Ukraine is becoming a rallying point for neo-Nazis and mercenaries from all over the world. They are being given the opportunity to fight, kill and gain experience under real war conditions.

The resulting unrestrained banditry is exacerbating and prolonging the war. Moreover, the mobilization of such forces is a danger to the working class in the countries from which the mercenaries originate.

Mussolini’s fascist shock troops, who terrorised Italian workers after the First World War, the German Freikorps, who murdered socialists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht and the bourgeois politicians Walther Rathenau and Matthias Erzberger, and Hitler’s Storm Troopers were recruited from such brutalised front-line fighters.

Ukraine’s role as a place of pilgrimage for militant neo-Nazis did not just begin with the start of the current war. The far-right militias that played a central role in the overthrow of President Yanukovych in 2014 and subsequently kept the war in the Donbas going are very well networked internationally, maintaining relations with militant neo-Nazi groups all over the world.

Ukraine becomes an international rallying point for neo-Nazis and mercenaries – World Socialist Web Site