Five years ago, I already wrote about the extreme-right Russian Imperial Movement (RIM) and the danger it posed internationally. And now, on the 6th of April this year, the US State Department designated the RIM, as well as three persons who were associated with this movement, as a Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGT). Explaining the State Department’s decision, Coordinator for Counterterrorism Ambassador Nathan Sales said that the RIM was “a terrorist group that provide[d] paramilitary-style training to neo-Nazis and white supremacists, and it play[ed] a prominent role in trying to rally likeminded Europeans and Americans into a common front against their perceived enemies”. Furthermore, Ambassador Sales noted that the RIM provided paramilitary training to Swedish persons who would, a few months later, become involved in a series of terrorist attacks in Gothenburg. Ambassador Sales also reminded that the RIM “was among the forces that [had] fought in Ukraine on behalf of the pro-separatist forces”. (I wrote about the RIM and the danger it posed five years ago.) […]

On 22 February 2020, a conference titled “Power and Market” took place in St. Petersburg. It was named after the book by Murray Rothbard, one of the key American libertarian thinkers, and was co-organised by the St. Petersburg branch of the Libertarian Party of Russia (LPR) and the “Civil Society” movement. One of the speakers at the event was a British far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (also known as Tommy Robinson), a former leader of the far-right English Defence League and a convicted criminal whose criminal record includes convictions for violence, financial and immigration frauds, drug possession, and contempt of court. His presentation at the conference was titled “The Rape of Britain” and focused on what he called “jihad rape gangs” referring to the groups of men convicted of sexual offences against girls in the UK. The presentation elicited a great round of applause from the Russian audience. […]