In political debates around the influence and strength of fascism in Ukraine, there has been a very dangerous analysis used here to dismiss their power and influence. This analysis is based on reading the electoral results of a single party - Svoboda's two percent in the parliamentary vote in 2019. This is a central argument made in Doug Saunders' Globe & Mail column on March 26 2022, entitled "Ukrainian 'Nazis' are real - but they're not worth our attention".
This is not the only way to measure the power of fascism, because fascism is not, at the end of the day, an electoral project alone. It is a project of seizing total power, not just parliamentary power.
Fascist methods of gaining power have very often included a "respectable" front in elections, but the dynamic element in the fascist drive to power is focused on building up streetfighting gangs and ultimately armed paramilitary death squads.
In Ukraine, there is an entire ecosystem of fascist organizations, many of which are focused on streetfighting and militias and not the parliamentary route. Since the 2014 coup in Ukraine, these fascist militias have been formally incorporated into the Ukrainian military. These militias have been trained by the West, including Canada (as exposed by Ottawa Citizen defence reporter David Pugiliese). Ukrainian fascists have also been incorporated into the command structures of police and intelligence forces.
There is a direct parallel with how the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists collaborated with the Nazi occupation from 1941 to 1943: their explicit strategy was getting training and arms by joining the collaborationist police and military units, of which the 14th Waffen SS (1st Galician) Division is only the most infamous example.
We don't have to look beyond our borders or continent to see how fascists deliberately enter the armed wing of the state in an explicit method of learning how to kill, terrorize and fight wars, and to build their political organizations and networks. In Ukraine, these units spent 8 years on the frontlines in the country's eastern civil war.
The fascist method of gaining and seizing power always involves building the capacity to deploy murderous and wanton terror against their enemies (and even against competing internal factions). This is what has happened in Ukraine.
So while the existing Ukrainian state is banning large and even marginal left-wing organizations and has deployed a program of "decommunization" against organization that might utter the "S" word, the fascist elements have become further integrated into the security state. Anti-communism was a cornerstone of the OUN founding in the late 1920s. The exiled OUN fascists also waged a failed insurgency against the Soviets through the postwar 1940s and into the 1950s - all sponsored by Western states.
Putting this all into perspective, what is Zelensky's actual powerbase in the state? He was hugely popular in the election for waging an ostensibly independent anti-oligarch pro-peace campaign. But once in power, he abandoned both and pursued war and neoliberal impoverishment with gusto. Zelensky is a TV clown with no actual organized base. Meanwhile, Nazis populate the security state in the context of a major war. We'd be foolish not to imagine the threat of a fascist bullet doesn't have influence at the highest levels of the post-coup Ukrainian state.
I am no expert on Ukraine. I have studied fascism as best I could. An essential starting point is Robert Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism.