A new class of foreign fighter is on the move, flocking by the thousands to a war zone, either looking for adventure or hoping to strike a blow for their cause, in ways that are increasingly getting the attention of Western intelligence officials.
These fighters, though, are not jihadists hoping to join one of the provinces touted by the Islamic State terror group’s virtual caliphate, nor are they aligning themselves with any number of groups affiliated with IS rival al-Qaida.
They are right-wing extremists and white supremacists, and they are traveling to Ukraine in numbers reminiscent of the movement of fighters to Syria in the earliest days of that conflict.
According to a report released Monday by New York-based nonprofit research group The Soufan Center, more than 17,000 people from 50 countries, including the United States, have traveled to Ukraine in recent years to fight both for pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian forces.
The vast majority, about 15,000, have come from Russia. But the remaining 2,200, researchers warn, bear watching.
“A very significant number are white extremists," said Jason Blazakis, a senior researcher at The Soufan Center and a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS).
“The bulk of those foreign fighters are coming from the near region,” he added, pointing to 800 fighters from Belarus and hundreds more coming from Germany, Georgia, Serbia and dozens of other countries across Europe.
“That’s, in some ways, not too different than what you saw with ISIS,” Blazakis said, using an acronym for the Islamic State terror group.
By comparison, in early 2015, the London-based International Center for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) had concluded – more than half from the Middle East and North Africa – had already traveled to fight in the Syrian civil war, surpassing the up to 20,000 foreigners who had flocked to Afghanistan to fight in the 1980s.
“White supremacy extremism (WSE) is a transnational challenge—its tentacles reach from Australia to Ukraine, and Norway to New Zealand,” The Soufan Center warned in a brief.
“White supremacists are forming global networks, much as jihadis did prior to 9/11, and are learning from jihadi tactics,” the brief said.
And what Syria did for jihadists, Ukraine is doing for white supremacists.
“It’s had a galvanizing effect,” Blazakis said. “It’s given them, for lack of a better word, a playground in which there is turmoil and chaos, a kind of playground that doesn’t exist in a conventional sense in places like the United States.”
One of the most prominent destinations for these fighters is the Azov Battalion, a pro-Ukrainian force that analysts say has embraced neo-Nazi views while targeting right-wing or white supremacist groups around the world for recruitment.
But pro-Russian forces have also found fertile ground for recruiting.
“Serbs from Serbia and Bosnia's Republika Srpska have mainly joined pro-Russian separatist militias fighting in Eastern Ukrainian,” said Adrian Shtuni, a foreign policy and security analyst who focuses on the Balkans.
“Some are affiliated with Serbian ultranationalist paramilitary organizations,” he said. “Some of them were allegedly hired as mercenaries by the Russian Wagner Private Military Company.”
Shtuni said official estimates suggest up to 300 Serbs have fought in Ukraine since 2014 and that about 30 individuals have already been convicted in Serbian courts.
Russia, though, has also been looking beyond traditional allegiances.
“The rise of white supremacy in Western society and far right groups in Europe has been part of a disinformation campaign by the Russian government to contribute directly to that rise,” said Ali Soufan, a former FBI supervisory agent and founder of The Soufan Center.
“They've just taken advantage of anything they can do in order to create divisiveness in Western societies,” he said. “And they don't care if it's white supremacist, if it's other groups. They do whatever and they see what works.”
Western officials worry it has been working well enough.
In Europe, intelligence officials see the Kremlin relying increasingly on relationships it has developed with far-right or nationalist political parties that have risen from being fringe groups to major political players.
And this past July, authorities in Italy seized guns, bullets, bayonets and air-to-air missiles, along with Nazi memorabilia, following an investigation into Italians who had been fighting in eastern Ukraine.