Zelensky and his fascist friends
At the end of last month Volodymyr Zelensky visited the Book Arsenal Festival in Kyiv, where he was presented with a copy of a book titled Ukrainian Nationalism: Fundamentals of Ideology. The publisher’s blurb describes it as a collection of texts from “the fundamental works of ideologists of Ukrainian nationalism: Mykola Mikhnovsky, Dmytro Dontsov, Mykola Stsiborsky, Yuriy Lypa, Yaroslav Orshan, Mykhailo Kolodzinsky, Oleg Olzhych, Dmytro Myron-Orlyk, Yaroslav Stetsko, Roman Koval”. These are all extreme rightwing nationalists if not outright fascists.
It’s not so long ago that the publishing house responsible for Ukrainian Nationalism, Markobook, which is owned by Marko Melnyk — he’s the guy with the beard and the vyshyvanka shirt standing next to Zelensky in the photo — was banned from Book Arsenal because of its far-right politics. After Markobook’s exclusion from the 2020 festival, an angry Melnyk threatened to organise an alternative book fair “for patriotic publishers, free from leftist propaganda, perversions, and capitulation”. Happily for him, since the Russian invasion of February 2022 fascists in Ukraine are no longer banished to the fringes of society but have been accepted into the political and cultural mainstream.
In a Facebook post following the encounter with Zelensky, Melnyk celebrated his new-found respectability: “Our books are now owned by President Volodymyr Zelensky, Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, the 5th President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko and many other people who shape our world today in the political and cultural dimension. Just 8 years ago, some book festivals simply refused us participation due to the radical nature of our literature, and the leaders of the state did not know about our existence. A few years later, our books were read by the then Commander-in-Chief of the Defense Forces, Valery Zaluzhny, and now the current President of Ukraine.”
Melnyk has a long history of far-right activism, having joined the fascist alliance Pravy Sektor during the 2013–14 Maidan protests. Although initially a reaction against president Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to postpone signing an association agreement with the EU, the protests were exploited by the far right to implement its own political agenda. Melnyk became a member of the Maidan “self-defence” forces, the far-right component of which sought violent confrontation with the state in order to advance their aim of “national revolution”.

After far-right threats of violence succeeded in forcing Yanukovych to flee the capital and then the country in fear for his life, the alliance behind Pravy Sektor fragmented, with a number of its constituent organisations breaking away. Melnyk joined the most high-profile force to emerge from these splits, the Azov battalion, which was formed to fight against anti-Maidan separatist rebels in Donbass. As Moss Robeson has pointed out, Melnyk served as editor-in-chief of Azov’s front-line magazine Chorne Sontse (Black Sun), named after the sonnenrad symbol made famous by Heinrich Himmler, who commissioned a mosaic based on that design for the SS centre at Wewelsburg.
Since then Melnyk has continued to pursue these politics through his own publishing activities. For example Markobook’s online store offers Natiocracy, the major work by Mykola Stsiborskyi, chief theorist of the fascist Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, in which he presents his views on “the nation as a self-sufficient blood-related hierarchical community, which is opposed to democracy”. You can also find an ebook titled The Da Vinci Code. This isn’t a novel about a conspiracy involving Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, but a tribute to the late military leader Dmytro Kotsiubailo, who used the call sign Da Vinci. Another far-right participant at Maidan, Kotsiubailo then joined Pravy Sektor’s paramilitary wing the Ukrainian Volunteer Corps to fight against the Donbass separatists. He attracted attention over a 2021 New York Times report in which he “joked” about feeding his unit’s pet wolf with the bones of Russian-speaking children, before being killed in action with the Ukrainian armed forces two years later.

Given the extremist politics of Markobook — in an evident nod to Adolf Hitler, its email address is markobook88@gmail.com — the contents of Ukrainian Nationalism are hardly a suprise. Ukrainian academic Marta Havryshko, who has tirelessly exposed the role of the far right in the face of online abuse and death threats, pointed to the fact that the editor of the volume is Oleh Odnorozhenko, co-founder of Azov and an ideologue of its predecessor the Social-National Assembly. (It is an indicator of Odnorozhenko’s politics that he broke with Azov some years ago, accusing the organisation of abandoning its goal of national revolution and trying to work within the existing political systen rather than organising to overthrow it.)
Havryshko also gave us this summary of the political views of some of the nationalist writers who Odnorozhenko chose for his collection: “Mikhnovskyi, Dontsov, and Kolodzinsky considered Jews to be among the greatest enemies of the Ukrainian nation and openly called for violence against them. Yaroslav Stetsko welcomed the anti-Jewish pogroms in Ukraine during the summer of 1941 and supported the Nazi Holocaust. Roman Koval is well known for his consistent glorification of Nazi collaborators.”
I shared Marta Havryshko’s tweet on Facebook, adding that it was reports like this that might explain why her own Facebook account had been suspended, for the second time in eighteen months. Not everyone was impressed. One critic didn’t see a problem with Zelensky posing for a photograph with a collection of writings by far-right nationalists, edited by a veteran fascist ideologue, and clearly displaying a wolfsangel on the front cover. I was told that the wolfsangel has served as a symbol of liberty for several hundred years and that in the Ukrainian context it just signifies Ukraine’s struggle for national independence. I’m not sure how widespread this particular delusion is on the left, but it deserves a rebuttal.
The wolfsangel was notoriously used by Nazi organisations, including a number of Waffen-SS divisions, and for this reason found favour among post-war neo-Nazis. The symbol has long been identified with the Ukrainian far right, in the distinctive mirrored form that features on the cover of Ukrainian Nationalism. This version of the wolfsangel originates with the fascist Social-National Party of Ukraine, which adopted it as the party’s emblem shortly after its foundation in 1991. The intertwining of the letters I and N was supposed to represent the “Idea of the Nation”.

