Bars and restaurants are donating food to refugees and raising money for the army. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts are fundraising for the commercial drones and night vision equipment the troops at the front desperately need. Ukrainian civil society is at the heart of this war, with evidence of the self-sacrifice and creativity of the nation’s embattled people visible at every turn. Pavement billboards display photos of troops grateful for their new night vision goggles above the bank details funds should be directed to; volunteer militias request donations for new vehicles on Telegram; one Ukrainian veteran I met a few years ago has sold his thriving café in a Kyiv hipster district to buy a new drone for his unit.

Andriy Lyubka is a critically-acclaimed young novelist from the sleepy western city of Uzhhorod. I met him 800 miles to the east of his Transcarpathian hometown in the now-frontline Donbas city of Sloviansk. He was dropping off new SUVs, food and generators to fighters from Uzhhorod’s Territorial Defence Forces, the volunteer militia now holding vital positions as dug-in infantry.

In perfect English, he spoke with the smooth, slightly bored fluency of someone used to being interviewed by foreigners, at least in better times. “Now I cannot do my regular work because I cannot concentrate, focus on the work, you know,” he told me, as sirens wailed unceasingly in the background. “It is impossible for me to write or translate. And that is why I decided that I will dedicate myself to this very regular physical work.”

His first fundraising appeal on his Facebook page raised twice as much money as he expected, enabling him to buy two SUVs for Uzhhorod’s poorly-equipped TDF forces in the Donbas. Now he makes regular trips, handing over off-road vehicles sourced in Western Europe to his hometown volunteers fighting at the other end of this vast country. A critic of prewar Ukrainian society — his widely-praised novel Carbide, recently translated into English, is a fable about smuggling Ukraine’s entire population into Western Europe through a hidden tunnel — Lyubka sees the war as having brought a divided nation closer together.

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“It’s maybe the first time I’ve visited Donbas,” he told me. “But now, we have these mutual steps towards one another, because a lot of people from Donbas are living now in our cities in Western Ukraine, and our friends are fighting here at the eastern edge of the front. And of course, it is a very fast method to create one united Ukrainian nation and it works very well. It is one of the main achievements of this war of Putin’s. It is of course opposite to what he planned.”

For the volunteer Territorials from Uzhhorod, fighting far from home in Sloviansk, the war is a difficult duty they cannot shirk. Sociology Professor Fedir Sandor, a 46-year-old father of four, left his job at Uzhhorod University to fight in Donbas. A photograph of him coaching his students through their end of term exams from his frontline trench recently went viral on Ukrainian social media. Meeting him in Sloviansk — he would not take me to his position, because of the constant casualties his fellow soldiers were taking from Russian shelling — Sandor outlined the difficult circumstances he was living in.

“So this is a totally new experience for me, because I’ve never served in the Army, never took part in any military activities and now I’m learning — I used to teach students and now I’m being taught!” A bald, burly man with a thick, fair beard, there is little trace of the Sociology professor of four months ago in the assault-vested combat veteran standing before me. “Today was cluster bombs, sometimes it’s chemical weapons,” he told me. “Yesterday the house where soldiers live was hit and three were wounded. That’s why the main weapon of a soldier is a spade!” he laughed.

The heavy casualty rate among TDF fighters is alarming, and social media videos of volunteers refusing to fight because of lack of weapons, or of wives and mothers protesting against their men being sent to the distant Donbas, are regularly shared by pro-Russian social media accounts. I asked Sandor if he felt well-prepared, as a completely untrained volunteer, when the war broke out. “We were training to use machine guns and firing weapons but it’s a totally different situation we’re learning here,” he replied. “It’s a war not of machine guns but of artillery and IT technologies. But I don’t want my wife to be threatened with rape as it was in Bucha. It’s better for us to stop it here.”

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As young TDF fighters got to grips with their newly-donated SUV — I could hear the sound of, unexpectedly, Fischerspooner’s “Emerge” blasting out of the windows while they twiddled with the controls — I chatted to Andriy, huddling against the unseasonably cold wind. “I think that now, in three weeks, this is our eleventh car,” he said with satisfaction.

Andriy’s sense of accomplishment was visible. Before the war, many ordinary Ukrainians were profoundly dissatisfied with how the country was run: millions had moved to Western Europe, and to Russia, in search of better alternatives. The Maidan revolution had kept the country out of Russia’s orbit — at great cost — but not enough else had changed. But now, Andriy is using his profile as an ascendant writer to provide the equipment that may preserve the lives of his fellow Uzhhorod volunteers fighting at the front. He is doing his bit for the nation in its time of greatest trial and, as with many Ukrainians, doing so gives him a greater personal stake in the new Ukraine being forged by war.

