Monday meth comedown

Drugs, clubs, hitlerites. Unique post-soviet drug-retailing techniques. Albania, Kosovo, and Zelensky's drug habits. "They can now tell by the smell whether it’s Colombian or Costa Rican"

I was walking around Kiev on a Monday morning, 11 AM. In search of some kind of document. My head was pounding and I felt on the verge of vomiting. Day one out of five.

I knew every person behind me was getting ready to stab me. I could already feel the blade sliding in besides my spinal cord.

And then, as I crossed the road, I saw my killer - a young man with a military backpack adorned with various fascist runes and paramilitary insignia. I clenched up and got ready for my fate.

And that’s how it felt for the whole rest of the week. Meth might be good, but the come-down is in a different league. Nor did I find it therapeutic teaching grammar to screaming oligarch children.

Civilized values

I stopped partying after that. But it wasn’t just because of the comedowns. Sometimes you start thinking about the sort of time you’re spending on your days off. I’d had a party at my apartment the Friday before, with my local friends inviting everyone. Among them was the Afro-Ukrainian model who was kind enough to share his white powder with the host. Then right after, my friend started DJing - with a swastica on his laptop formed out of duct-tape.

Sometimes one can get in a bit too deep, and start appreciating everything around you as ‘an interesting phenomenon’. But there are better ways to spend a weekend.

I stopped talking with that crowd after that weekend. Partly because of the swastica, though it didn’t seem so serious at the time - they were an apolitical bunch who’d do anything for shock value - but more because I was tired of that lifestyle.

Now he’s in the Azov brigade, renowned for its ideological commitment to the values of ultra-nationalism, white supremacy and esoteric paganism. He posts film camera shots of himself with weapons and indie rock music.

Now instead of the usual brands, he shows off his fashionable Right Sector apparel. How is that all possible, you ask?

Do you remember the Vice documentaries of ‘Kyiv, the new Berlin’?

The 2014 revolution brought Kiev nightlife to a complete standstill. As protests turned into riots, and government security forces opened fire on protestors, the country fell into crisis. But out of the ashes of revolution has risen a new generation.

Indeed - la luta continua, the revolution never ended. 2014 Euromaidan was a revolution of western values - the right to go clubbing all night. Never mind you could do the same thing in Moscow or Minsk. But it’s about the atmosphere - isn’t the rave more exciting when it takes place on the background of catastrophic poverty and social breakdown?

The vice video even notes how its raving hero lost his job because of the post-2014 ‘financial crisis’ - a nice neutralization. As though the fact that post-euromaidan Ukraine exceeded Brazilian poverty levels had nothing to do with its ultra-liberal economic policies, like the removal of all price controls on food (see this article of mine on the topic)

The euromaidan events had a heady mixture of fascists, anarchists, and liberals. The same thing in the clubs. I remember one anarchist who ran a soup kitchen I went to occasionally - she decided not to call the initiative ‘food not bombs’. As she explained in an interview, that slogan wasn’t appropriate in Ukraine, given that she supported the ‘anti-terrorist operation’ in eastern Ukraine. Those people don’t like our clubs, they don’t like our values.

Of course, sometimes a bit of steam gets let off. To make it clear who’s in control. Just like the euro-optimist Trotskyists at euromaidan with their ‘red EU flag’ got playfully, viciously stomped on a few days in by the dominant fascists, sometimes the club gets a little less cosmopolitan. One old friend, himself from Donetsk, told me about a time around 2016. He was in the club with a friend of south Asian descent. The progressive Nizhneyurkovska precinct. Some men in big black boots fractured his friend’s skull.

That’s all to say that I wasn’t particularly surprised when my old drinking friend ended up in Azov. You might have an idea of Azov like the following, a bunch of loser freaks

And that isn’t to say they don’t exist. But in my experience, Azovites are where the hipsters go. If you’re in Azov, you have good connections - like my old friend. He didn’t care much about politics, he was curious about my Lenin volumes. But he had good connections through his work in the TV industry. And that’s the real class character of the ultra-right in Ukraine - ‘creative class’ hipsters, coders with enough money to feel superior to the ‘subhuman masses’.

It has nothing to do with ‘east and west’ Ukraine, so commonly invoked on the topic. This friend of mine is a Russian-speaker Kievan. He once told me proudly of how his grandfather threw rocks at the Nazis when they occupied the city. I don’t think he ended up in Azov because of any clearly defined beliefs, though I’m sure by now he has some. He went there because that’s where the cool people go.

