July 6, 2022 — BRANDON OELOFSE

On March 7, 2022, a Getty Images picture of a Ukrainian soldier went viral.

The seemingly harmless photo of a man assisting an elderly woman to safety stirred debate and discussion. 'The Black Sun,' a common Nazi symbol used by white supremacists, was emblazoned on his chest.

On March 8, 2022, in honour of International Women's Day, a similar photograph was tweeted by NATO's official Twitter, this time featuring a female soldier from the Ukrainian army.

The picture rapidly drew a lot of attention, and NATO withdrew the photograph after it was discovered that the soldier was wearing "The Black Sun" as an accessory to her uniform.

Ukraine has extreme right wing movements, most notably the Azov Battalion, which formed in 2014 and eventually joined the country's National Guard after fighting Russian-backed militants in eastern Ukraine. Their insignia features the “Black Sun” and “Wolfsangel”- both are listed as hate symbols by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). 

The symbol displayed in the photographs above is known as the "Schwarze Sonne" or "Sonnenrad" in German and has been utilized by far-right groups around the world, including the United States and Ukraine. It appears on the official logo of the Azov regiment, also known as the Azov Special Operations Detachment and previously as the Azov Battalion.

Much of the discussion on Twitter, Reddit, and 4Chan has centered on major narratives deployed by the Kremlin in connection with the "Nazi Narrative. "These key narratives are: 

• The Ukrainian Forces are Neo-Nazi’s 

• The United States of America and Europe are colluding with Neo- Nazis

A seed of truth

The Holocaust, World War II, and Nazism have all been useful instruments in Putin's attempt to legitimize Russia's war in Ukraine.After capturing Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, Russia promoted the Nazi narrative. According to Russian media, Ukraine's government is run by drug-addicted neo-Nazis who are launching a genocidal war against ethnic Russians in the country's east.

In a speech prior to the invasion of Ukraine, Russian president Vladimir Putin said he wanted to "denazify" the country.

These stories recall the Soviet Union's valor in combating Nazism throughout WWII.During WWII, significant successes were won against the Nazis, driving them out of the Soviet Union and elevating the Soviet Union to world power status. 

Ukrainians faced starvation under Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin's leadership in the 1930s.

As a result, when German troops invaded Ukraine in 1941, many Ukrainian nationalists greeted them as liberators and cooperated with the occupation. However, this was more than 80 years ago. Putin's statements capture but distort that grain of truth. Claiming Ukraine's present administration is a Nazi state ignores the reality of its politics, notably the landslide victory of a Jewish president and many Ukrainians' desire to promote democracy, reduce corruption, and move closer to the West. 

The Azov Battalion, later the Azov Regiment, has been operational since May 2014. The unit, founded by far-right militants, was originally used to combat pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. The regiment is a minor component of Ukraine's 250 000-strong army. It is estimated that the regiment has between 900 and 2500 fighters, with far-right tendencies constituting a much smaller proportion, while the regiment claims to have been "de-ideologized" and is a regular fighting unit, having moved away from its founding first commander Andrily Biletskity's political activities and ideologies since 2014.

"They are the official army of our state. Anyone who wanted to be involved in politics - they left and are now in politics. Those who decided to serve in the Armed Forces became part of the Armed Forces," President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in an interview on May 1.

Azov's fighters became the public face of Ukraine's resistance in Mariupol against Russian troops.

Its members were acclaimed as the opposition to Russian invasion after airing video clips of fighting in Mariupol's steel works in 2022.The Azov Regiment was instrumental in recapturing Mariupol from Russian troops in 2014, a city critical to Russia's strategic control of the Sea of Azov, and has since been the object of considerable Kremlin propaganda.

Cherry-picking and Business as Usual Falsehood

According to a Rand report “We characterize the contemporary Russian model for propaganda as “the firehose of falsehood” because of two of its distinctive features: high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions. In the words of one observer, “[N]ew Russian propaganda entertains, confuses and overwhelms the audience.”

Creating an Ideology

Typically, hate narratives center on us vs them divisions, identifying and criticizing injustice, identifying a collective adversary, and configuring stereotypes that devalue or dehumanize the enemy.These narratives typically depict a positive social identity based on beliefs that identify communal goals and violence as the sole efficient means of achieving an ideal social state.

Using the EOOH dashboard to track keywords revealed the Kremlin's "Nazi" narratives and hate efforts in response to the unfolding events.

Vladimir Putin has legitimised murder, generated stereotypes, and propagated tales of "hero on a white horse" freeing the desperate from the oppression of the Ukrainian government by portraying Ukrainian forces as Nazis.

Cherry picking 

In the case of white nationalism and Neo-Nazis in the Ukrainian army, there is some validity to the notion that there are fewer than 900 soldiers who embrace these ideas.

However, in an army of a quarter-million troops, the assertion becomes a massive exaggeration and cherry-picks information in a grossly distorted manner.

The EOOH dashboard

Social listening via dashboards that trawl social platforms and open source messaging channels for critical information can be immensely beneficial in detecting rising trends and hate narratives.

This form of awareness can also lead to positive action, such as increasing awareness of key messages that can be used to create counter-messages.This knowledge can be expanded to include the debunking of new hate ideologies and tactics as they emerge.It can also be used to intervene in the early stages of radicalisation, when polarised thinking has not yet established firmly. While this form of trend research is typically quite visible after the fact, developing trends can be quickly detected as trackable hate phrases during current events. These too can identify hate networks and reveal their key messages.

During the preliminary testing of the dashboard in March and April, generalised hate speech concentrating on existing European hate lexicons provided from the ADL, Hate Base, and Alt-right Glossary was applied as keywords. Common far-right hate terminology was used. The keywords used included common far right hate terms. 

In particular “The Black Sun” and “Nazi” were inputted and monitored. Over 1000 messages were captured in the dataset and were posted between March, 1 2022 and May 20,2022. The majority of the data was gathered from Twitter (95 percent), 4plebs, and Facebook. With a score more than 0.8, around 150 texts (15%) are extremely harmful.

Toxicity was frequently associated with hatred of Jews (15%), politics, racism, and/or contempt.

As topics, the most common combination was hatred of Jews and politics.

Toxic keywords commonly used include: shitskins, nigger, scum, aryan, sandnigger, final solution, replacement theory, whites, subhuman, and rape.

Correlations were also found between the US supermarket shooter Payton Gendron, who used the Black sun emblem in a manifesto posted on Discord. The May 14 attack was also recorded in data capture.

A significant takeaway for future use is that a broad net of hate phrases must be cast in order to undertake social listening effectively. In the instance of my research, approximately 200 keywords of popular hate expressions were entered into the EOOH dashboard to generate a result. Keyword popularity shifts and is heavily impacted by current events.

Brandon Oelofse is the co-founder of Media Development Collective, a consulting company working on strengthening the capacities of journalists and the civil society sector in issues related to radicalisation and disinformation and the media.