Just past midnight in a snow-covered forest near Kyiv, four men dressed in black with truncheons strapped to their waists listen carefully for the telltale buzzing of chainsaws that belong to illegal loggers. “The police in our country are ineffective, corrupt or drunk,” says Zhenya, one of the men. “That’s why we have to deal with this problem ourselves.”
These woodland vigilantes, all in their early to mid-twenties, are not your typical environmental activists. They are members of the National Militia, an ultranationalist organization closely linked to Ukraine’s Azov movement, a far-right group with a military wing that contains openly neo-Nazi members, and its political spin-off, the National Corpus party.