Before the war, this guy was living the good live in California. Note the ‘orcteryx’

If you’re in Azov, you’ve made it. You’ll get the best weapons and the best training. It isn’t where the proles go. They get shoved into some newly-formed unit that gets ‘used up’ within a few weeks at the front. The people in Azov own trendy male hairdressers in the capital, they do expensive edgy tattoos for fellow clubbers.

Hidden staches

A friend knew another Azovite. This was before the war. He was out of Azov by that point, working at a call center (another rightwing-organized crime nexus). He told stories of how he used to do DMT with his trench-brothers in Donbass on nights off.

Drugs are everywhere in Ukraine. Sprayed everywhere across the walls at the university I worked was graffiti announcing ‘meth and LSD' and the appropriate telegram code.

In Ukraine and Russia, drugs aren’t sold the way it is elsewhere. Over there, you don’t meet someone who sells you the drugs. You do it through zakladchiki - ‘hiders’. They operate at the most exposed level of the drug retail network, and are the most likely to be arrested and given long prison sentences. Supplied with drugs by higher-ups, they hide it somewhere in the city. Beneath a bin, in a garden, in a playground pole.

‘stache in this area’. The telegram phone number follows. ‘klad’ means ‘zakladka’, stache.

Then the drug consumer opens an anonymous telegram channel and pays for the coordinates using cryptocurrency. Now it’s on the consumer to find the drugs. Hence, you’ll often see some dazed drug addicts searching through the dirt in a playground or park for hidden treasure.

There was plenty of other graffiti. The METH AND WEED qr codes had to make space amidst the usual jumble of recently-sprouted esoteric fascist organizations. One I remember particularly vividly was Avangard, which enjoys playing with Italian nazi-maoist aesthetics.

‘Reactionary nihilism in action. Avant-gardism as a way of life’

Avant-garde is not simply an online phenomenon. Though they only emerged around 2021, they’re already a group with transnational ties in Kosovo and Albania - another important node in NATO’s global drug circuit.

A 2021 post. Here is the caption: There aren't many young European nations left where the active impulse still burns — among them are the Albanians 🇦🇱🔥. We, by the way, also claim to have a passionary spirit. And overall, we advocate for a pragmatic approach to pan-Europeanism, so we decided to visit, with a diplomatic purpose, the ancient Roman province of Illyria, now known as Albania... The land of castles, fascist architecture, and the warlike pagan Shqiptars from the Albanian Third Position movement ⚔️.

I remember how towards the end of 2021, particularly virulent graffiti and posters started going up around Kyiv. Here are some I photographed

Thjs is actually an ad for a punk live show. You can listen to their songs on telegram too. Their songs praise interior minister Arsen Avakov, the Armenian oligarch who bankrolled the far-right movement until current intelligence chief Budanov took over in 2022.

The war on drugs

Roman Gubriienko, a great young leftwing economic journalist who can no longer write for the papers because of censorship, often joked that Ukraine is ‘not a banana republic, but a corn republic’.

Just as Ukraine has its own CIA-funded fascist paramilitaries, it also has its own absurd ‘war on drugs’ - where the anti-drug warriors are also the benefactors.

One time, around 2016, I got mugged outside one of Kiev’s most well-known clubs, Closer. It wasn’t too dramatic - two men introduced themselves as police and strongly urged me to enter a dark, abandoned alleyway with them so that I could ‘show them my ID’. I politely refused. They were sure ‘I had drugs on me’ and tried to drag me in. I let go of my wallet, which had nothing inside anyway, and ran away.

Fast forward to 2021, and I was in the same area having a picnic. This is the Podil neighborhood, a Jewish area renowned for criminality in the Russian empire and nowadays one of the capital’s hipster hotspots. I remember seeing a man wearing a FREIKORPS shirt here in 2015 and wondering what on earth was going on in the country. Anyway, I was having my picnic, and all of a sudden the following took place (my video):

Here’s my commentary on it at the time, as published on my telegram channel:

The past 3 weeks, fascist groups clustered around the telegram group Katarsis have been conducting publicized raids against clubs frequented mainly by middle class inner city youth in the Kiev Podil area. These raids have been conducted in the name of a "crusade against drug trafficking", a popular theme among many fascist groups, particularly those associated with Evgen Karas' (formerly of C14, now in "Foundation of the Future"/Osnova Maibutnyogo, famed for his group's publicized murdering of Roma children).

