Pictured: Karas with supporters – note the one on the right with a Ukrainian-style swastika on his hat.

by New Worker correspondent

The notorious Ukrainian Nazi Yevhen Karas was recently a star speaker on the topic ‘War in Ukraine: The battleground for the future of Europe’ at Chatham House, a leading British thinktank.

Chatham House describes its goal as “to help governments and societies build a sustainably secure, prosperous, and just world” and has been praised by the Institute of Directors for “providing a safe space for speakers and encouraging openness”.

Karas was billed as a “Major” in Ukraine’s 413^th Separate Battalion of Unmanned Systems – in other words a straightforward Ukrainian army officer.

But Chatham House omitted to mention that he was the founder of the notorious S14 ultra-violent Nazi gang, created in 2010 as a youth wing of the farright Svoboda party, which he viewed as “too moderate”. He was photographed in his youth smiling while giving a ‘Sieg Heil’ salute.

S14 derives from the Ukrainian word ‘Sich’, an historical name for Cossack political-military bodies, alongside the number 14, a common white supremacist and Nazi reference to David Lane’s 14 word call – “we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”.

After the 2014 NATO Ukraine coup, S14 developed close ties with the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), which used S14 to attack anti-fascists they couldn’t pursue legally.

In a 2017 interview Karas boasted that the SBU had tipped off Nazi groups about “separatist meetings”, saying: “They inform not only us, but also Azov, Right Sector, and so on.” Well, well, well, how interesting!

Two S14 members were the main suspects in the brutal murder of journalist Oleh Buzyna in 2015, along with another who has never been identified but is widely believed to be Karas. Ten years later no-one has been convicted for the murder.

In 2018, masked S14 members attacked three Roma settlements with guns and knives, killing one person. Doctors then had to call the police when the injured victims were attacked at the local hospital. Seven years later, as a result of pressure from Kiev’s Western backers, three S14 members were eventually jailed. Even the British MI6-front website Bellingcat has declared that it was “still ok” to call S14 neo-Nazis. So that’s good to know!

In 2020, the group quietly rebranded itself as the “Foundation for the Future”, apparently a more ‘respectable’ umbrella for neo-Nazi organisations, including S14 and the international white supremacist Misanthropic Division – the Azov battalion’s international wing for recruitment and propaganda.

The British wing of the Misanthropic Division, according to Hope not Hate, has connections with the fascist National Action and Combat 18 groups.

Karas also believes that a nuclear war would be good for Ukraine, saying in an interview last December “after a nuclear strike, nothing worse will happen.

Then we just fight. China and India will drop Russia and the West will need to help us. Also we will evolve as humans technologically, since we need to live with radiation.” His wisdom must have been invaluable for the respected experts who gathered at Chatham House!

And the moral of this story? Karas’s London appearance has been a useful reminder of just how well Nazism is embedded throughout official Ukrainian structures, and is still very much thriving, alive and well. Or alternatively, that the capitalist censored mass media’s across-the-board assertion – enthusiastically supported by many so-called ‘leftists’ and trade unionists in Britain – that fascism in Ukraine is an irrelevant minority is simply bullshit.