Germany describes Denis Kapustin as a top neo-Nazi, and his role in the war is a double-edged sword for Kyiv.
“We’re the bad guys but fighting really evil guys,” wisecracks Denis Kapustin.
For now, Ukraine is willing to embrace his form of bad guy. As a Russian militant who led eye-catching paramilitary raids into Russia from Ukrainian territory this year and last, Kyiv sees Kapustin has a role to play as an ally against President Vladimir Putin.
But there are hazards in holding him too close. German authorities say Kapustin — sometimes known as Denis Nikitin — is “one of the most influential neo-Nazi activists” on the European continent, and that’s a godsend to Russian propagandists, who are seeking to whitewash their murderous invasion of Ukraine as an attempt to “de-Nazify” Kyiv.
“Think of ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,’” adds Kapustin, who leads the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC), the largest of three anti-Kremlin Russian militias fighting for Ukraine. “Before, you just had good guys and bad guys dressed in black in cowboy movies, and then Clint Eastwood comes along and he’s dressed in black and fighting for good,” he says.
Kapustin is indeed dressed in black for his discussion with POLITICO in a downtown Kyiv hotel — though his clothing is free of any neo-Nazi logos or flashes. That’s despite the fact he runs a far-right apparel line of T-shirts and caps emblazoned with white nationalist and xenophobic imagery as well as the Nazi symbol 88 — the eighth letter of the alphabet twice being a not-so-subtle code for “Heil Hitler.”