The raids themselves, which have featured primary school age children, essentially consist of visiting the clubs, ridiculing the clubgoers on camera, throwing some firecrackers about (no fascist event lacks this element), breaking some windows, graffiting "white power" and homophobic slogans, and chanting "glory to ukraine death to the enemies" and so on. I was lucky enough to accidentally witness such an extravaganza last weekend, a video of which is attached. Note the lack of response by police, who nevertheless arrived exactly as the fascists did.

Like any self proclaimed "war against drugs", it's clear that this is being waged in the interests of redistributing drug revenue. Here we can can essentially distinguish between the katarsis/C14 group, which is more closely linked to the Arsen Avakov-created police (many former C14 members now work in "municipal guard", a Kiev city council funded para police organization whose members are solely proud neonazis, and who mainly engage in beating up supposed gays on camera violently raiding clubs, and simply random violence against the homeless, alcoholics, drug addicts and Roma), and Podil clubs, themselves patronized by the arch-libertarian politician Sergei Leschenko.

In other words, this is a struggle between different groups of the Kievan petit-bourgeois - those who have made their business through being "veterans" and attaching themselves to various police and (state or Western funded) fascist NGOs, and those who prefer more attractive, liberal NGOs. A battle between the admirers of "White Evropa" and those of "Tolerant Europe".

The overlap between these groups is quite symptomatic of current political divides. In a telegram post responding to the raid, the owner of the Khviloviy club castigated the "self proclaimed nationalist rightwingers", implying of course that "true" nationalist rightwingers are worthy of respect, not criticism. Meanwhile, the Katarsis telegram today attacked a member of the NGO/liberal-oriented rightwing hooligan group "Gonor" for its support of Khviloviy against Katarsis. The post also called out Gonor member Sergiy Sternenko, whose battle - supported by the same crowd that goes to the clubs attacked by Katarsis - with the Avakovian police apparatus continues in full force.

See here my article on Karas and C14. See this one on Sternenko and his connections with important US figures in Ukraine. See this on Avakov.

Here’s how things looked inside the club.

Centuria was also involved, an aggressively ultrafascist group which incubated at one of Ukraine’s largest NATO training bases. See Oleksiy Kuzmenko’s remarkable research on the topic here.

It should be no surprise to any of my latin american readers that those who most aggressively wave the flag of the ‘war on drugs’ are often those who most profit from it. There were also plenty of rumors at the time that club magnates sent the likes of Centuria and Katarsis to ruin the vibe at rival clubs. I’ve also written here at length at the mafioso exploits of Ukraine’s most incorruptible natsiocrats.

Public users

But what of their opponents, the liberal ‘drug appeasers’ like Leshchenko? Here again I resort to an old telegram post of mine.

A video leaked this week (November 2021) of the politician Serhiy Leschenko snorting drugs, promptly shared by Katarsis aligned far right groups. Leschenko's wife is a well known techno DJ who plays at major European clubs.

Leschenko himself is also the "effective capitalist manager" of the State railway company Ukrzaliznitsya. Receiving a monthly wage of over 12 thousand USD, while railway workers generally get from $200-400 a month, Leschenko is accused by many workers of running the company into the ground, with the lack of investments leading to increased fatal accidents and unemployment. Leschenko also famously was unable to say how wide Ukrainian railroads are.

I also have to boast (?) that I was at a club at the same time as Leshchenko. I didn’t see him, and it wasn’t that hard - he seems to be at every club, every night, so my yearly nightlife expedition was enough.

Anyway, fast-forward to the present, and Leshchenko is happily at work as one of Zelensky’s advisors. Which brings us to the final dose.

In December 2021, with all Ukraine’s oligarchs and political elites raging at the increasingly unpopular president Zelensky, Andriy Bohdan gave a scandalous interview. Once the personal lawyer of top oligarch Igor Kolomoisky, Bohdan was head of Zelensky’s presidential administration from May 2019 to February 2020.

Bohdan left, Zelensky right, 2020

In his December interview, Bohdan had much to say about his old boss.

The interviewer brought up Zelensky’s increasingly erratic behavior at press conferences. Bohdan answered:

When I was around, there were no problems. What's happening now requires research—these are medical indicators; it’s impossible to hide them.

When asked directly by the interviewer about rumours Zelensky was using drugs, Bohdan answered:

His face is different. If you take two photographs, it's a completely different person. It's a different conversation, different speech, words, different expressions. His thoughts are entirely different. He's completely different.

He underlined in particular Zelensky’s increasingly fact, chaotic speaking manner.

He lacks the energy of life. He's dissatisfied with what he's doing and doesn't understand what tomorrow will bring. (The president is confident), "Everything will be fine, I'm lucky.