“It is very deep changes that are now taking place in the consciousness of people,” he told me. “So, I think that maybe we even needed something like this earthquake as a big war, you know, because now we are ready to build a new, good country, and the only things we need now are victory, and peace.”

But the Russian claim is false: Ukraine is a genuine liberal-democratic state, though an imperfect one, with free elections that produce significant changes of power, including the election, in 2019, of the liberal-populist reformer, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Ukraine is, unequivocally, not a Nazi state: the Russian casus belli is a lie. And yet, there is a danger that the understandable desire by Ukrainian and Western commentators not to provide ammunition for Russian propaganda has led to an over-correction — and one that may not ultimately serve Ukraine’s best interests. 

During one recent news bulletin on BBC Radio 4, the correspondent referred to “Putin’s baseless claim that the Ukrainian state supports Nazis”. This is, itself, disinformation: it is an observable fact, which the BBC itself has previously reported on accurately and well, that the Ukrainian state has, since 2014, provided funding, weapons and other forms of support to extreme Right-wing militias, including neo-Nazi ones. This is not a new or controversial observation. Back in 2019, I spent time in Ukraine interviewing senior figures in the constellation of state-backed extreme Right-wing groups for Harper’s magazine; they were all quite open about their ideology and plans for the future. 

Indeed, some of the best coverage of Ukraine’s extreme Right-wing groups has come from the open-source intelligence outlet Bellingcat, which is not known for a favourable attitude towards Russian propaganda. Bellingcat’s excellent reporting of this under-discussed topic over the past few years has largely focused on the Azov movement, Ukraine’s most powerful extreme Right-wing group, and the one most favoured by the state’s largesse. 

Over the past few years, Bellingcat researchers have explored Azov’s outreach effort to American white nationalists and its funding by the Ukrainian state to teach “patriotic education” and to support demobilised veterans; it has looked into Azov’s hosting of neo-Nazi black metal music festivals, and its support of the exiled, anti-Putin Russian neo-Nazi group Wotanjugend — practitioners of a very marginal form of esoteric Nazism, who share space with Azov in their Kyiv headquarters, fight alongside them in the front line, and have also played a role translating and disseminating a Russian-language version of the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto. Unfortunately, Bellingcat’s invaluable coverage of Ukraine’s extreme-Right ecosystem has not been updated since the current hostilities began, despite the war with Russia providing these groups with something of a renaissance.

The Azov movement was founded in 2014 by Andriy Biletsky, former leader of the Ukrainian neo-Nazi group Patriot of Ukraine, during the battle for control of Kyiv’s central Independence Square during the Maidan Revolution against the country’s Russia-leaning, elected president Viktor Yanukovych. Back in 2010, Biletsky claimed that it would one day be Ukraine’s role to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade… against Semite-led untermenschen“. The revolution, and the war which followed, would give him the national stage for which he had so long craved.

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Alongside other far-Right groups, such as Right Sector, the nascent Azov movement played an outside role in the fighting against Ukrainian security police which left 121 dead and secured the success of the revolution. Acquiring control of a large property, just off Independence Square, from the Ministry of Defence, Azov turned the building, now named Cossack House, into its Kyiv headquarters and recruiting centre. Though Azov has since toned down its rhetoric, and many of its fighters may be non-ideological and simply attracted by its martial reputation, its activists are often to be seen covered in tattoos of SS totenkopfs and lightning bolt runes, or sporting the Sonnenrad or Black Sun symbol of esoteric Nazism. Derived from a pattern created for Himmler at Wewelsburg castle in Germany, chosen as an occultic Camelot for senior SS officers, the Sonnenrad is like the Wolfsangel rune of the SS Das Reich division one of Azov’s official symbols, worn on their unit patches and on the shields behind which their fighters parade in evocative torchlit ceremonies.

I’ve visited Cossack House multiple times to interview senior Azov figures, including the leader of its National Militia (which provides auxiliary patrolling muscle to Ukraine’s official police force), Ihor Mikhailenko, and Azov’s International Secretary and intellectual linchpin, Olena Semenyaka. It’s an impressive setup: along with classrooms for the educational lectures they provide with state funding, Cossack House is home to Azov’s literary salon and publishing house, Plomin, where glamorous young hipster intellectuals busy themselves with organising Right-wing seminars and book translations, beneath glossy posters of fascist luminaries such as Yukio Mishima, Cornelius Codreanu, and Julius Evola.

