Revealed: The Russian Neo-Nazi Network Pushing ‘White Lives Matter’ Division in Britain – Promoted by Tommy Robinson
As riots spread across Belfast, Tommy Robinson promoted a movement founded by a sanctioned Russian oligarch, which has pushed white supremacist propaganda about the death of Henry Nowak
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A network of Russian far-right extremists steeped in neo-Nazi antisemitism – created under the umbrella of a sanctioned oligarch close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and now openly promoted by Tommy Robinson – has been driving ‘White Lives Matter’ propaganda over the murder of 18-year-old student Henry Nowak, Byline Times can reveal.
The organisation promoted by Robinson is part of a wider Russian state-linked campaign to sow division across the UK and Europe,
A Byline Times review of X and Telegram posts by the Brotherhood of Academists, a Russian ultranationalist youth movement which operates under the leadership of the US-sanctioned Tsargrad Society, reveals that the group pushed a white supremacist framing of Nowak’s killing on 20 May – the day media coverage of his killer’s trial intensified.
The material it amplified came from the “Paladins International Sovereigntist League”, a Russian-sponsored alliance of extreme-right organisations from a dozen countries, launched last September in a regional parliament building by the same Kremlin-linked oligarch.
On Tuesday night, as riots spread through Belfast hours after his call for nationwide street protests, the far-right agitator – real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – promoted the movement by name to his 1.9 million followers on X, sharing its torchlit ‘Remember Henry Nowak’ ceremony with the words: “Russian nationalists @Academists1721 paying their respects to Henry Nowak and sending a message of United patriotism 🇬🇧 🤝 🇷🇺”.
Robinson posted the video from Russia, where he had spent the previous days meeting Elon Musk’s father, Errol Musk, in a Moscow hotel bar – a man who has himself given an interview to the Brotherhood.
Analysis of the two organisations’ X accounts and Telegram channels by Byline Times establishes that they were promoting white supremacist propaganda over Nowak’s murder, including the ‘White Lives Matter’ slogan, almost two weeks before the Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage declared that “white lives matter too”.
The Russian Brotherhood group promoted by Robinson is also a virulently antisemitic group, frequently promoting conspiracy theories about “Jewish puppeteers” controlling the West and promoting the neo-Nazi concept of “ZOG” (‘Zionist Occupied Government’).
A Tribute from Moscow
Robinson has spent the past week urging his followers onto the streets. After graphic video of a stabbing attack in north Belfast circulated on Monday night, he shared a list of protest locations and declared: “The whole of the United Kingdom is hitting the streets tonight at 7pm following yet another invader attack on our people.” The word ‘invader’ echoed the description of Nowak’s killer the Brotherhood had amplified three weeks earlier.
By Tuesday night, masked crowds in Belfast had torched a bus and other vehicles and blocked roads while police appealed for calm. Robinson continued to post support for people “rising up” even as he simultaneously posted image upon video of burning buildings and vehicles.
At 7.23pm – 23 minutes after the protests he had called for were due to begin – Robinson posted the Academists’ tribute video: uniformed members of the movement holding flares and gold banners behind a burning sign reading ‘Remember Henry Novak’ – the surname misspelled in Russian transliteration, the Cyrillic alphabet having no ‘w’. The clip was viewed more than 243,000 times within hours.
Robinson had previously filmed his evening with Errol Musk at what Searchlight and the Guardian identified as the Shalyapin bar of Moscow’s five-star Metropol Hotel, joking that the pair were going to “cause some trouble”.
Musk, a frequent visitor to Russia, had spent the previous week at the Kremlin-backed St Petersburg International Economic Forum, known as ‘Putin’s Davos’.
Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, has long supported Robinson, and repeatedly amplified the latter’s calls for people to take to the streets over the Belfast attack to many millions of people.
The Oligarch’s Youth Movement
In its promotional material, the Brotherhood of Academists describes itself as a youth project developing “under the leadership of the Tsargrad Society”, the political network of Konstantin Malofeev, the sanctioned oligarch known as Russia’s ‘Orthodox billionaire’.
The US Treasury designated the Society itself in April 2022, accusing it of involvement in espionage on behalf of Russia. Malofeev – first sanctioned by the US in December 2014 for financing separatism in Crimea, and since designated by the UK, the EU, Australia, Canada, Japan and New Zealand – was described by the Treasury as a financier of opinion-makers and institutions advancing Russia’s interests inside the European Union.
The Tsargrad Society’s founding executive director was Leonid Reshetnikov, a former general in Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR. The Brotherhood’s channels repeat the slogan “Be white, be Christian”, and it runs military training programmes feeding members into a reconnaissance detachment fighting in Ukraine.
The Brotherhood’s main Russian-language Telegram channel has more than 5,000 subscribers and its dedicated English-language Telegram channel has more than 1,000 subscribers.
The Paladins League
The Brotherhood effectively functions as the youth movement arm of the International Sovereigntist League of the Paladins, frequently reposting the league’s X and Telegram channel content.
On 12 September 2025, the Mariinsky Palace – seat of St Petersburg’s Legislative Assembly – hosted the launch of the Paladins’ first congress. Delegates from fascist groups worldwide joined a religious procession led by Patriarch Kirill. Malofeev opened the congress alongside the Russian ultranationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin – commonly dubbed “Putin’s brain” – with a deputy from United Russia, Putin’s ruling party, among the Russian participants.
Fifty delegates from a dozen countries attended, including the Italian neo-fascist party Forza Nuova, the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn, and HVIM, the Hungarian ultranationalist ‘Sixty-Four Counties’ youth movement. The league is named after the Paladin Group, the far-right mercenary organisation founded by former Nazi SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny.
