A prominent far-right militant has been invited to discuss the “future of Europe” in London
London-based think tank Chatham House has hosted notorious Ukrainian neo-Nazi Yevhen Karas as a speaker at an event called ‘War in Ukraine: The battleground for the future of Europe’.
The think tank presented Karas as the commander of the 413th Separate Battalion of Unmanned Systems ‘Raid’ of Ukraine’s armed forces, failing to mention his colorful neo-Nazi background.
Karas is known as the founder of the notorious S14 far-right paramilitary group, created in 2010 as a youth offshoot of the far-right Svoboda party. The name of the group is a stylized form of the Ukrainian word ‘Sich’, referring to an administrative and military center for Cossack proto-states, and contains the number ‘14’, widely used by assorted white supremacist and neo-Nazi organizations worldwide.
The number refers to a 14-word phrase by American white supremacist David Lane: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” The S14 itself, however, has insisted its name refers to the date it was created and denies being a neo-Nazi organization, but merely a “Ukrainian nationalist” group.
The group rose to prominence amid the 2014 Maidan turmoil, acting as a neo-Nazi mob in attacks on pro-government activists. After former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich was toppled and the conflict in then Ukrainian Donbass broke out, S14 militants were repeatedly involved in attacks on entities and individuals deemed to be ‘pro-Russian’ and ‘separatist’.
S14 developed ties with the post-Maidan Ukrainian authorities and the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) in particular, with the agency using the neo-Nazi mob to attack those it could not legally prosecute. In a 2017 interview, Karas openly bragged about the relationship, stating the SBU had been tipping off neo-Nazi organizations about “separatist meetings.”
“They inform not only us, but also Azov, Right Sector, and so on,” he said.
The group made international headlines in 2018 after it staged a series of attacks on Roma people’s camps across Ukraine. The publicity turned out to be so bad for S14 that even Kiev’s Western backers condemned the group. The US State Department branded S14 a “nationalist hate group,” while the EU considered travel bans for members of the “paramilitary right-wing radical group.”
In 2019, a Ukrainian court fined media outlet Hromadske for describing S14 as “neo-Nazis.” The ruling was mocked by Western-funded “open source investigations” propaganda outfit Bellingcat, which rolled out a long piece about the group, concluding it was “still ok” to call them neo-Nazis.
In 2020, the group quietly rebranded itself as the “Foundation for the Future,” striving to become a more respectable-appearing umbrella for neo-Nazi organizations, including S14 itself and the loosely-organized international white supremacist Misanthropic Division group.
