US declares Russian white supremacists are terrorists

THE United States has designated a Russian nationalist group as a terrorist group, in its first such move against a foreign white nationalist organisation.

The Russian Imperial Movement, which campaigns for the restoration of an ethnic Russian empire ruled by an Orthodox Christian absolute monarchy, was added to the State Department’s list of designated terrorist organisations yesterday.

Three leaders, Stanislav Anatolyevich Vorobyev, Denis Valliullovich Gariev and Nikolay Nikolayevich Trushchalov, were designated as individual terrorists. The designation means the US treasury department can block or seize any US property or assets owned by the group, ban its members from visiting the US, and bar American citizens from doing business with them.

Donald Trump, the US president, signed an executive order in September allowing the State Department and the treasury to designate people who provide training to terror groups as terrorists even if there is no link to a specific attack.

Nathan Sales, the Statement Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism, said in a briefing yesterday that the Russian Imperial Movement provided “paramilitary-style training to neo-nazis and white supremacists”.

He said the group had two training facilities in St Petersburg “which likely are being used for woodland and urban assault, tactical weapons, and hand-tohand combat training”.

“This group has innocent blood on its hands,” Mr Sales said, adding the designation sent the “unmistakable message” that the US will take action against “any foreign terror group, regardless of ideology”.

The Russian Imperial Movement is not known to have carried out terrorist attacks against US civilians or assets. But like many radical Russian nationalist groups, it is believed to run paramilitary training camps, and sent members to fight on the pro-russian separatist side in eastern Ukraine in 2014.

Ukraine’s security service has accused the group of training fighters for an armed wing called the Imperial Legion at a base near St Petersburg run by Mr Gariev.

The group has also been linked to Western far-right extremists. Mr Trushalov was photographed in 2015 alongside Nick Griffin, the former leader of the British National Party, at a 2015 conference of far-right groups in St Petersburg.

The Kremlin has made use of farright nationalist groups abroad, including as a source of manpower for its covert war in Ukraine, but has sought to either repress or coopt them at home. At a trial of three men accused of plotting bomb attacks on asylum seekers in Sweden in 2017, prosecutors said the defendants had spent 11 days at the Russian Imperial Movement’s paramilitary training camp.

Matthew Heimbach, the founder of an American white supremacist group called the Traditionalist Worker Party, claimed to have met a representative in 2017.

Rinaldo Nazzaro, the leader of a US white supremacist hate group called The Base, is believed to live in St Petersburg. It is not clear whether he has contacts with the group.