MOSCOW – A Ukrainian court on Wednesday rejected an extradition request from an American who served in right-wing paramilitary units, delivering a blow to US law enforcement agencies seeking to crack down on Americans traveling to Ukraine for experience battle with -Military right there.
American Craig A. Lang, an Army veteran and a native of North Carolina, was charged in the United States with a double murder in Florida, but his case drew attention to the risk of Americans fighting for far-right groups in Ukraine and other global critical points.
“Just as we don’t want them in the American armed forces, we don’t want them training to fight and kill,” said Heidi Beirich, director of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, in a telephone interview. “We have enough violence in our own backyard to be concerned.”
US officials have signaled that they intend to focus on Ukrainian paramilitaries as one of the world’s centers for right-wing extremists, an issue that topped the agenda this year after far-right groups demonstrated their potential for violence on Capitol Hill. revolt.
But the issue is seen quite differently in Ukraine, where right-wing militias are fighting alongside the government in a war with Russian-backed separatists that killed more than 13,000 people.
Any suggestion that these groups are extremists risks falling into the hands 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 share of the vote in Ukrainian elections.
The appeals court in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev largely agreed with Lang’s lawyers that, despite the murder charge, he faced prosecution in the United States for his military service in Ukraine under the Neutrality Act, a law rarely used against fighting in Ukraine foreign wars. The court ruled that he was therefore entitled to a hearing as an asylum seeker.
“There should be no discrimination against a group of people by race, religion or political or ideological outlook,” Lang’s defense attorney, Dmitry Morgun, said in an interview.
Despite ending the extradition process, the decision did not necessarily put Lang out of the reach of American law, his lawyers said, noting that he could be deported to the United States if his asylum application fails. The District Attorney of the Central District of Florida, which is suing him for the double homicide, did not immediately return a request for comment.
Lang, 30, said in an interview at his lawyer’s office in Kiev that he has no far-right views. He said he left the US Army after leaving without a license. He was switching between temporary jobs when he decided to go to Ukraine to help an ally, he said, in a cause that inspired him.
Despite leaving the military under a cloud, he was met by a prominent paramilitary group, the Right Sector, when he arrived in Ukraine in 2015, with few questions asked. Disembarking from a train in eastern Ukraine, close to the war zone, “someone handed me a rifle” right at the station, he said in the interview, and the next morning he was posted to the front.
While fighting with the Right Sector in Ukraine, according to the United States Attorney’s Office for the Kansas District, he advised Jarrett W. Smith on fighting with extreme right-wing paramilitary groups in Ukraine. Mr. Smith, who also served in the US Army, later pleaded guilty to charges related to explosives.
Federal prosecutors in Kansas said Smith had spread information about bombs and homemade napalm recipes on the social networking site Telegram, while discussing plans to kill a Democratic Party politician and blow up a media company’s headquarters. The prosecution did not identify the media company, but CNN said it was the target.
“You may also be asked to kill certain people who become the bad graces of certain groups,” Lang wrote to Smith in 2016, according to court documents in Kansas, describing what service on a Ukrainian right-wing paramilitary could entail.
Then, back in the United States in 2018, according to Florida federal prosecutors, Lang and a veteran American war veteran from Ukraine, Alex J. Zwiefelhofer, from Wisconsin, stole and murdered a couple to raise money to travel south America, where they hoped to join a right-wing paramilitary group fighting the Venezuelan government.
Zwiefelhofer was arrested, but Lang returned to Ukraine. Both were charged in 2019 for the murders and for violating the Neutrality Law for their mercenary plans in Venezuela. Mr. Lang, in the interview, said he was innocent of these charges. Mr. Zwiefelhofer pleaded not guilty.
Hate crime experts have long been warning about transnational links to military training abroad on the far right.
Estimates of the number of Americans who fought on the government side in the Ukrainian war range from 20 cited by the Soufan Center, a non-partisan group that researches extremism, to more than 100, according to volunteers. Many remained in Ukraine; Mr. Lang has a Ukrainian bride and a son.
The legal proceedings in Ukraine have shed light on another little-known activity by American law enforcement agencies related to Ukraine. Lang’s lawyers filed testimony from American veterans of the Ukraine trench fight about being questioned by the FBI on their way home.
“I am really sad to feel that I and others have become enemies of the government for simply wanting to help an ally,” said an American veteran, whose name was drafted by lawyers, in one of his lawsuits.
The lawyers cited searches, revocation of a passport and requests sent by the FBI for assistance to the Austrian authorities to interrogate an American veteran.
In the interview at his law firm, when Lang denied having far-right views, he argued that he could be targeted today in the United States on suspicion that he was.
“I am not a Nazi,” he said.
Maria Varenikova contributed reporting from Kiev, Ukraine.