Trump assassin II: the NS/WP network

Enslavement and murder of the homeless. The 2000s origins of the Russo-Ukrainian neo-nazi movement. The MKU and the RaHoWa

More bodies than usual starting appearing in Kyiv underpasses in the winter of 2020. The bodies of old homeless men and women.

They’d been forced out of the central train station by police and their brownshirt colleagues. In 2019, neo-nazis from the organization C14 created a para-police unit called ‘Municipal Guard’, employed by the Kyiv city capital. Supposedly assisting the police (though one police representative even stated they refused to work with C14’s brownshirts because of their racism), they stalked the streets of the capital looking for drunks and homeless to kick to a pulp.

Open neo-nazi from C14/Municipal Guard, Serhiy Bondar’, beating a homeless man at the central train station, 2019

Videos came out of grandmothers kicked on the ground. Bezomnie.ua, a large instagram account dedicated to helping the homeless, posted photos of the aftermath of one such raid in August 2019:

Municipal Guard ‘inspecting’ homeless encampments at the central station area

But why were homeless turning up dead in the underpasses?

The going theory was that they didn’t have the money to pay ‘the rent’ to sleep on the cold seats of the station. There was a basement area apparently filled with homeless sick with cancer and other diseases, poised on the brink of death. But it was full. There’d never be enough room to fit the estimated 45,000 homeless of the city of Kyiv.

Many were there because of the neo-liberal reform of the medicine system pushed through by US citizen minister of health Ulyana Suprun, also known as ‘Doctor Death’. I wrote about her and her close alliance with neo-nazis here.

Thousands were pushed onto the street due to the closure of psychiatric facilities during the covid period. The government also admitted that 42-50 thousand children had been ‘sent home’ from orphanages around the same time. Others claimed the figure was closer to 95 thousand. Many elderly people were homeless because they had lost their apartments to scammers.

It wasn’t enough to just pay the rent if you wanted to survive in the train station. Pro-homeless activists (one of whom died in mysterious circumstances in 2020) claimed that the train station mafia - the police and its brownshirt allies - used the homeless under their control as slaves. These indentured laborers cleaned roofs, brewed beer and collected rubbish. This is how an activist described it:

There are literally hundreds of schemes where these people are used in enslavement. This happens every night. You can see how these men in black uniforms walk between the rows, pass by some homeless people, and focus on specific others. They start beating their legs, their arms, then roughly grab the homeless person, lift them from the bench, and take them away—usually straight to the railway tracks via the stairs. I think that if not every second, then at least every third passenger who has ever departed from the station could have witnessed this and seen this horrifying scene.

Those who refused to or were unable to pay for the privilege of slaves were pushed out of the train station. Many die in the cold - 64 froze to death in January 18, 2021. Some went to sleep in underpasses on Victory Parade (now renamed due to its ‘incorrect’ interpretation of the outcome of WW2). More of them died there.

Some said it was nihilistic youths feeding them poison. Others argued it was the railway mafia again, punishing squatters who didn’t want to pay ‘the rent’. The bezdomnie.ua instagram posted about it, but it was shut down in mid-2022 amidst accusations that it was managed by a Russian-sympathizing priest.

In the great novelist Roberto Bolano’s words:

No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them

In Monday’s article, I analyzed the Misanthropic Division, a Ukrainian group linked to would-be Trump killer Nikita Kasap. Today, I will be looking at a much older network - NS/WP, which naturally stands for National Socialism / White Power. Though it has cells in Ukraine, this decades-old network is a largely Russian phenomenon.

There is great contemporary relevance in today’s investigation into the roots of the modern post-soviet neo-nazi skinhead movement - 2000s Russia. The Misanthropic Division was formed largely out of neo-nazi exiles from Russia and Ukraine. Key figures of the Azov movement itself came from Russia around 2014 or earlier. The ideological trends and famous figures of Russia’s 2000s scene continue to inspire modern neo-nazis in Ukraine.

I also believe there is a deeper importance to the phenomenon of NS/WP. Over the course of the 2000s and early 2010s, they transitioned from ritualistic murders of non-slavic immigrants to killings of the homeless, themselves generally white. It seems to me that this represents a significant shift away from race as the central category, and towards sadistic violence for its own sake. ‘To live is to kill’, as one NS/WP member wrote.

There is something socially significant about the rise of neo-nazism in 90s-2000s Russia and 2010s-present Ukraine. These were/are societies profoundly traumatized by unfettered capitalism. The number of homeless exponentially grew - according to Ukrainian activists, it rose by 10 times in the winter of 2015-16. The Soviet working class, once held up as the vanguard of society, become either homeless or at risk of becoming such.

Killing the homeless became normal - whether by the impersonal forces of the market, hunger, the cold, or the more ‘personal’ forces of the police and their neo-nazi brownshirt allies. In such conditions, a bit of help from autonomously-acting crazed skinhead youths is just a drop in the ocean. ‘

The Russian skinheads of the 90s and 2000s called themselves the ‘cleansers of the streets’ when killing hundreds, if not thousands of migrants. Their attacks on the homeless could be said to conform to neoliberal, market logic, getting rid of ‘unproductive’ members of society. Disciplining the working class. Ukraine’s minister of social policy infamously called to sterilize the unemployed in 2020 - as Nazi Germany showed, it is a small step from that to euthanization.

It is this deracialized vision of the ubermensch against the untermenschen that explains why so many Russian neo-nazis have found it logical to fight alongside the Ukrainian army. For Ukrainian nationalists themselves, many of whom are Russian-speaking, it has never been race per se that matters. Their hatred of ‘Russians’ is much more of a class hatred. Russians are essentialized as ‘orcs’, those with ‘Soviet mentality’ (‘sovok’), proletarian/lumpenproletarian obedient cattle (‘bydlo’).

That’s why anyone can be ‘Russian’, including Ukrainians. If you are against neoliberal economic reforms, you are displaying a Russian mentality. If you are skeptical about the EU, you are a Russian fifth columnist. I wrote in my article ‘bydlomania’ about how Ukrainian middle-class intellectuals of the 2010s fantasized about randomly poisoning Ukrainian ‘bydlo’.

From 2014 onwards, the Ukrainian citizens who fought against the Euromaidan in eastern Ukraine were labeled as Russian bydlo, orcs, and often ‘bomzhi’, or bums, a word also used for the homeless. Since 2022, a beloved title of abuse against Russian troops is that they are ‘bums’, often in the gruesome drone videos depicting their killing. A link is often drawn between the Red Army and the modern Russian army - both are hordes of non-european (lumpen)proletarian:

This move away from targeting individuals based purely on race and committing violence for its own sake is a crucial conceptual link in understanding the appeal of mass shooting events among contemporary neo-nazis. As I wrote in my article on school shootings in Russia, the perpetrators often identified their victims as Russian ‘untermenschen’ society as a whole, a society of drunks and bums. Such a misanthropic ideology is clearly quite useful if your aim is to groom individuals to commit violent acts, whether that be assassinations or domestic terrorism.

Now, let’s move onto NS/WP itself. We will analyze the origins of the network, its transition into killing the homeless, its influence on modern groups like the Maniac Killers Cult and the Misanthropic Division, and whether they took a side in the Russo-Ukraine war.