No need to comment on such a low-quality article*. In the course of last several months and especially on the eve of the current anti-Trump campaign in the US, a dozen of similar incredibly dumb and manipulative “investigations” popped up, which I understandably ignored. However, this article received an audience award for the best featured image, so let’s make several points on my connection to Alexei Levkin if my friends and contacts receive such questions ?
The peak of our synergy was the year 2017 when hundreds of foreign guests attended the musical festival cycle, Asgardsrei, which he co-organizes annually in Kyiv. The event is quite big and, among others, hosts mainstream Black Metal bands, thus attracting quite a wide Ukrainian and foreign audience. Those festival goers who are involved in political and metapolitical projects naturally ended up attending intellectual events with my participation right after or before the festival at which they learned about the Ukrainian patriotic perspective of the conflict with Russia, as well as the alternative models of a united yet decentralized Europe suggested by our movement: Intermarium and Paneuropa.
The short history of our communication. In 2014-2015, the Wotan Jugend website was the only source of pro-Ukrainian news among the Russian patriotic groups, that’s why it was hacked by the FSB that started posting there pro-Kremlin highlights to recruit the fighters for the separatist “DNR.” A group of Russian nationalists who supported Ukraine and provided materials or were related to the website had to flee to Ukraine, among them, Alexei. Here, they recreated the original Wotan Jugend website but continued their pro-Ukrainian activities in more advanced political and civic formats. Now, as far as I know, since I do not follow it anymore, the website mostly serves musical subcultural networking which, on the one hand, helps to develop pro-Ukrainian sympathies among the foreign youth, on the other, creates “unnecessary” associations for the movement. Regardless of whether it is still run by Alexei, which is doubtful, his activities are independent and should be discussed with him alone.
Given that in the early phase of the war in Donbas the big percentage of pro-Kremlin fighters were remotely right-wing or national-bolshevik, it is hard to overestimate the favor made by those Russian nationalists to Ukraine at the risk of their own lives. Likewise, I definitely contributed to the establishment of the mutually beneficial forms of cooperation with Alexei’s artistic scene in 2016-2018. However, after the searched (meta)political communication with its like-minded foreign audience has been established, I initiated a new international conference cycle which is more scientific-oriented and has no relation to the right-wing musical subculture and its aesthetics.
At the moment, Alexei is a part of the National Corps movement, but neither a party member nor the Azov Regiment’s acting volunteer. His interests include music and ancient history, the latter being a frequent topic of his lectures for the civilians.
So the state of cooperation as reported by Irene Donatoni for East Journal in January of 2018 is no longer relevant**. By the way, she should be credited with an accurate disclosure of the “scary” Reconquista program as a constructive step-by-step alliance of like-minded political forces of East and West Europe, as envisaged by our movement, which for some strange reason is depicted by those media “researchers” as a destructive program of a civil “race war.”
Overall, educational activities in all the structures of the National Corps movement can be based solely on the promotion of patriotism and modern vision of Ukrainian nationalism as determined by the leadership, not activists, especially the foreign ones. The Azov Regiment, which, as a political functionary, I do not and cannot represent, has never had “ideological” education programs for the personnel different from the encouragement of high motivation, discipline and loyalty to the state.
Moral: the skills of your graphic designers increase the probability of the feedback on my part
