Most dismiss Vladimir Putin’s assertion that the West is arming and funding Jewish Nazis to mass murder Russians for Sorosite liberalism as Kremlin schizophrenia. But the strange bedfellows coming together to honor the recently deceased Russian Volunteer Corps (RKD) commander Denis “White Rex” Kapustin causes one to give this seemingly delusional narrative a second look.

On one side, Australian National Socialist Network (NSN) leader Thomas Sewell spoke in a slowed, grief-stricken tone, reflecting on his Aryan superhero and ideological inspiration being whisked away to Valhalla by Valkyries while he mowed his lawn.

Elsewhere in Tel Aviv, Leonid Nevzlin — the Israeli oligarch who helped fund RKD and is famous for calling Slavic Russians “slave cattle” — put out a mournful statement blessing Kapustin’s memory, stating that “WhiteRex was real power.”

In various George Soros funded publications that saturate the Ukrainian media space, they took a pause from their usual screeds against racism, homophobia, and authoritarianism to honor Kapustin — the man whose best-known literary contribution to politics is to popularize Australian mass shooter Brenton Tarant’s manifesto in Eastern Europe — as a noble freedom fighter.

What kind of man simultaneously has the owner of Haaretz sitting shiva and a self-described “Esoteric Hitlerist” performing an Odinist sendoff at his funeral?

Denis Kapustin may have died, but his innovation of combining a regime-compatible lifestyle brand that uses Nazi aesthetics, radical music, and networks built through MMA tournaments continues to influence some newer, “Gen Z” targeted iterations of nationalist politics around the world today. In Ukraine, Kapustin, through his partnership with the CIA agent Ukrainian HUR chief Kyrlo Budanov, showed Washington and NATO that it is possible to manipulate soccer hooligans, black metal edgelords and even genuine nationalist romantics who in theory should be fighting their own government to instead fight for it.

Kapustin, a Russian-born emigre to Germany, would go on to become leader of the international “neo-Nazi” fight club movement, an important ambassador for the Azov Battalion, and later a commander in the pro-Ukrainian Russian Volunteer Corps (RKD). He was an ethnic Jew whose family sought asylum from supposed Russian anti-Semitism under a 1990 update to Germany’s Kontingentfluchtlingsgesetz (Refugee Quota Act). The extent of Kapustin’s Jewish ancestry is unknown, but under the German law, refugee resettlement was reserved only for those whose Soviet passport registered their nationality as Jewish.

First in Cologne and later in Moscow, Kapustin grew close to nationalist soccer firms despite later stating that he is not a fan of the sport. In 2008, Kapustin began an MMA clothing company called White Rex, and by 2011 began marketing his business by hosting unlicensed but highly professionalized fighting tournaments featuring the world’s toughest skinheads, bikers, and soccer hooligans pummeling one another. The novelty of a white nationalist themed fighting league was new at the time and encountered a great deal of success. The majority of “White Rex” tournaments were hosted in Russia, including one St Petersburg event that drew 2,000 spectators.

Following the beginning of the 2014 ethnic Russian insurgency in Ukraine, many self-described Russian “Nazis” embraced the Euromaidan coup and began migrating to areas controlled by the Azov Battalion to start music labels, MMA gyms, and t-shirt stores in Eastern Ukraine. Kapustin, who had spent much of the 2010s networking with nationalist groups across Europe, was invited by Azov battalion leaders to help recruit right-wing war tourists, eventually joining them in 2017. Ukraine has hate speech laws similar to those in the European Union that have become significantly more draconian since 2014, but an exemption was carved out specifically for Ukrainian “Nazis” volunteering to fight Russian-speaking Ukrainian citizens in Kharkiv and Mariupol, granting them a lot of leeway to produce propaganda and host large events to give some parts of the nationalist world the impression that they were creating the Fourth Reich.

During this time, Azov’s international secretary, Olena Semeniaka, began soliciting support from nationalists for the Ukrainian cause. Most hierarchal, rooted, ideologically coherent Nationalsocialist and Fascist organizations, such as Golden Dawn in Greece, Forza Nuova, Marian Kotleba’s Our Slovakia, etc, prioritized a worldview that is anti-NATO, against Washington’s influence, and anti-Zionist, so Azov struggled to find an audience.

