This article was published on March 5, 2022 on page 7 of number 17 of the Essential. You can subscribe here.
In September 2014, at the outbreak of the Donbass war between the Ukrainian government and pro-Russian separatists, Pavel Gubarev, then governor of the self-styled Donetsk People’s Republic, triumphantly announced on Facebook: “A true Italian fascist has joined our militia” . According to him, the Italian had arrived with a precise reason: “The Ukrainian Nazis are pro-American. By killing them I fight against the United States ”.
Andrea Palmeri, 41, is a neo-fascist militant from Lucca: known by the name of Generalissimo, he was for a long time the leader of the ultra-far-right Bulldog group; in that capacity he was responsible for various politically motivated attacks, collecting complaints and criminal proceedings.
In the summer of 2014, while under special surveillance, Palmeri left Lucca and then reappeared in the Donbass. A photo posted on Facebook showed him shirtless with a Kalashnikov, next to two militiamen. He has not returned since, and in the meantime the Luhansk People’s Republic granted him citizenship for merits obtained on the ground.
Since February 24, when the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, Palmeri has been posting several updates on social networks. On 1 March you wrote that “unfortunately the situation is getting out of hand and is dangerous” since “Europe is filling Ukraine with lethal weapons, information is invaded by russophobic propaganda and fake news”.
For the Italian justice Palmeri is a fugitive. On September 28, 2021, the Genoa court sentenced him in first instance to five years of imprisonment: according to the accusation, he would have recruited people to make them fight in the pro-Russian militias in Donbass.
The investigation was launched in 2013 in La Spezia, after some neo-Nazis had smeared the walls of the church of the Sacred Heart with writings praising the former captain of the SS Erich Priebke.
Palmeri is the best known foreign fighter Italian in Ukraine, but he is not the only one. Currently, according to some Italian newspapers, at least three other Italian citizens are fighting with the pro-Russian militias.
One is Massimiliano Cavalleri (nom de guerre Spartaco), 46, who in an interception of the investigation on the recruiters, says: “If I go back I want to take the gun and start shooting left and right”. Then there are Gabriele Carugati (Arcangelo), 32, son of the former secretary of the Varese League, and Edy Ongaro (Bozambo), who defines himself as an “anti-fascist internationalist committed to fighting injustices in the world“.
In the last post published on his Facebook profile, Ongaro affirms that “massacring Novorussian civilians has never brought luck to those who came from the west, subhuman Nazi bastards which have always been an imperialist instrument”.
The Italian fighter Gabriele Carugati in Donetsk, Ukraine, 2015
(Alfredo Bosco (Light))
According to the report Career break or new career? Extremist foreign fighters in Ukraine, of the Counter extremism project (Cep), there are about 17 thousand foreign fighters in Ukraine. Researcher Kacper Rękawek has calculated that the vast majority (15 thousand) come from Russia, the rest from Western countries.
Francesco Marone, researcher at the Institute for International Political Studies (Ispi), estimates that over the last eight years the fighters who left Italy would be about sixty. A flow that is far from negligible: in Europe only Germany and Serbia have higher numbers, 150 and 100 respectively.
Some, says Marone to the Essential, have left to change their lives: “They have decided to leave Italy and start again somewhere else”. Others, on the other hand, went “for mainly economic or professional reasons: perhaps they were already professional soldiers, and the conflict in eastern Ukraine was an opportunity to pursue a career or make useful contacts to work in private security”. For still others, “ideology seems to have been the most important spring”.
According to Rękawek’s report, more than half of Western foreign fighters in Ukraine have far-right positions. The interesting thing is that the neo-fascist fighters have split equally between the Ukrainians and the separatists.
Some have ideally joined Vladimir Putin and his worldview, considered a bastion of resistance to “globalism” and the moral corruption of Western liberal democracies; others have embraced Ukrainian nationalism and the dream of a “national revolution”.
The parallelism with the phenomenon of global jihadism is not convincing
This is the case of an Italian fighter who served in the extremist group Pravy sektor (Right Sector) during the pro-European protests of Euromaidan and subsequently enlisted in the ranks of the Azov battalion, a militia born in the spring of 2014 from the merger of two groups of far right led by Andriy Biletsky (called the White Führer by his followers).
During the Donbass War, the Azov battalion was at the forefront of the battle of Mariupol and contributed to the reconquest of the city, being then awarded with a position in the Ukrainian National Guard. Two reports from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights accused the battalion of indiscriminate killings of civilians, looting and torture.
Italian fighter Massimiliano Cavalieri in Donetsk, Ukraine, 2016
(Alfredo Bosco (Light))
In a 2015 interview with Corriere della Sera, the volunteer said that in the battalion there were “many Swedes, many Russians, but also French, Slavs and seven Italians”. He even praised his compatriots sided with the pro-Russians: “They move with the same spirit that pushed me, so I respect them.”
Today the situation of 2014 and 2015 could be replicated on a larger scale. The Ukrainian defense ministry created an International Legion, and President Volodymyr Zelenskii encouraged people to enlist to express “support for our country”. Hanna Maliar, Deputy Defense Minister, announced on social networks that there are already thousands of requests.
The ambiguity of governments
So far the governments of European countries have held an ambiguous attitude. UK Foreign Minister Liz Truss even encouraged her citizens to go, drawing criticism from the Conservative Party. The Belgian foreign ministry, on the other hand, has advised its citizens against going to Ukraine.
The Italian authorities have not yet officially pronounced themselves on the issue. On a legal level, the situation is complex: fighting abroad is not a crime, it becomes so only if you fight for a terrorist organization.
The decree that introduced this new criminal offense was approved in February 2015 after the terrorist attack on the headquarters of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, and is tailored to jihadist terrorism.
In this case, however, the parallelism with the phenomenon of global jihadism is not convincing. “In Ukraine there are, neither on one side nor on the other, organizations that are programmatically engaged in terrorist activities on an international scale,” says the researcher.
“And groups like Azov, although they can be part of a transnational far-right vision, have little to do with the global agenda of the Islamic State group”.
But actually, alongside people who care about the Ukrainian cause, extremists could also mobilize. “The reasons why they had already gone there, including the presence of far-right battalions, have not disappeared,” explains Marone.
This article was published on March 5, 2022 on page 7 of number 17 of the Essential. You can subscribe here.