Hong Kong Protest: Ukrainian Neo Nazi's - 3 December 2019
What are Ukrainian Neo Nazi's doing in Hong Kong?
Prominent Ukrainian neo-Nazi figures have been spotted in the Hong Kong protests just weeks after hosting an “academy of street protest” in Kiev.
Leaders of far-right Ukrainian groups that rose to prominence in the 2014 coup d’etat they helped orchestrate, including the Azov Battalion and Right Sektor, have recently traveled to Hong Kong to participate in the anti-Beijing protests there. It’s unclear why the groups, sporting the apparel of a far-right hooligan group called “Honor” or “Gonor,” have gone to Hong Kong, but the fact that both the 2014 Ukrainian coup and the present protests in Hong Kong have enjoyed extensive support from the CIA-spawned National Endowment for Democracy may give a clue.
“Hong Kong welcomed us as relatives,” Serhii Filimonov wrote on Facebook Saturday, sharing a video of himself and other Ukrainian far-right figures in the semi-autonomous Chinese city. Filimonov once headed the Kiev branch of the Azov Civilian Corps, a support group for the ultra-nationalist Azov Battalion that’s thinly veiled as a civilian NGO.
Several of the men wear paraphernalia of the far-right “Honor” or “Gonor” so-called youth group founded by Filimonov in 2015, sporting a stylized version of the “trident,” a symbol with ancient meaning in Ukraine adopted by ultra-nationalists, as three daggers. Several also have neo-Nazi tattoos, such as swastikas.
The men also posed in front of the wrecked Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where an intense two-week showdown between police and protesters saw more than 1,000 students detained and thousands of weapons seized, including petrol bombs and explosives.
It’s not clear exactly what these “simple activists” were doing in Hong Kong. However, it’s worth noting the extensive groundwork laid for both the 2014 uprising in Ukraine and the 2019 protests in Hong Kong via the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
In the three years before the 2014 coup, the CIA-backed NED sunk $14 million into regime change efforts in Ukraine, and the NED has been cultivating anti-Beijing attitudes in Hong Kong since the mid-1990s, before the territory was returned to Chinese rule by the British Empire.
Whether Filimonov and associates are there at the NED’s behest or as simply a bit of protest tourism is anybody’s guess.