As Ukrainian journalist Dmitry Gordon has asserted, the rise of extreme nationalists in Ukraine and the so-called "Nazification" of its politics is fundamentally an FSB project—a deliberate infiltration and amplification by Russian security services to sow division, justify aggression, and destabilize the country from within.

As Ukrainian journalist Dmitry Gordon has asserted, the rise of extreme nationalists in Ukraine and the so-called "Nazification" of its politics is fundamentally an FSB project—a deliberate infiltration and amplification by Russian security services to sow division, justify aggression, and destabilize the country from within. Gordon, known for his investigative interviews and critiques of Kremlin influence, has pointed to how Moscow cultivates far-right elements in Ukraine to create a facade of internal threats, making invasion appear as "denazification." If this holds true—and evidence from declassified reports and analyst investigations supports it—then a parallel operation unfolded in Donetsk and other Russian-backed regions, where the same FSB hand fostered "black-hundredism" (the virulent, antisemitic ultranationalism of pre-revolutionary Russian far-right groups like the Black Hundreds) fused with Duginism, Alexander Dugin's neo-Eurasianist ideology that romanticizes fascist mysticism and imperial revival. This dual-track manipulation reveals the same orchestrating force preparing the ground for war on both sides, pitting brotherly Slavic peoples against each other in a manufactured conflict that echoes the engineered collapse of the USSR.In Ukraine, the FSB's playbook involved embedding agents and ideologues within nationalist movements to escalate extremism. Take the Azov Battalion (later Regiment), formed in 2014 amid the Donbas crisis: while it drew genuine Ukrainian patriots defending against Russian proxies, it was infiltrated by figures with suspiciously deep Russian far-right ties. Sergei Korotkikh, a Belarusian-born ex-neo-Nazi from Russia's National Socialist Society, became a key Azov commander despite his past in Russian ultranationalist circles—raising red flags about FSB orchestration, as noted in investigations by the Illiberalism Studies Program. 

illiberalism.org

 Similarly, other Russian émigré neo-Nazis like Alexey Levkin (former leader of the Russian pagan-fascist Wotanjugend) embedded themselves in Azov-linked groups, bringing fascist aesthetics and rhetoric that amplified the "Nazi" label Moscow loves to exploit. Analysts like Vyacheslav Likhachev have documented how these infiltrators turned grassroots defense units into magnets for international scrutiny, allowing Kremlin propaganda to paint all Ukrainian resistance as "Nazism." This wasn't organic; it was a calculated FSB effort to radicalize and discredit, drawing from the same "biomass" of disaffected youth and ex-convicts—marginalized people manipulated as cannon fodder.On the flip side, in Donetsk and Luhansk under Russian occupation, the FSB mirrored this by nurturing its own fascist-leaning proxies to mirror and escalate the conflict. Groups like the Espanola Battalion (a volunteer unit of Russian far-right football hooligans and nationalists fighting in Donbas since 2014) openly flaunted Nazi symbols—swastika tattoos, SS runes, and Hitler salutes—while posing as "anti-fascist" liberators. Espanola's fighters, many with backgrounds in Russian neo-Nazi scenes like the Slavic Union, were recruited and funded through Kremlin channels, blending black-hundredist antisemitism (targeting "Jewish oligarchs" in Kyiv) with Dugin's Eurasianist calls for a "multipolar" empire crushing Western "decadence." Similarly, the Wagner Group, the notorious PMC led by Yevgeny Prigozhin until his 2023 death, was packed with convicts sporting Nazi tattoos (e.g., SS Totenkopf skulls, Iron Crosses) and far-right ideologies, yet framed as Russia's "denazifiers." Wagner's recruitment from prisons—offering freedom for frontline service—exploited the same "biomass" of societal outcasts as Azov did, but under direct FSB oversight. Reports from the Freedom House highlight how these groups gained legitimacy through the war, mirroring Ukraine's far-right surge but serving Moscow's narrative of a "civil war" among Slavs. 

freedomhouse.org

This symmetry isn't coincidence—it's the hallmark of a single directing hand, the same FSB/Kremlin apparatus that dismantled the USSR in 1991 through engineered chaos and now engineers fratricide among its core Slavic nations. The Soviet collapse was no accident: it involved FSB predecessors (KGB) inflating ethnic tensions, funding separatists, and staging economic sabotage to fragment the union into controllable pieces. Today, that same playbook pits Russians and Ukrainians—historically brotherly peoples sharing language, culture, and Orthodox faith—against each other in a bloodbath that benefits only the elite manipulators. Dugin, with his pro-fascist roots in 1980s Moscow occult-Nazi circles (adopting pseudonyms like "Hans Sievers" after SS occultists), provides the intellectual veneer: his "project" amplifies black-hundredist revival in Russia while his ideas indirectly fuel mirrored extremism in Ukraine via infiltrated networks. Tie this to Ivan Ilyin's rehabilitated fascist philosophy (praising Mussolini and Hitler as "healthy" forces, now canonized by Putin) and Andrey Vlasov's collaborationist tricolor (the "Vlasov rag" flying over modern Russia), and the pattern is clear: a regime sustaining dark influences to orchestrate division.Beneath it all, my suspicion of Dugin's closet repression—a "комплекс шкафного гея пойманного"—adds a personal layer: his hyper-passionate anti-LGBT patriotism, starkly contrasting his marriage to pioneering lesbian activist Evgenia Debryanskaya (co-founder of Russia's first gay rights groups), suggests overcompensation masking vulnerabilities, perhaps mirroring the regime's own projected aggressions. In essence, from Azov to Espanola/Wagner, Ukraine's "Nazification" to Donetsk's Duginist cults, and the USSR's fall to today's Slavic strife, it's the same hand pulling strings—a profoundly worrying elite conspiracy demanding exposure.

https://www.illiberalism.org/unexpected-friendships-cooperation-of-ukrainian-ultra-nationalists-with-russian-and-pro-kremlin-actors

https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/2020-02/FarRightEurasia_FINAL_.pdf