American far-right radicals – linked to neo-Nazis from the Ukrainian Azov Battalion – have been charged with conspiring to stage a terrorist attack in Baltimore, Maryland. Clint Russell and Beth Clendaniel are dangerous, but we’ve heard so little of their international connections.
In early February, the US Justice Department announced the indictment of neo-Nazis Sarah Beth Clendaniel and Brandon Clint Russell for conspiracy to destroy energy substations in Baltimore.
Authorities describe the pair’s plans as “driven by their ideology of racially-motivated hatred.” If convicted, they each face a maximum sentence of 20 years.
From the FBI report:
From at least June 2022 to the present, Russell conspired to carry out attacks against critical infrastructure, specifically electrical substations, in furtherance of Russell’s racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist beliefs. As alleged, Russell encouraged the use Mylar balloons to short out a power transformer and, in a conversation on Oct. 25, 2022, Russell encouraged an attack be carried out “when there is greatest strain on the grid,” like “when everyone is using electricity to either heat or cool their homes.”
In his conversations on encrypted communications applications, Russell posted links to open-source maps of infrastructure, which included the locations of electrical substations, and he described how a small number of attacks on substations could cause a “cascading failure.” Russell also discussed maximizing the impact of the planned attack by hitting multiple substations at one time.
In later conversations, Clendaniel allegedly stated that if they hit a number of electrical substations all in the same day, they “would completely destroy this whole city,” and that a “good four or five shots through the center of them . . . should make that happen.” She further added, “[i]t would probably permanently completely lay this city to waste if we could do that successfully.”
Few bothered to tell us just how dangerous these two neo-Nazis are at a time when the FBI and DOJ see Nazis in their coffee in the morning when they get up. Could it be because of their ties to Ukraine’s Nazis? The US media was hot on the case of Ukrainian Nazis in the Azov Battalion until the Russian invasion. Now the neo-Nazis are fierce freedom fighters.
The Atomwaffen Division
Russell founded Atomwaffen Division, also known as the National Socialist Resistance Front, an international neo-Nazi terrorist network. In January 2018, he was jailed for possessing an unregistered destructive device and illegally storing explosives.
The corrupt SPLC, the go-to advisors for the military and the FBI, calls Atomwaffen a dangerous neo-Nazi group but plays down the Ukraine ties.
No one obsessed with calling all American white people white supremacists has made much of it.
This is an actual far-right lunatic duo, unlike parents at Board of Education meetings, that Bidenistas should want in prison. The media should jump on this, but they didn’t.
RT notes that Atomwaffen is tied to Ukraine’s Azov Battalion of Nazis. That information was noted in a West Point Investigation.
The West Point Investigation
An investigation in 2020 by the West Point Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center found that Ukraine has long-held “a particular attraction for white supremacists–ideologues, activists, and adventurers alike.”
There were many nationalist groups in the 2014 Maidan coup that was “electrifying to far-right individuals and groups in Europe, the US, and further afield,” the investigation records. Neo-Nazis worldwide began flooding Ukraine. Of particular attraction was the Azov Battalion, which “enjoyed support from within the government of then President Petro Poroshenko and the security services, despite well-documented human rights abuses.”
They were celebrated and some of the neo-Nazi arrivals to Kyiv (Kiev at the time) joined the Battalion itself or received training or guidance from its now-regaled fighters.
Among this far-right conglomeration were representatives of Atomwaffen. The relationship was formalized in the years since. Its European division attended Azov training camps in Ukraine, as did several of its US-based members, who were subsequently jailed for plotting violent attacks and intimidation campaigns against journalists.
More From the Investigation
The American who founded Atomwaffen, Brandon Russell, contacted an anonymous representative of Azov in 2015 through Ironmarch. Using the handle Odin, he described himself as “an avid supporter of the Azov Battalion” and said he’d like “some advice from you about my militia that I lead in the US.”99 Russell was a physics major who had joined the Florida National Guard.r
According to an investigation by Bellingcat, Azov was in contact with another putative member of Atomwaffen, Andrew Oneschuk, early in 2016 via its online podcast.100 According to Bellingcat, Oneschuk discussed issues facing Americans who wanted to join Azov, “and expressed interest in learning methods of attracting youth to nationalism in America.”101 s Oneschuk had actually tried to travel to Ukraine the previous year, at the age of 15, but had been stopped by his parents.102
At least one of the members of The Base arrested in January 2020 had expressed a desire to go to Ukraine. According to court documents, William Bilbrough had “repeatedly expressed an interest in traveling to Ukraine to fight with nationalists there” and had tried to recruit two other members of The Base to accompany him.103
Atomwaffen wants a race war, and no one in the Biden administration or the media sees fit to draw the connections for us?
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