Who replaced Bohdan? None other than Ukraine’s grey cardinal, Andriy Yermak - the man western and Ukrainian media is certain has Zelensky wrapped around his thumb, who enjoys Zelensky’s total emotional dependence.

And among Zelensky’s dealers is one of Yermak’s most infamous creatures - parliamentarian Mykola Tyschenko, a figure I dedicated a whole substack series to.

According to Bohdan:

Tyshchenko’s brain's chemistry has been so influenced by substances far removed from the proud name "alcohol”. His brain represents immense value—tremendous value. I think we could use Kolya Tyshchenko to trade and pay off our sovereign debt because this person is simply a heritage-level specimen for all global science, a treasure of the global community. How can a person live with something like that inside them?

I think he will make a fantastic prime minister. I think Vladimir Aleksandrovich (Zelensky) will make an honourable decision. He really loves Vladimir Aleksandrovich. He loves him so much so much, he's ready to do his brows with his tongue.

Bohdan describes Tyshchenko

In the same interview, he said that Zelensky has lists of hundreds of political figures he wants arrested. Comedown paranoia? I didn’t have the money for coke, but I can imagine how Zelensky might feel. And unlike him, I never actually had people out to knife me.

There’s lots of lore to Zelensky’s drug habits. While strana wrote mainly about Zelensky’s coke habits, the popular journalist Shariy recorded a video on how Zelensky is supposedly into methadrone. A much less bourgeois drug, it should be noted. Here’s some more material from strana’s 2021 deep dive into Zelensky’s hobbies:

For instance, Member of Parliament Geo Leros published on his YouTube channel statements from Zelensky's former business partner, Gennady Lazutin, who claimed that the president and his friends could even differentiate cocaine by its country of origin.

"They can now tell by the smell whether it’s Colombian or Costa Rican," Lazutin said.

A note to the reader from Events in Ukraine - lest I be suspected of spreading Kremlin narratives, note that Leros is a pro-western, Ukrainian nationalist, euromaidanite politician. He criticized Zelensky on the grounds he was supposedly a Russian agent, or surrounded by Russian agents (like Lazutin).

According to "Strana" sources within the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the police began closely monitoring Zelensky's drug use during his election campaign. Several police departments were tasked with documenting evidence of drug use by the future president and his close associates.

"Staff from multiple departments—covert surveillance, narcotics control, and experienced officers from the former Organized Crime Unit (UBOP)—were involved in documenting drug use and supply to Zelensky. The operation was classified as top secret. Likely, this was intended to gather compromising material on Zelensky and his team. Results were obtained quickly—yes, the facts were confirmed. However, the investigation went no further. All case materials, including photos and video recordings, were sent up the chain and never turned into criminal cases or public revelations," a Ministry of Internal Affairs source told "Strana."

The results, according to the officer, did not surprise those involved in the operation.

One of the primary suspects was the president's close friend and MP from the "Servant of the People" party, Mykola Tyshchenko. The scandalous MP was well-known to UBOP officers from his activities in the late 1990s and early 2000s when he was part of the Savlokhi organized crime group and went by the nickname "Kolia Obolonsky."

According to "Strana" sources in the Ministry of Internal Affairs and criminal circles, Tyshchenko regularly supplies cocaine to Zelensky and his inner circle, which he receives from several dealers. One of the regular suppliers is listed in the Ministry of Internal Affairs' database under the alias "Andros."

"During surveillance operations, several purchases of cocaine by Tyshchenko were documented. Tyshchenko would buy relatively large batches of 100–150 grams, usually before meetings with Zelensky, on the eve of holidays, or during gatherings at the president's countryside residences. This was likely intended for Zelensky and his friends. According to intelligence, Tyshchenko insisted his dealers provide uncut cocaine. He purchased marijuana separately, preferring an elite Sativa strain. Tyshchenko himself does not use cocaine but might smoke marijuana for relaxation," explained a police officer.

When asked by "Strana" whether it was true that he regularly supplied Zelensky and his entourage with cocaine, Tyshchenko responded as though it were a joke or a holiday prank.

"Is this a joke? I don’t even want to talk about it," Tyshchenko said before hanging up.

Judging by the fact that the findings of the secret police operation were shelved, it seems the compromising material on Zelensky and his drug suppliers is being kept for use at a later date by whoever ordered the operation.

It all sounds like something you would do if you were a show business comedy icon handed the presidency of a country entering into history’s most mediatized war.