The individual responsible for producing the actual design, one Nestor Pronyuk, later stated that he had been unfamiliar with the German wolfsangel. This claim itself stretches credulity, but it beggars belief that members of the SNPU central committee who chose the emblem were unaware of its historical antecedents. Even Pronyuk admitted that it was intended to provoke a reaction through its resemblance to the swastika.
In 2004 Oleh Tyahnybok became leader of the Social-National Party and rebranded it as Svoboda, appropriating the name of the electorally successful far-right Freedom Party in Austria, in a move to present a more respectable “democratic” face to voters. To that end, the SNPU’s paramilitary wing Patriot of Ukraine was disbanded, and Tyahnnybok also retired the wolfsangel symbol because of its association with Nazism, replacing it with a more innocuous tryzub-style emblem in the form of a hand with three raised fingers.
Future Azov leader Andriy Biletsky saw Tyahnybok’s concessions to public opinion as a sellout, and broke with Svoboda to set up his own explicitly totalitarian and white supremacist movement. He relaunched Patriot of Ukraine in 2005 as an independent force, and then drew in some smaller far-right groups to form the Social-National Assembly in 2008. Biletsky’s organisations proudly displayed the former SNPU wolfsangel in order to demonstrate their commitment to the fascist principles they claimed Svoboda had reneged on. In 2014 Biletsky maintained that tradition when he founded the Azov battalion, whose emblem not only incorporated the wolfsangel but for good measure combined it with the “black sun” sonnenrad.

So it came as a surprise in 2022 when the Azov regiment appeared to have renounced its use of the wolfsangel. The story, uncritically repeated by Western media, was that they did this to neutralise Russian propaganda about Ukraine being in the grip of Nazis. More likely Azov was under pressure to moderate its image due to concerns that the Zelensky government’s US and European backers might balk at arming a self-advertised fascist movement. These concerns turned out to be misplaced, of course — the Western powers were more than happy to support neo-Nazis in order to wage a proxy war against Russia — and Azov soon resumed its display of the wolfsangel. Here is an Azov delegation with their banner on a May 2024 visit to the UK, where they were given a warm reception by Boris Johnson among others.
In short, even if he wasn’t necessarily aware of the exact contents of Ukrainian Nationalism, the presence of such a long-established far-right symbol on the cover can have left Zelensky in no doubt about the political character of the nationalism the book was promoting. Yet he readily posed for a photo that provided Melnyk and his publication with free publicity and apparent presidential endorsement. Far from being embarrassed by this association, Zelensky would almost certainly have welcomed it, because in recent years he has made a point of publicly demonstrating his affinity with fascists.
There was a period when Zelensky enjoyed a rather less friendly relationship with the far right. After he won the presidential election in April 2019 with a landslide majority, on a programme of ending the civil war in Donbass and seeking peace with Russia, he faced a rightwing nationalist backlash. Dmytro Yarosh, a well-known fascist who had led the violent Pravy Sektor forces at Maidan, threatened that if Zelensky betrayed the heroic fighters who had sacrificed their lives fighting separatists in Donbass, by reaching a compromise with Moscow, he would be hanged from a tree on Khreshchatyk (the main street in Kyiv).
In October 2019, as a precondition set by Putin for engaging in negotiations, Zelensky signed up to the Steinmeier formula. This outlined a series of steps for implementing the Minsk 2 agreement, which provided for the reintegration into Ukraine of the pro-Russian breakaway republics in Donbass, through the election of a regional government with devolved powers. The far right predictably denounced this as treachery. In response they launched the Capitulation Resistance Movement, and took to the streets in protests that revived the political alliance forged at Maidan, bringing together fascists, neo-Nazis, nationalists and pro-Western liberals in furious opposition to a supposedly “pro-Russian” president.

No doubt fearing that he might go the same way as Yanukovych, Zelensky decided against defying this movement. In December 2019, when he attended the Normandy format summit in Paris with Putin, Merkel and Macron to discuss ending the conflict in Donbass, he reportedly told them that if he did proceed with the full implementation of Minsk 2 “then next time you will be talking to a different president”.
A week later Zelensky was provided with an opportunity to signal his accommodation with the far right. Ukrainian footballer Roman Zozulya, then playing in Spain, was abused by leftwing supporters of a rival team who relentlessly barracked him with chants of “Zozulya you’re a fucking Nazi”, resulting in the match being called off at half time. Despite Zozulya having made no secret of his fascist politics, Zelensky leapt to his defence. “You are not only a great football player,” he told Zozulya, “you are a true patriot who loves his country and helps our military. We are with you! I shake your hand!” Zozulya was later awarded the Order of Merit by Zelensky.

