Dying to kill The Russian neo-Nazis fighting Vladimir Putin's war to 'denazify' Ukraine
In June 2022, snapshots of a young man standing in front of a German flag began circulating on Ukrainian Telegram channels. He had a shaved head and a number of memorable tattoos, including an intricate portrait of Adolf Hitler on his shoulder, the emblem of the Third Reich on his chest, and, on his forearm, the phrase “Jedem das seine” — the motto displayed over the main gate of the Nazi’s Buchenwald concentration camp.
The man in the photograph is Anton Raevsky, a well-known Russian ultra-nationalist who, in 2014–2015, fought alongside Russian and Kremlin-backed forces in the Donbas. In April 2022, he went off to war once again — this time, to take part in what Vladimir Putin had dubbed a “special military operation” to “denazify” Ukraine.
‘He’d sit in the back row and read Mein Kampf’
Anton Raevsky, 37, was born and raised in Russia’s Oryol region. A longtime acquaintance, who spoke to Meduza on condition of anonymity, said that Raevsky already had a “religious bent” when they met as teenagers in 2002. He enjoyed “reading the literature” of Protestant sects, pagans, and Satanists. Raevsky, he recalled, was athletic and very fond of karate. And unlike his classmates, he was well behaved in school. He got along well with his teacher, the acquaintance said, even though he would “calmly sit in the back row and read Mein Kampf” (Adolf Hitler’s manifesto).
In the 2000s, Raevsky tested out three ultra-nationalist groups, but he soon cut ties with all but one — the Black Hundred (Chornaya Sotnya, in Russian). As his acquaintance recalled, the group’s tenets combined all of Raevsky’s core views: anti-Semitism, support for monarchy as a form of government, and Russian Orthodoxy. According to the acquaintance, Raevsky eventually made a special trip to St. Petersburg to meet with the group’s founder, Alexander Shtilmark, who granted him permission to open a Black Hundred branch in Oryol. Upon returning home, Raevsky took it upon himself to cover the city with Black Hundred-themed graffiti.
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/07/15/dying-to-kill
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