BRATISLAVA: Russia’s ultra-nationalist Night Wolves bikers club is expanding its presence in Slovakia, prompting the Nato member to seek to curb its influence amid concerns about the rise of the far-right.
The Night Wolves, under US sanctions for their role in a pro-Russian insurgency in Ukraine, opened a Slovak branch in June and held military-style exercises in the same month with the Slovak Recruits, a 200-strong paramilitary group.
Slovakia is the most pro-Russian of four central European states, according to a 2017 Ipsos poll, and has granted the bikers passage while Poland and Germany banned them.
Deputy Defence Minister Robert Ondrejcsak said he was concerned about the rise of groups opposed to democratic ideals, and the potential threat the Night Wolves posed in terms of pro-Russian propaganda.
“(Slovak Recruits’) recent cooperation with the local branch of the Night Wolves — a soft power (tool) of the Russian hybrid strategy and propaganda, who are openly against the democratic system, against the EU and Nato — is even more worrying,” he said. Critics accuse Vladimir Putin’s Russia of hybrid warfare — a blend of political subversion, cyberwarfare and irregular warfare — to increase Moscow’s influence. It includes allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election, something Putin strenuously denies.
Slovakia was a part of the Soviet bloc during the Cold War but moved decisively into the western orbit when it joined the European Union and the Nato military alliance in 2004.
Its centre-left government, however, still seeks strong trade ties with Russia and reluctantly backed EU sanctions against Moscow over its annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea territory.
At the heart of Ondrejcsak’s concerns are the Slovak Recruits, a group founded in 2012 by Peter Svrcek, who acknowledges attending a military camp in Russia as a 16-year-old. Svrcek denies any illegal activity by his outfit or links to extremist groups but said at least one former member joined pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Svrcek’s Slovak Recruits confirmed to Reuters that in June they conducted a military-style exercise at the Slovak branch of the Night Wolves compound in western Slovakia, using decommissioned military equipment the Wolves’ borrowed from the state Military History Institute to display at their planned World War Two museum. The exercises, first reported by activist Juraj Smatana, prompted an open letter by more than 200 politicians, analysts and rights activists demanding the Recruits and the Wolves be banned. The institute has since asked the Night Wolves to return its equipment. The Night Wolves’ compound, painted in camouflage and surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, opened in June at a former pig insemination station in western Slovakia, some 70 km from Bratislava.
President Andrej Kiska on Tuesday branded the compound a security threat and criticised police for failing to act against what he called “questionable clubs spreading across the country”. — Reuters
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