“Russia is an insult to these people”

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Excitement in the Russian border area. Attacks broke out in southwestern Bryansk Oblast on Thursday. For Kremlin boss Vladimir Putin (70) a “terrorist attack by Ukraine”, for Selensky adviser Mykhailo Podoljak (51) the work of Russian partisans. “Representatives of the Russian Volunteer Corps” have claimed responsibility for the attacks, according to videos posted on Telegram and Twitter.

At the forefront of this group: one of Germany’s best-known neo-Nazis, Denis Nikitin (38, née Kasputin), who moved to Germany from Russia as a child and lived as a refugee in Cologne. He himself founded the volunteer corps in August 2022 – to fight against Putin, according to his own words.

Russian neo-Nazis have contacts in Switzerland

Nikitin is also no stranger to Switzerland. Since 2017 at the latest, the neo-Nazi has ties to the former chairman of the far-right National Oriented Swiss (PNOS) party, Florian Gerber. He is said to have handled the affairs of his clothing company White Rex in Switzerland for Nikitin, as reported by “Spiegel”.

In addition, the Russian had repeatedly offered self-defense courses for the PNOS before receiving a 10-year entry ban from the Schengen area in 2019. Since then and since the dissolution of Pnos in 2022, it is unclear whether Nikitin still has contacts in Switzerland.

« Liberation from Putin’s dictatorship »

It is not clear on whose behalf the corps actually works. Nikitin claims to have received permission from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (45). In an interview he gave in the fall of 2022, Nikitin explained that Zelensky himself agreed to the integration of the volunteer corps into the Ukrainian army.

However, this has not yet been confirmed by the Ukrainian side. Ukraine’s military intelligence, meanwhile, described the reports of the skirmishes in the Bryansk region as “the continuation of Russia’s transformation, its purge and liberation from Putin’s dictatorship,” according to Ukraine’s Hromadske news agency.

Kacper Rekawek, who works at the University of Oslo, has been researching right-wing extremism and foreign fighters in Ukraine for many years. He tells Blick, “It certainly wasn’t a false flag operation on the Russian side.”

But why are Russian right-wing extremists fighting Putin at all? The reason is simple: “In the 2010s, the Kremlin began to control far-right violence domestically,” Rekawek explains. Figures from a study by Leiden University show that Russia has experienced five times more violence by far-right militants than the United States and almost four times more than Germany. “A threat to the Kremlin.”

The result: some of these nationalists fled to Belarus or Ukraine – where they are now fighting Putin. Nikitin in an interview: «Russia is a political nation. But we, we are Russians. In my home country people try to mix everything up.”

Rekawek explains Nikitin’s thoughts: “The way Russia is currently being run is an insult to these people. A country that encourages migration is ruled by a kleptocratic regime and, in the eyes of these extremists, sends Asian soldiers to Ukraine to fight Europeans.”

Source: Blick