Extreme Right Foreign Fighters in Ukraine
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Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine in 2014, about 17.000 predominantly far-right foreign fighters joined the frontline to fight on both the Ukrainian and the separatist pro-Russian side. The majority of these fighters come from Russia and former Soviet republics, while around 1.000 also joined from the West.
In today's podcast, Lucinda Creighton is joined by Kacper Rekawek, a researcher at CEP and a GLOBSEC associate fellow, to discuss this phenomenon. Kacper Rekawek has been working on Western foreign terrorist fighters engaged in the war in Donbas for the last five years. He is also the author of a CEP report entitled "Career Break or New Career? Extremist Foreign Fighters in Ukraine". Together they explore different aspects of the topic, such as the motivations of western foreign fighters, the context on the ground, transnational extreme right networks and the potential danger these fighters represent for their home countries.