But Azov’s power derives from the gun, not their literary efforts. Back in 2014, when the Ukrainian army was weak and underequipped, Azov volunteers under Biletsky’s leadership fought at the vanguard of the battle against Russian-speaking separatists in the east, reconquering the city of Mariupol, where they are currently under siege. Effective, courageous and highly ideological fighters, Azov’s efforts in the east won them great renown as defenders of the nation, and the support of a grateful Ukrainian state, which incorporated Azov as an official regiment of Ukraine’s National Guard. In this, Azov is believed to have enjoyed the support of Arsen Avakov, a powerful oligarch and Ukraine’s Interior Minister between 2014 and 2019. 

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Both Ukrainian human rights activists and leaders of rival extreme Right-wing groups have complained to me, in interviews, about the unfair advantage Avakov’s patronage gave the Azov movement in establishing its dominant role in Ukraine’s Rightwing sphere — including official functions as election observers and state-sanctioned auxiliary police. Ukraine is not a Nazi state, but the Ukrainian state’s support — for whatever reasons, valid or otherwise — of neo-Nazi or Nazi-aligned groups makes the country an outlier in Europe. The continent has many extreme Right-wing groups, but only in Ukraine do they possess their own tank and artillery units, with the state’s support.

This awkwardly close relationship between a liberal-democratic state supported by the West and armed proponents of a very different ideology has caused some discomfort in the past for Ukraine’s Western backers. The US Congress has gone back and forth in recent years on whether Azov should be blocked from receiving American arms shipments, with Democrat lawmakers even urging in 2019 that Azov be listed as a global terrorist organisation. In interviews, Semenyaka complained to me that this unease was a result of their listening to Russian propaganda, and insisted that American cooperation with Azov would be beneficial for both parties.

In this, the current war has surely come as a blessed relief for Azov. Biletsky’s attempt to found a political party — the National Corps — met with almost zero success, with even a united bloc of Ukraine’s far- and extreme Right-wing parties failing to clear the very low hurdle for parliamentary representation in the last election: Ukrainian voters simply do not want what they are selling, and reject their worldview. Yet in time of war, Azov and similar groups come to the forefront, with the Russian invasion seemingly reversing the downward spiral that set in for them following Avakov’s resignation due to international pressure. Judging by their social media, Azov’s armed units are expanding: they’re forming new battalions in Kharkiv and Dnipro, a new special forces unit in Kyiv (where Biletsky is organising at least some aspects of the capital’s defence) and local defence militias in western cities such as Ivano-Frankivsk.

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Along with other extreme Right-wing groups such as Karpatska Sich (whose militancy against Western Ukraine’s Hungarian-speaking minority, including Roma, has drawn criticism from the Hungarian government), the Eastern Orthodox group Tradition and Order, the neo-Nazi group C14, and the extreme Right-wing militia Freikorps, the Russian invasion has allowed Azov to restore its earlier prominence, burnishing its heroic reputation with its dogged defence of Mariupol alongside regular Ukrainian marines. While just a few weeks ago there was still a concerted Western effort to not directly arm Azov, now they seem to be a prime beneficiary of Western munitions and training: these pictures tweeted by the Belarusian opposition outlet NEXTA show Azov fighters being instructed in the use of British-made NLAW anti-tank munitions by blurred-out trainers. 

Similarly, until the Russian invasion, Western governments and news outlets frequently warned of the dangers of Western neo-Nazis and white supremacists gaining combat experience fighting alongside Azov and their allied Nazi subfactions. Yet in the heat of the moment, these concerns seem to have dissipated: a recent photograph of newly-arrived Western volunteers, including Britons, in Kyiv shows Azov’s Olena Semenyaka smiling happily in the background, alongside the Swedish neo-Nazi and former Azov sniper Mikael Skillt. Indeed, Misanthropic Division, a unit of Western neo-Nazis fighting alongside Azov, is currently advertising on Telegram for European militants to join the flow of volunteers and link up with them in Ukraine, “for victory and Valhalla.”

Like Ukraine’s other extreme Right-wing militias, Azov are dogged, disciplined and committed fighters, which is why the weak Ukrainian state has found itself forced to rely upon their muscle during its hours of greatest need: during the Maidan revolution, during the war against separatists from 2014 onwards, and now to fend off the Russian invasion. There has been a certain new-found reticence abroad to speak frankly about their role, no doubt for fear that doing so will provide ammunition for Russian propaganda. This fear is surely misplaced: after all, groups such as Azov are only prominent precisely because of Russia’s meddling in Ukraine. Instead of de-Nazifying the country, Russian aggression has helped solidify the role and presence of extreme Right-wing factions in Ukraine’s military, reinvigorating a waning political force rejected by the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians.

