ABSTRACT
Foreign fighters present on either side of the war in Ukraine often came from similar “nationalist” or far-right backgrounds, and largely held similar views on socio-economic issues. Yet, they still fought one another in Eastern Ukraine, and while doing so sometimes found their far-left ideological foes as their brothers in arms. This ideological squaring of the circles would not have been possible without the intellectual input of the French “new right” and its revolutionary nationalists, as well as Jean Thiriart's theory of the “outside lung.” They were later to converge with Eurasian influenced ideas of the Russian geographer and philosopher, Alexander Dugin, and produced a truly brown-red cocktail in Eastern Ukraine. Unité Continentale (UC, or Continental Unity), a French-led “separatist” unit, came to symbolize this convergence but, interestingly, many of ideas powering its members were also animating some of the foreign far-right fighters on the pro-Ukraine side.
