Russia’s claim that it invaded Ukraine to “denazify” it has beenthoroughly debunked, but what has received much less attention is Russia’s own neo-Nazi “problem.” I put “problem” in quotes because there’s no evidence Kremlin considers neo-Nazis inside Russia a problem. By contrast, Russia has ahistory of cultivating and collaborating with neo-Nazis, at home andabroad. Another great summary of Russia’s support of neo-Nazi activity ishere. In this article, I’d like to tell you about a Russian ultra-nationalist white supremacy group called theRussian Imperial Movement(RIM). Unless otherwise noted, all the information below comes from Stanford University’s “Mapping Militant Organizations” project (RIM summary page;full report).

In 2020, RIM was designated by the US as a特别指定的全球恐怖分子, the first white supremacist group to be assigned this label. Yet RIM operates relatively openly in Russia and, although it does not receive any formal support from the regime, its operations have not been targeted or hampered by the government in any way. Nor is it on Russia’s list of terrorist or extremist organizations.

RIM was founded in 2002 and is based in St. Petersburg. It is anti-Semitic and anti-Ukrainian. More generally, it espouses an ideology of white supremacy and ethnic Russian nationalism and views European and US governments as enemies. As its name suggests, it also advocates the return to Russia’s tsarist regime. In its early years, its activities were largely political: it worked with other far-right groups to form opposition parties and staged demonstrations. One of these attempts involved the creation of a nationalist party called the New Force, which, among other things proposed that only ethnic Russians should be allowed to immigrate to Russia and that undocumented immigrants should be put into labor camps before being deported.

RIM在2014年在乌克兰东部新的冲突中看到了军事活动。它还启动了一项名为“游击队”（“游击队”）的军事训练计划。党派的主要目的是培训俄罗斯人的战斗技能，但也很乐意培训外国右翼极端分子。RIM声称已在2014 - 2016年间训练并派遣了300多名俄罗斯人前往乌克兰东部与亲俄罗斯分离主义者一起战斗。帝国军团的成员（武装翼的名称）也在叙利亚和利比亚作战。2017年，《华盛顿邮报》conducted an interviewwith a Partizan instructor, who spouted a lot of the same anti-Ukrainian sentiment currently beingpromoted by Putin.

Since 2015, RIM has also collaborated and built ties with a variety of extreme-right organizations around the world in a variety of ways, including by sending its members to the US in 2017 to network with US neo-Nazis, attending a variety of far-right conferences, and, of course, providing military training through its Partizan program. In 2016–2017, two men who had trained in the Partizan program bombed a left-wing bookstore, a shelter for refugees, and a public campground that housed asylum seekers in Sweden. The prosecution cited training by RIM as a key step in their radicalization.

To be fair, RIM is neither huge nor mainstream. But it’s important to shed light on what Putin allows to happen in his own country as he professes to “denazify” others. Moreover, just as RIM was given a boost by the 2014 invasion of Crimea and Donbass, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 may well strengthen it further, as itseems to have done with extreme right groups elsewhere. And while it would be wrong to deny that Ukraine is free fromright-wing extremists，如果西方帮助乌克兰果断地赢得这场战争，美国和欧盟将能够与乌克兰政府合作，以确保这些团体保持边缘化。不幸的是，关于俄罗斯的极端权利不能说同样的话。