ABSTRACT
The phenomenon of Italian foreign fighters fighting on opposite sides of the Russian–Ukrainian conflict presents elements of high ideological complexity. On the Ukrainian front the foreign fighters of the farright/neo-fascist ideological area fight on opposite sides of the front and shoot at each other, those who fight with the pro-Russian militias have as comrades foreign fighters of the extreme left. This is an intricate situation that reflects the complexity of a political area too often and hastily portrayed as unitary by the media, that of the Italian extreme right and neo-fascism. This chapter aims to reconstruct and understand the ongoing complexity based on sources represented by texts written by foreign fighters in social media and collected through online ethnography. The analysis conducted on textual sources is the qualitative thematic with inductive method that is consolidated for the understanding of the ideological drivers of radical movements. Particular attention is devoted to the phenomenon of Red-Brownism, also called ‘Red-Brown cocktail’ which highlights the dynamics of ideological rapprochement between some neo-fascist groups and others of the extreme left fighting together on the Ukrainian front, but which could also represent an ideology beyond the cooperation between foreign fighters.
