Russia sends in notorious neo-Nazi mercenaries to Ukraine

Neo-Nazi mercenaries known for their brutality in conflicts in Syria and the 2014 war in Crimea have been deployed by Russia in Ukraine.

The self-styled "task force Rusich", recruited from nationalist circles in Moscow and St Petersburg, posted images of its troops in the Kharkiv region.

The openly fascist and far-Right fighters further undermine Russia's claims it is fighting to "de-Nazify" Ukraine.

One photograph showed Denis Pushilin, the president of the Russian-run Donetsk People’s Republic, presenting an award to a fighter wearing the unit’s Volknut emblem - a Norse symbol appropriated by the modern neo-Nazi movement.

The soldier was also wearing a Totenkopf, the skull-and-cross-bones emblem of the SS.

Rusich was founded in the summer of 2014 by Alexei Milchakov, a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi from St Petersburg, and Yan Petrovsky, a Russian "nationalist and patriot" who grew up and was radicalised in Norway.

The unit fought mostly in the Luhansk region under Alexander Bednov, a pro-Russian warlord who was later killed in an internal separatist power struggle.

It gained a reputation for brutality in Ukraine, where Milchakov photographed himself alongside dead Ukrainian soldiers.

When it left Ukraine some members of the unit showed up in Syria alongside the Wagner Group, a private military contractor run by an ally of Vladimir Putin and used by Russia to carry out off-the-books wars in the Middle East and Africa.

Rusich has been described by some researchers as a sub-unit of Wagner, whose commander, Dmitry Utkin, bears SS tattoos.

The group has been investigated for war crimes by the International Criminal Court in the Hague, and Michalkov and Petrovsky have both been charged with terrorism in Ukraine.

Petrovsky denied war crimes in a 2017 interview with the independent Russian outlet Meduza.

The group’s leadership is part of an intimate but fractious Russian-speaking neo-Nazi movement charactarised by a fascination with Norse mythology and a carefully cultivated reputation for violence.

Milchakov’s own carefully cultivated notoriety is partly based on a legend that he once ate the head of a puppy.

Before 2014, Vladimir Putin’s government wavered between courting, co-opting and cracking down on the far-Right underground, which it saw as a potentially dangerous rival for power.

When war broke out in eastern Ukraine in 2014, Russian authorities had no qualms in allowing Nazis and other radical Right-wing and anti-Semitic groups to raise combat units.

Some members of the movement warned the Kremlin was hoping nationalists would conveniently come back in body bags.

Other radicals chose to fight on the other side, and their presence in the Azov regiment has been used by the Kremlin to claim it is fighting a "denazification" campaign in Ukraine.