Chatter in far-right forums, social media posts, and expert analyses show that some of these white nationalists claim to stand with Ukraine because they see Russia’s actions as a threat to the idea of national self-determination. (This is an important concept for racists who dream of self-determining their way to the creation of all-white states.) Some have also taken Putin’s stated—and highly dubious—goal of “demilitarizing and denazifying” the nation as a direct attack on their ideals. In predictably conspiratorial and bigoted fashion, some have even denounced Putin as a secret Jew or member of a shadowy Jewish cabal that allegedly controls Russia and wants to use this war, as one recent post in a large, American-led, white nationalist forum put it, to “divert the attention [sic] from the plans of the big globalist cliques, great reset plans.” (That phrase refers to a notorious and long-debunked conspiracy theory about an elite plot to manipulate the pandemic.)

Rather than throw their weight behind Ukraine’s Jewish president, however, this sect has largely thrown its lot in with the Azov Battalion, a militia absorbed into the Ukrainian National Guard in 2014 to help fight Russia. Despite its official status, the Battalion was and is a far-right extremist group with well-documented neo-Nazi leanings.

Others stand with Russia because they believe Putin is a bulwark against Western liberal ideals and alleged “globalist” (read: Jewish) plots that supposedly threaten white Christian civilization. And because they like the cut of his performatively hypermasculine jib. As one prominent American white nationalist put it in a recent and especially ugly post, they hold “faith that Vladimir Putin is a Christian King sent by God to free Christendom from the clutches of the Jewish homo agenda.”