Why does anyone care what neo-Nazis think?

• Ukraine had always allowed foreigners to join their military to help them, only if those foreigners already had legit military training.
• The Azov Brigade and the legit neo-Nazis in the Ukrainian military were always real, but it was like 1,000 people. Just like there are some violent weirdo white supremacists in the US or any other military, there are some wackos in the Ukrainian military, and much was made of their existence by other much more dangerous violent weirdos.
• It sounds like the neo-Nazi interest in joining with Ukraine was similar -- it was real, but it was literally like 2 people and it's unclear if they even had the military training that would make it possible for them to do so. US intelligence wrote reports on because that's their job, not because it was anything that existed at scale.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

At the outset of the war, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued an intelligence bulletin that far-right American extremists were heading to the conflict and could use it to hone terrorist skills to bring back stateside.

In a November 2023 audio message on Telegram, the ex-Marine Christopher Pohlhaus – the leader of neo-Nazi network the Blood Tribe known for its racist and homophobic protests across the US – recently told followers he was not allowing his “guys” to join in the conflict.

For its part, the Kremlin has been a relentless recruiter of neo-Nazis to its cause; the co-founder of the mercenary Wagner Group, Dmitry Utkin, not only named his organization after the Third Reich’s favorite composer but had the logo for the Waffen-SS tattooed on both sides of his neck.

The war is also at a crisis point for Ukraine as the mainstream Republican party blocks aid to Kyiv in Congress over demands to first reinforce the southern border with Mexico and make draconian changes to the US’s asylum system.

Rinaldo Nazzaro, the Russia-based former Pentagon contractor turned founder of international neo-Nazi organization the Base, told his group in a secret meeting that he saw the war as an opportunity for a potential training pipeline.

“We do our best to be understanding of the fact that in the Anglosphere there is a different kind of echo chamber where mostly Kremlin propaganda dominates and that you have probably never even heard the truth,” said one prominent European neo-Nazi account on Telegram in March last year, already noticing the slide away from the conflict among English speakers.

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