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If anything, the primary threat posed by groups such as Azov is not to the Russian state — Russia happily supports extreme Right-wing elements in its Wagner mercenary group and in the separatist republics, after all — nor to Western nations whose disaffected citizens may find themselves drawn to a combat role alongside them. Instead, the threat is to the future stability of the Ukrainian state itself, as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch have long warned. While they may be useful now, in the event of the decapitation or evacuation of Ukraine’s liberal government from Kyiv, perhaps to Poland or Lviv, or more likely, in the event of Zelenskyy being forced by events to sign a peace deal surrendering Ukrainian territory, groups like Azov may find a golden opportunity to challenge what remains of the state and consolidate their own power bases, even if only locally.

Back in 2019, I asked Semenyaka if Azov still saw itself as a revolutionary movement. Thinking carefully, she replied, “We are ready for different scenarios. If Zelenskyy is even worse than [ex-president] Poroshenko, if he is the same kind of populist, but without certain skills, connections and background, then, of course, Ukrainians would be heavily in danger. And we have already developed a plan of what can be done, how we can develop parallel state structures, how we can customise these entry strategies to save the Ukrainian state, if [Zelenskyy] would become a puppet of the Kremlin, for instance. Because it’s quite possible.”

Senior Azov figures have been explicit, over the course of years, in stating that Ukraine has unique potential as a springboard for the “reconquest” of Europe from liberals, homosexuals and immigrants. While their broader contintental ambitions may have a very doubtful chance of success, a broken, impoverished and angry postwar Ukraine, or worse, a Ukraine suffering years of bombardment and occupation with large areas outside central government control, would surely be a fertile breeding ground for a form of extreme Right-wing militancy not seen in Europe for many decades. 

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Right now, Ukraine and Zelenskyy may well need the military capabilities and ideological zeal of nationalist and extreme Right-wing militias simply to fight and win their battle for national survival. But when the war ends, both Zelenskyy and his Western backers must be very careful to ensure that they have not empowered groups whose goals are in direct conflict with the liberal-democratic norms they both pledge adherence to. Arming and funding Azov, Tradition and Order and Karpatska Sich may well be one of the hard choices forced by war, but disarming them must surely be a priority when the war ends. 

As we have seen in Syria, there is nothing that radicalises a civilian population more than dispossession, bombing and bombardment. Just as in Syria, there is surely a danger that temporarily empowering extremist factions for their military utility, even indirectly, may have grave and unintended consequences. And in Syria, too, there were strong early taboos among Western commentators in discussing the rise of extremist militias that would later cannibalise the rebel cause, for fear of validating Assad’s propaganda that the rebels were all terrorists: this early reticence did not, in the end, work in the rebels’ favour. 

It is not doing Putin’s work for him to observe frankly that there are extremist elements fighting against him in Ukraine: indeed, it is only by carefully monitoring — and perhaps, curtailing — their activities now, that we can ensure they will not deepen Ukraine’s misery in the years to come. For years, liberal Western commentators complained that the Ukrainian state was turning a blind eye to its Right-wing extremist factions: it serves no good purpose for the same commentators to now do the same thing themselves.

A week after it launched its attempted blitz across Ukraine, finally the Russian army has taken its first major city: Kherson, a key port city in the south of the country. But the defenders of Kyiv and Kharkiv have held out; elsewhere, Ukrainians have succeeded in repelling the invasion.

Vladimir Putin gambled everything on swiftly dismantling the Ukrainian state — and on that front, he has failed. That the vastly outnumbered Ukrainian air force has yet to be knocked out of the sky is in itself a surreal expression of how terribly Putin underestimated the capacity of the Ukrainian army and population. Simply put: those in Putin’s circle who believe that Ukraine doesn’t exist, that Ukrainians are simply exiled or confused Russians just waiting to be invited back home, have categorically been proved wrong.

Many more innocent people will likely die before this is all over; many more houses will be bombed. Bridges will be demolished by retreating Ukrainian forces. Already, several thousand civilians are reported to have been killed, while millions of others have been forced to flee into neighbouring countries. And yet the country has so far survived a massive assault by a numerically and technologically superior foe. Across Ukraine, the Russian army has failed to achieve any of its strategic or tactical goals.

