MOSCOW – A court in Ukraine on Wednesday rejected an extradition request for an American who served in the country’s right-wing paramilitary units and dealt a blow to US law enforcement agencies who wanted Americans traveling to Ukraine combat war experience with far-right militias there.
The American Craig A. Lang, a veteran of the Army and North Carolina, has been charged in America with a double murder in Florida, but his case drew attention to the risk that Americans for far-right groups in Ukraine fight. and other global hotspots.
“Just as we do not want them in the U.S. military, we do not want them to practice fighting and killing” in foreign military-to-military organizations, said Heidi Beirich, director of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said in a telephone interview. “We have enough violence in our own backyard to worry about.”
The US authorities have indicated that they intend to focus on the Ukrainian paramilitaries as one of the world’s hubs for right-wing extremists, an issue that has shot to the top of the agenda this year after far-right groups raised their potential for violence in the Capitol. riot.
But the issue is seen quite differently in Ukraine, where right-wing militias on the government side are fighting in a war with Russian-backed separatists that has killed more than 13,000 people.
Any suggestion that these groups are extremist could play the risk of getting hold of Russian propagandists, who tried to label the war as one of the Russian speakers resisting a “neo-fascist” government in Kiev. In fact, far-right parties win only a small chunk of votes in Ukrainian elections.
The Court of Appeal in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv largely agrees with Lang’s lawyers that he, despite the murder charge, is being prosecuted in the United States for his military service in Ukraine, under the Neutrality Act, a law rarely used to to fight in foreign wars. The court ruled that he was therefore entitled to a trial as an asylum seeker.
“There must be no discrimination against a group of people on the basis of race, religion or political or ideological views,” he said. Lang’s defense attorney, Dmitry Morgun, said in an interview.
During the termination of the extradition process, Judge Lang did not necessarily place him out of the reach of U.S. law, his lawyers said, pointing out that he could be deported to the United States if his asylum application failed. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of Florida, which is prosecuting him for the double murder, did not immediately return a request for comment.
Mr. Lang, 30, said in an interview at his law firm in Kiev that he did not have far-right views. He said he flushed out the U.S. Army after being absent without leave. He alternated between different jobs when he decided to go to Ukraine to assist an ally, in a case that inspired him.
Despite leaving the army under a cloud, he was welcomed with a few questions by a prominent paramilitary group, Right Sector, when he arrived in Ukraine in 2015. He went down in the interview of a train in eastern Ukraine near the war zone and said: ‘someone gave me a gun’, he said in the interview and the next morning he was deployed to the front.
While fighting with the Right Sector in Ukraine, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Kansas District, he mentored Jarrett W. Smith about the struggle with far-right paramilitary groups in Ukraine. Mr. Smith, who also served in the U.S. Army, later pleaded guilty to explosives.
According to federal prosecutors in Kansas, Mr. Smith spread information about bombs and recipes for homemade Napalm on the social networking site Telegram, while discussing plans to assassinate a Democratic Party politician and blow up a media headquarters. The accusation did not identify the media company, but CNN reported that it was the target.
“You could also be asked to kill certain people who fall into the bad grace of certain groups,” he said. Long in 2016 to mr. Smith wrote, according to court reports in Kansas, in which he describes what service in a Ukrainian right-wing paramilitary force entails.
Then, again in the United States, in 2018, according to federal prosecutors in Florida, Mr. Long and a fellow American veteran of the war in Ukraine, Alex J. Zwiefelhofer of Wisconsin, robbed and killed a couple to raise money to travel to the South. America, where they hoped to join a right-wing paramilitary group fighting the Venezuelan government.
Mr. Zwiefelhofer was arrested, but Lang withdrew to Ukraine. Both were charged in 2019 in connection with the killings and for violating the Neutrality Act, for their mercenary plans in Venezuela. Mr. Lang, in the interview, said he was innocent of these charges. Mr. Zwiefelhofer pleaded not guilty.
Experts on hate crime have long sounded the alarm about transnational ties with overseas military training in the far right.
Estimates of the number of Americans fighting on the government side in the war in Ukraine vary, according to volunteers from the 20 quoted by the Soufan Center, a non-partisan group investigating extremism. Many stayed in Ukraine; Mr. Lang has a Ukrainian fiancé and child.
The court proceedings in Ukraine shed light on another, little-known activity of US law enforcement agencies related to Ukraine. Lang’s lawyers submitted affidavits from U.S. veterans of the trench fight in Ukraine over the FBI’s interrogation upon returning home.
“I am very sad to feel that I and others have become an enemy of the government because I simply wanted to help an ally,” one U.S. veteran, whose name was redirected by lawyers, said in one statement.
The lawyers cited investigations, the revocation of a passport and requests made by the FBI for assistance to the Austrian authorities to interrogate a US veteran.
In the interview in his law firm, when Mr. Long denying that he has far-right views, he claims that he can nevertheless be targeted in the United States today because he suspects it.
“I’m not a Nazi,” he said.
Maria Varenikova reported from Kyiv, Ukraine.