Harpers | Ukraine is among the poorest countries in Europe and the closest thing the continent has to a failing state. It is mired in a smoldering conflict with Russian-backed separatists in its eastern provinces, and its state institutions have been almost entirely captured by competing oligarchs. Corruption pervades almost every level of government. Outside Kyiv’s metro stations, elderly women in head scarves and bedraggled war veterans beg for change, while nearby the streets are lined with luxury shops and petty gangsters run red lights in black SUVs without fear of rebuke. Millions have emigrated to Poland or Russia for work. The capital has the uncanny feel, at times, of a postmodern Weimar, where Instagram influencers brunch in cafés tricked out in the international hipster style opposite billboards adorned with the faces of Ukraine’s martyrs in the war against Russia.
But perhaps Ukraine’s clearest departure from the standard model of European liberalism is its proliferation of armed far-right factions, considered by analysts and ordinary Ukrainians alike to be the secretly funded private armies of the elite oligarch class. They fought in the trenches outside Donetsk and now patrol city streets, enforcing a particular vision of order with the blessing of overstretched and underfunded police departments. In some regions, they serve as official election monitors.
Recruitment posters for these militias can be found across Kyiv, calling on disenchanted veterans and disaffected youths to join them in their mission to remake the world by crushing liberalism. To their supporters, these groups are enforcers of the popular will, defenders of the nation against Russian encroachment from the East and liberal values from the West. To others, especially Ukraine’s Western-funded NGOs, increasingly isolated outposts of liberal order, they pose a serious and growing challenge to Ukraine’s social harmony, and, ultimately, to the state itself.
The most powerful and ambitious of these militias is Azov. Like many of the country’s armed far-right groups, it was founded during the 2014 revolution, when the Moscow-friendly autocrat Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in bloody clashes around Kyiv’s central square, Maidan Nezalezhnosti. More than one hundred protesters were killed in the city, mostly by snipers from the elite Berkut police force, before Yanukovych was overthrown and forced to flee to Russia. Amid the chaos, former members of Patriot of Ukraine, a neo-Nazi paramilitary group, established Azov. The militia first fought in the capital, then aided the military in battles against Russian-backed separatist forces, including the reconquest of the city of Mariupol. In November 2014, Azov was officially integrated into the National Guard of Ukraine, with its own armored units and artillery battery. Since then, it has built a wide-ranging infrastructure of civil and military groups—including the National Militia, an auxiliary police force—and spawned a variety of summer camps, training centers, and veterans’ programs. In 2016, Biletsky launched the National Corps. While they have thus far polled at around 1 percent, their failure to generate electoral enthusiasm belies their growing presence both on the streets and within the organs of the state.
This spring, as the novel coronavirus triggered an economic crisis across Europe, Azov capitalized on the uncertainty by pumping out a stream of social-media propaganda that highlighted its humanitarian efforts targeting poor Ukrainians. Azov press releases showed masked volunteers disinfecting trams and common spaces in apartment buildings, handing out packages of food to families and retirees under quarantine, and delivering surgical masks to underfunded clinics and hospitals in neglected provincial towns. “During this time, our Volunteers already know better than social services who really needs help,” claimed one post.
Volunteers are not shown on TV channels, but activists do their job every day. We help those who really need it. Who needed it before quarantine, and became even more vulnerable during quarantine.
National Corps members repaired crumbling orphanages, sewed face masks, and plastered walls with advice on hygiene and social distancing—making a show of performing basic services the Ukrainian state was failing to provide. At the bottom of each press release was a phone number and the exhortation join us! together we will overcome all difficulties!
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