Ukrainian recruiters were then forced to fish in a smaller, more polluted pond, seeking out eccentric internet-based organizations full of teenagers and police informers that grew out of the Iron March forum, which was run by an anti-Putin fanatic and Azov supporter from Uzbekistan. Iron March users bathed in nihilism, expressing a fascination with accelerationism, Charles Manson, school shooters, and the FBI controlled satanic cult, the Order of 9 Angles. Kapustin and his partner, the black metal musician Alexei Levkin — an avowed satanist, mental patient, and murderer — began using groups like Misanthropic Division and Wotanjugend as a feeder to talk these mentally disturbed young people into moving to Ukraine and joining the Azov Battalion.

While the Azov Battalion’s internet publicists at the time sold the group as a Nazi revolutionary force to impressionable young people, the truth about the militia’s origins contradict this. Azov was co-founded by Rabbi Natan Khazin, an Israeli Defense Forces veteran, who incorporated his “Jewish Hundreds” into the so-called “neo-Nazi” group and provided them with training and Israeli weapons.

One would think that the choice between being a Jew and a neo-Nazi would be a binary one. But here, the toxic confusing odor of both Ukrainian Nationalism and Denis Kapustin lingers. A key tenet of Kapustin’s ideology, now ubiquitous in both Eastern Europe and abroad, is convincing dupes that they can somehow build bridges to the avowed enemy of nationalism — post-1945 Western liberal plutocracy — by fighting and dying on its behalf.

But another factor is at play here: Jews who fund and support this activity increasingly see mimetic, ideologically defenestrated, pop culture forms of Nazism as a useful recruitment tool for irregular armies ordered to enact vengeance against Russians and others they hate and fear as blood enemies. Kapustin, by extracting anti-Semitism from NS ideology, creates a product that looks and feels like a dynamite stick but has no nitroglycerin.

Throughout his career, Kapustin presented himself as a liberator of the Holy Rus against Putin’s Islamo-Mongolian hordes. Aside from the obvious absurdity of fighting on behalf of a state that outlaws Russian language and culture in the name of Russia, Kapustin’s fighting group, the Russian Volunteer Corps (RKD), showed nothing but contempt for the Russian people during their relatively few military operations.

In March 2023, Kapustin’s RKD were ordered to infiltrate Russian villages in the Bryansk region near the Belarusian border and cause mayhem. Before being repelled by security forces, the RKD began shooting random civilians, including a 10-year-old boy, even taking some hostages in their hasty retreat from the poorly planned assault. The aftermath of the RKD’s sadistic and cowardly rampage was so discrediting to the Ukrainian war effort that when images of bullet ridden cars full of dead civilians were shown by Russian media, the Ukrainian government initially dismissed the RKD incursion as a Russian false flag to make Ukraine look bad.

Rather than a Russian patriot, Kapustin’s pattern of behavior is more akin to a dime a dozen mafia enforcer. It is a known fact that Israeli anti-Russian figure Leonid Nevzlin helped fund the RKD, which uses the symbols of General Vlasov’s pro-Hitler Russian Liberation Army. Anonymous sources have sought to dispute the extent of Nevzlin’s financial support for Kapustin’s project, but Nevzlin is even controversial among anti-Putin activists for his employment of ultranationalist soccer hooligans in Kapustin’s sphere to attack his personal rivals. Text messages published in Russian media reveal Nevzlin and Kapustin apparently plotting to frame another Ukrainian military liaison for embezzlement so that they can both access the public funding being allocated to RKD for themselves.

All lingering doubts were cleared last October, when prominent anti-Putin Jewish figures such as Garry Kasparov, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and Nevzlin himself provided explicit full-throated support for both Kapustin and the Russian Volunteer Corps at their Free Russia Forum.

There’s no question that Kapustin and his model has been enormously influential. Kapustin is the co-founder of the Active Club movement, which today has nearly 200 chapters worldwide, and was involved in organizing and inspiring the National Socialist Network in Australia which is always in the news. Germany’s Der III Weg, Italy’s CasaPound and Poland’s NOP have also been indelibly marked by Kapustin and his brand of Ukrainian nationalism. In America, figures such as Richard Spencer and Nick Fuentes, consciously or subconsciously, have embraced a more clean-cut version of Kapustinism, arguing to nationalists in America that it is their duty to save Zionist controlled Washington from its geopolitical enemies.

The guaranteed fate for all who embrace spook manufactured epistemically incoherent worldviews is that they will be used and discarded once the powers they serve find no more use for them. Kapustin and several other RKD members have perished this week in Zaporizhzhia in what military analysts describe as a suicide mission. Only the naive do not realize that these “neo-Nazis” are being fed into the Russian combine harvester at a procrastinated rate on purpose as the end of the war approaches.

Denis Kapustin’s end is indeed symbolic.