Could Ukraine be the Far Right's Afghanistan?

by Benjamin R. Young

Benjamin R. Young is an assistant professor of homeland security and emergency preparedness in the Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is the author of “Guns, Guerillas, and the Great Leader: North Korea and the Third World,” and his writing has appeared in a range of media outlets and peer-reviewed scholarly journals. Follow him on Twitter@DubstepInDPRK.

In the 1980s, when Afghanistan was embroiled in a war between Soviet forces propping up a client government in Kabul and the CIA-assisted mujahedeen insurgency, the country became a hotbed of global jihadism, as radical Islamist fighters, most infamously Osama Bin Laden, flocked there to wage armed struggle against the communists.

Several billions of dollars worth of covert U.S military assistance went to training and arming the Islamist guerilla fighters, including with Stinger antiaircraft missiles, which greatly hampered Soviet air power. What the U.S government couldn’t know at the time was how the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan would go on to galvanize radical Islamists and lay the foundations for future jihadist terrorist attacks on the West.

Unfortunately, the case of Ukraine suggests that the West has not learned the lesson from Afghanistan: that supporting and arming insurgencies can later have unpredictable and calamitous effects. Much like the Islamists who traveled to Afghanistan in the 1980s to wage jihad and later became the vanguard of global Islamist terrorism, present-day Ukraine could have the same mobilizing effect for the global far right.

With a steady flow of military assistance from NATO nations, Ukraine will soon become awash in weapons and ammunition. Given the presence of Ukraine’s far-right military regiment the Azov Battalion and its foreign supporters, these Western-supplied arms could easily land in the hands of violent white supremacists and far-right insurgents. As with jihadists in Afghanistan, the West’s actions in Ukraine may again be seeding a movement that could rapidly grow beyond its control.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has also welcomed foreign volunteers to come fight alongside Ukraine’s military against the Russian forces. With visa requirements for entry into Ukraine now waived, foreign fighters are flocking to Ukraine. According to Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, 20,000 fighters from 52 different countries have already arrived to defend Ukraine.

Read entire article at World Politics Review