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.”
He has links with American neo-Nazi groups, and in 2021 co-hosted a podcast with Robert Rundo, founder of the Rise Above Movement, which participated in the Charlottesville white supremacist rally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyrylo_Budanov
In 2014, he took part in the war in Donbas, where he was wounded several times and reportedly participated in a number of classified special military operations.
According to The New York Times, Budanov was brought to the United States for treatment at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center after being wounded in fighting in the Donbas.
Budanov was one of the members of the elite Unit 2245 of the Ukrainian Main Intelligence Directorate trained by CIA.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
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.
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.”
Including the notorious Rusich militia, which happily displays Nazi flashes, advocates racist ideology and has been accused of battlefield atrocities in Ukraine and Syria, and the white supremacist Russian Imperial Movement, designated a “terrorist organization” by the United States.
In 2022, Germany’s BND intelligence service said the Russian military has welcomed neo-Nazi groups in its ranks, rendering “the alleged reason for the war, the so-called de-Nazification of Ukraine, absurd.”
Kapustin’s RVC and two other Ukraine-based anti-Putin paramilitary groups — Freedom of Russia Legion and the newest formation, the Siberian Battalion — are in the news again after launching on March 12 their biggest cross-border raids of the war around Kursk and Belgorod, remaining on Russian soil and fighting for more than two weeks.
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