all-out invasion and went on to form the Kraken special unit under the auspices of Ukraine’s military intelligence (the HUR).

When the 3rd Detached Assault Brigade was reorganised into 3rd Corps in 2025, Kraken joined the corps. Its commanders — one of whom, Serhiy Velychko previously languished in prison in the SBU crackdown — were put in charge of the corps’ drone unit. Another Kraken commander set a drone pilot school called Killhouse Academy which ran a live FPV drone simulator show at the Munich conference event, with no one voicing objections to the propaganda of murder in its very name. 

The war in Ukraine allowed people from the far-right fringe jump on a social lift they could have never dreamed about, which makes them key beneficiaries of this conflict — along with Putin’s regime in Russia — and explains their interest in this war running for as long as possible, at best forever.

With Gopniks on board

Times have changed in a big way since 2011, when the BBC Panorama exposed neo-nazi ultras from Metallist Kharkiv accused of violence against people of colour at football matches. At the end of the programme, famous British player Rio Ferdinand called for the boycott of Euro-2012 held in Ukraine. These days, people from this very milieu are warmly welcome at major international events platforms, like the Munich conference. 

Coopting far-right extremists and football ultras as a potent street force that could either protect a political regime or help overthrow it is an old political technology. One may recall Arkan’s Tigers, a Serbian paramilitary group that threatened ethnic cleansing in Kosovo back in the 1990s. It was at least partly comprised of the Grobari (Gravediggers), the fans of Partisan Belgrade. 

Putin’s regime has been eager to engage both football fans and neo-nazi thugs since the early 2000s — just look at his administration’s dealings with BORN, a neo-nazi group responsible for assassinations of migrants and antifa activists. However many of these former Kremlin allies and FSB volunteer helpers, including people related to BORN, ended up in Ukraine in the heady days of the Maidan revolution. They deemed Ukraine to be closer to their far-right political ideals, while Putin launched a purge of the far right in Russia exactly because of their role in the Maidan revolution.

In social terms, secret services and presidential office operatives engaging with the far right are tapping into the social strata typically described in post-Soviet space as “gopniki”, the nearest English-language equivalent being chavs — low-class young men prone to gang-like behaviour and  criminal culture.

A predominantly Russian-speaking city, Kharkiv has its own word for gopniki — syavy. Two opposite paramilitary camps emerged in that city from this social strata — Patriot of Ukraine which grew into Azov movement and Oplot, a pro-Russian group that was instrumental in staging coup attempts in various Ukrainian regions in the spring of 2014. In a pattern characteristic of both Ukraine and Russia, both groups emerged at the conjunction of secret services, organised crime and far right activism.

People like Kraken founder Velychko (he coined the famous ‘Putin khuylo’ or ‘Putin is a dick’ chant when he was a leader of Metallist Kharkiv ultras), couldn’t possibly imagine that he would command a large, Nato-equipped military unit and the Western military-industrial complex would be keen to tap into his unit’s experience. 

At the Munich conference, the Snake Island Institute event was opened by former CIA chief David Petraeus. Among the event’s partners, the institute listed Alta Ares which describes itself as “a leading Nato-backed project to reshape the defence of Europe’s eastern flank”, deals with AI-powered drones and takes part in Nato drills. Danish anti-drone equipment manufacturer MyDefence and Rasmussen Global, the PR agency run by former Nato secretary-general Andres Fogh Rasmussen, were on the same list.

The war in Ukraine saw many former far-right activists turn into operators of unmanned fighting systems, primarily drones. Some of these are absolutely open about their political leanings — a fact which the Ukrainian government and its Western funders seem to be entirely okay with. For example, the 422nd drone regiment of the Ukrainian armed forces is called Luftwaffe and displays the Prussian/Nazi Iron Cross symbol on its logo.

Snake Island Institute people are also not the only ones who get hosted by major Western expert platforms like Munich conference. Take Yevhen Karas, the founder of C14 group which has “Fourteen Words” (a neo-nazi slogan) in its name and whose members were accused of conducting political assassinations after the Maidan revolution, including that of the journalist Oles Buzyna. Now a drone regiment commander, Karas was hosted by Chatham House, a leading British think-tank, last November. 

Members of the pro-Ukrainian commentariat tend to dismiss the very existence of a nazi problem in Ukraine, even as Kyiv landmark WWII Museum is currently hosting an exhibition dedicated to Russian Volunteer Corps, a far-right unit fighting on Ukraine’s side which draws inspiration from Hitler’s Russian allies of Gen. Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army and uses the fascist Spayka symbol as its logo. The curator of the exhibition, Aleksey Lyovkin, is a frontman of M8L8TH (Hitler’s Hammer), in which 88 is a neo-nazi slogan which stands for Heil Hitler.

But none of that seems to bother the members of Western security establishment when people from this milieu appear at their prestigious event in Munich, a century after the Beer Hall Putch.

UKRAINIAN NATIONALIST ARMY OUN–UPA AND THE NAZI GENOCIDE

Portugal sells twice as many drones to Ukraine than it ever did to Russia

Copyright AP Photo

By João Azevedo

Published on 04/03/2026 - EURONEWS

From €4 million in 2022, the year the war began, revenues have soared to €87.3 million in 2025. Portuguese exports to Ukraine, five to ten times lower before the conflict, now represent double the sales to Russia.

Portugal's drone exports to Ukraine have risen sharply since the start of the full-scale invasion of the country by Russia. Portugal is now selling more drones to Ukraine than it ever sold to Russia — and the gap is widening fast.

According to Jornal Económico, revenues from drone sales to Ukraine totalled €4 million in 2022, the year the conflict broke out, rising to €23 million in 2023 and €33 million in 2024.

Growth accelerated sharply in 2025, with revenues reaching €87.3 million. The largest Portuguese drone exporter to Ukraine is Tekever, a company based in Caldas da Rainha.

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The surge has reshaped Portugal's broader trade relationships.

Ukraine climbed from 75th to 36th in the ranking of Portugal's export destinations between 2019 and 2025, while Russia fell from 34th to 50th over the same period — a decline surpassed among the top 100 destinations only by Cuba, which dropped 20 places, and Syria, which fell 19.

Before the war, Portuguese exports to Ukraine were five to ten times lower than sales to Russia.

By 2023 and 2024 that gap had narrowed to around 10%, and by 2025 Ukrainian purchases had pulled ahead to double those to Russia.

Overall, Ukrainian purchases from Portugal have jumped 110%, making Ukraine one of very few countries in the top 100 export destinations to record double- or triple-digit growth.

The trend may be further boosted by a deal signed in December between Portugal and Ukraine for the joint production of underwater drones.