President Zelenskyy has not yet fled or been executed, and it is now obvious that Russia’s troops will not be able to hold onto Kyiv if they capture it. It remains unclear why the electricity, heating, water and internet have not been knocked out in any part of the country (with the partial exception of Mariupol)  — though the answer must surely lie in the incompetence, logistical failures and lack of preparation that have underscored the Kremlin’s offensive.

While it is possible that the Ukrainian government could still capitulate, this does not seem likely, and would require a drastic escalation of force from the Russian army, up to and including leveling Kyiv to the ground. Whether Moscow can countenance such a level of violence is another question: it is unlikely to support such drastic measures if it wants to integrate Ukraine into a wider project, rather than simply massacre its citizens and plant a flag in the ruins of their capital.

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The Kremlin may not have committed enough manpower to conquer a country the size of Ukraine when much of the population is willing to resist so valiantly. However, a week into the war, we do have an idea of what Putin had intended if his troops were successful. According to a recent article in the Russian-state tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, he intended to conquer the country and split it into four regions: Crimea, New Russia, Little Russia, and West Ukraine.

While the Russian/Ukraine expert community has spent the past week debating what a post-war settlement might look like, it now seems that the partitioning of the Ukrainian state was always Putin’s intended strategy. After all, the alternative — imposing a Moscow-controlled proxy puppet government — was always going to be impossible. Blowing up Ukrainian cities is not a constructive way to entice Ukrainians to your political cause. Even among the most rabidly pro-Kremlin politicians and media figures in Ukraine, the Russian attack has elicited tremendous disgust and embarrassment.

As for the pro-Russian political proxies within the Ukrainian parliament — who make up roughly 10% of its representatives — most fled the country in the days leading up to the invasion. There are, as a result, quite simply not enough serious pro-Kremlin politicians left in the country to form a puppet government. Meanwhile, those who had fled will now look tarnished if they return to a ruined Ukrainian capital to be established as quislings.

The idea of a symbolic restoration of Yanukovych/Azarov cabinet, which had been quietly floated by the Kremlin, is also a non-starter. Even the most pro-Yanukovych sympathisers in the Donbas now view him as a cowardly weakling, after he fled for Russia at the end of the Maidan revolution. Eight years later, there is simply no appetite for a restoration of his people or regime.

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In the lead up to the war, when the Americans and the British tried to dissuade Moscow from invading by leaking both real intelligence and what may have been unverified information, the Western allies identified various local proxies as potential leaders of a puppet regime. The UK Foreign Office in particular suggested that Yevheniy Murayev, the leader of an insignificant pro-Russian faction in the Ukrainian parliament, would lead the new government.

Of course, Murayev denied the entire plot and swiftly went underground. But the names of other minor politicians were soon circulated, and then ridiculed — by both local and Western analysts — for being trial balloons, misinformation, or proof that the Kremlin has zero understanding of the nuances of Ukrainian power dynamics. Either the people concocting these plans in the Russian Defence ministry were fools, or this was all a bad joke. Oleg Voloshin, for instance, one of the more marginal names offered, has ranted at me over lunch that gay marriage was merely a cover for demon-worshipping paedophilia. You wouldn’t trust these people to run a local council, let alone the second-largest country in Europe.

Yet not every nominee was a joke. Viktor Medvedchuk, who picked Putin to be godfather to his daughter, was always the most likely candidate. But in what can only be described as an act of total incompetence, the Ukrainians allowed Medvedchuk — the main proxy of Russian power within Ukrainian politics — to escape the country over the weekend. This may very well prove to be a terminal mistake by the Ukrainians, who should have kept him as a hostage to ensure that Zelenskyy would not be assassinated. Medvedchuk is perhaps the only pro-Russian leader within Ukraine with the gravitas to fill the leadership role.

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It is doubtful, however, that even if he were to return to rule Ukraine, he would succeed as Putin’s puppet. One of the reasons Putin decided to proceed with a fundamentally foolhardy and unlikely plan of invasion was his correct sense that the window of opportunity was closing. Indeed, the absence of an organised group of proxies waiting to form a quisling government is, if anything, an apt demonstration of how far Ukraine has already floated outside of the realm of Russian control.

This is the dilemma Putin faces: even if his army finds a way to repress the so-far irrepressible Ukrainian resistance, what next? A Russian occupation is off the cards. A puppet government will swiftly fall. When the bombing finally stops, Putin will look around at a defiant country — and find that he has already lost.