Zozulya wasn’t the only prominent fascist to receive an award from Zelensky. In December 2021 the aforementioned Dmytro Kotsiubailo, who you’ll remember was amused by the idea of feeding Russian-speaking children to his pet wolf, was presented with the Hero of Ukraine decoration by Zelensky. This was in recognition of Kotsiubailo’s role in “defending the state sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine” (i.e. killing people from the breakaway republics in Donbass who resisted being forcibly reincorporated into Ukraine). After his death in March 2023 — ironically as a result of Zelensky’s insistence on continuing, for propaganda purposes, the futile and strategically pointless defence of the city of Bakhmut — Zelensky paid tribute to Kotsiubailo’s courage, attended his state funeral to lay flowers on his coffin and posthumously awarded him both the Cross of Military Merit and the National Legend of Ukraine title.

Zelensky even thought it politically advantageous to publicise his August 2023 visit to the the military headquarters of the 3rd Assault Brigade, which originated in volunteer units made up of former Azov fighters — notably Andriy Biletsky, who became the brigade’s commander. Given his extensive record of fascism and white supremacism (including his declared mission to “lead the White Peoples of the world in the last crusade for their existence … against the Semite-led untermenschen”) Biletsky could reasonably be described as Ukraine’s most notorious far-right leader. Yet Zelensky made a point of posting a video of his meeting with Biletsky on his Telegram channel, stating that they had enjoyed an “open conversation” and discussed “the most pressing issues”. Zelensky declared that he was “grateful to everyone who defends our country and people, who brings our victory closer!”

Another fascist to receive Ukraine’s highest honour from Zelensky was Miroslav Symchych, who came from an earlier generation of the far right. The background to this award was the Verkhovna Rada’s decision (on the initiative of Svoboda’s Oksana Savchuk) that the 80th anniversary of the founding of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in October 2022 should be “celebrated at the state level”.
The UPA was the military arm of the OUN-B, the faction of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists led by Stepan Bandera, which aimed to establish an ethnically pure totalitarian state purged of Russians, Poles and Jews. Under the German occupation OUN-B members were instructed to join the police force, in which capacity they assisted the Nazis in carrying out the Holocaust, before deserting to join the UPA, taking their weapons and expertise in conducting genocide with them. Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe (Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist, p.269) describes the horrific campaign they waged in 1943–44 against the Polish population of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, an estimated 70–100,000 of whom were murdered:
“For the purpose of killing Poles, some UPA units used methods similar to those used by the Germans to annihilate Jews in Ukraine. This knowledge was based on the experience of OUN-B activists in the Ukrainian police. The UPA partisans would sometimes give candy to Polish children and be very polite to the population generally, in order to calm them. They would ask the Poles to go to a meeting, and then they would either take small groups from the meeting and shoot them, or they would burn the entire Polish population of a village, in a barn or other building. They would attack on Sundays, when the Polish villagers were gathered for a service in church, and would either throw grenades into the church, burn it down, or enter and murder everyone inside. They would dig a large grave, take groups of Poles to it, and either shoot the Poles or murder them with sharp implements, either beside the grave or in it. When the grave was full of corpses, they would cover it with earth, almost exactly as the Einsatzkommandos had done with the Jews.”

To mark the founding of this gang of genocidal fascists, Zelensky awarded UPA veteran Miroslav Symchych the title of Hero of Ukraine “for the heroism shown in the struggle for the independence of Ukraine, outstanding personal merits in the establishment of Ukrainian statehood, and many years of fruitful public activity”. Eduard Dolinsky, former director of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, has provided details of Symchych’s actual record of “heroism” in pursuit of the UPA’’s vision of an independent Ukraine:
“Post-war criminal case documents indicate that the head of the UPA hundred Symchych personally ordered the destruction of the Polish population of the village of Pistyn, including women, children, the elderly and their houses. On October 23, 1944, the Symchych squad attacked the village of Troitse. 78 people were killed — 66 Poles, 14 Ukrainians and one Russian. Among the killed were women and children. The killers burned 49 Polish houses and took all the belongings of the murdered — clothes, food. Symchych was twice convicted of killing civilians and war crimes.”
None of this means that Zelensky is himself a fascist, of course, or that post-Maidan Ukraine has been under the heel of a “neo-Nazi dictatorship”, as Putin would have it. But the legitimisation and empowerment of violent fascist tendencies in Ukrainian society has further exposed the myth that the country is a liberal democracy under the rule of law. Last year the chair of the Verkhovna Rada’s foreign affairs committee, a member of Zelensky’s own party, warned about the threat from a growing far right that is now heavily armed, with military training and experience, and vehemently opposed to a negotiated settlement of the war with Russia. Since then the power of the far right has only increased, with the Azov Brigade recently expanded into the 1st Azov Corps and Biletsky’s 3rd Assault Brigade into the 3rd Army Corps. Zelensky may yet come to regret his choice of allies.
First published on Medium in June 2025