The Paladins league brought to fruition a plan Malofeev’s network had incubated for years: internal Tsargrad emails and documents reported by New Lines in 2022 showed Malofeev’s organisation covertly coordinating with Matteo Salvini’s League in Italy, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, the Freedom Party of Austria and Alternative for Germany, to plan a Moscow-run network of European far-right parties dubbed ‘Altintern’ – a play on the Soviet-era Comintern.
Four years later, the league began coordinating action on European streets. On 1 December, the Paladins announced “the first joint official rally against the European Union”, timing protests for the anniversary of Kaja Kallas becoming the EU’s foreign policy chief, and declaring: “Our White Christian nations shall be free!” In April, the Academists’ X account celebrated reports that Slavic immigrants “are targeting Arabs and Africans” in Germany as “Amazing”.
The Brotherhood has other ties to the UK. One Brotherhood representative who has interviewed Errol Musk has appeared on the online show of Holocaust-denier Mark Collett, founder of the neo-Nazi group Patriotic Alternative.
Setting the Narrative
The Paladins and the Brotherhood turned their attention to Britain as the trial of Nowak’s killer drew to a close.
On 15 May, the Academists reposted a Paladins declaration that “WHITES are indigenous to Europe!” Five days later, as reporting on the trial intensified, the Paladins’ X account posted CCTV footage of the 18-year-old alongside a racialised account of his death – describing Vickrum Digwa, a British Sikh, as an “Indian invader” who left Nowak “bleeding in the street” while police “handcuffed the dying victim”.
The Brotherhood reposted the Paladin’s post the same day, and published the CCTV image of Nowak under a three-word caption: “WHITE LIVES MATTER”.
Police bodycam footage of officers handcuffing the dying teenager, released at the start of June, triggered protests and a political backlash. On 2 June, Farage declared “white lives matter too”, calling Nowak’s treatment evidence of two-tier justice – a narrative Byline Times reported this week is a racist myth, with a quarter-century of policing data showing it is ethnic minority people who are disproportionately targeted by police. Farage urged the public to respond with “pure cold rage”.
That evening, hundreds protested in Southampton before marching on Digwa’s family home, where missiles were thrown at police and some demonstrators performed Nazi salutes while shouting “white power”. Tommy Robinson addressed the crowd alongside UKIP Leader Nick Tenconi and Reclaim Party founder Laurence Fox. Sections of the British Right have cast the case as the country’s ‘George Floyd moment’.
On 5 June, the Brotherhood of Academists pinned a post to its X account declaring an end to “globalist-driven immigration”: “The plague of third worlders will be purged!”
On 8 June, the same day as the Belfast stabbing attack, its Telegram channel published a post titled ‘Europe Is Bleeding’, presenting Nowak’s death – “a police officer in Britain flatly refused to help a bleeding man with a stab wound” – as proof that “globalists intentionally replace the population of Christian countries and condone the murder of white people”: the baseless far-right ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory of a deliberate plot to displace white Europeans.
The post concluded: “Tribunal – to the left traitors! Reconquista – to the foreigners! Life – to the Europeans!”
‘Jewish Puppeteers’
The group has a long history of antisemitism. On 24 February – the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine – the Brotherhood’s Telegram channel published an image of armed fighters wearing its insignia, declaring the war “an existential and a spiritual war” ignited by “globalist elites”, and vowing to fight on until “every Russian person is liberated from the hands of Jewish puppeteers”.
The channel repeatedly forwards material from the Paladins built around ‘ZOG’ – the ‘Zionist Occupation Government’ – a foundational neo-Nazi conspiracy theory holding that Jews secretly control Western states.
One post by both the Brotherhood and the Paladins, illustrated with an antisemitic caricature of an octopus encircling the globe beneath a Star of David, claims the Jeffrey Epstein files have turned the “decades-old ‘conspiracy theory’” into “documented reality”. A separate post by the Brotherhood on X described Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “the Antichrist”.
Robinson’s promotion of the virulently antisemitic Brotherhood of Academists contradicts his stated support for Israel and opposition to antisemitism. He was hosted in October by Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli on an official visit, during which he was described as “a true friend of Israel and the Jewish people”.
The Pattern
Robinson’s entanglement with Kremlin-aligned networks has a long history. In February 2020, he travelled to Moscow and St Petersburg, giving interviews to the state broadcaster RT, delivering a talk titled ‘The Rape of Britain’ and meeting Alexander Malkevich, a propagandist sanctioned by the US for election interference.
In February this year, Byline Times revealed that Robinson had years earlier been appointed ‘goodwill ambassador’ to the MMBF Trust, an unregistered charity fronting hollow British local news websites traced to Moscow Media Group – a company which worked for Putin’s presidential administration and has ties to the sanctioned oil company Gazprom Neft.
During the 2024 Southport riots, Robinson was among the most prominent figures circulating false claims about the attacker’s identity – claims pro-Kremlin Telegram channels amplified.
This year, Robinson has amplified the Kremlin’s messaging directly. In February, Kirill Dmitriev – the US-sanctioned head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and one of Putin’s most prominent envoys – posted on X that “UK Phase One colonisation is complete – immigrants are fully in control of UK leadership, state and media”. Robinson shared it, commenting: “Russia can see it.”
By April, Robinson was telling his followers: “Our enemies sit in Westminster, not Russia.” Replying to Prime Minister Keir Starmer on X on 30 May, he wrote that Russia “are not the enemy of the British people”.
Robinson was contacted for comment, but did not reply.
Nafeez Ahmed is Head of Investigations at Byline Times
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When are Starmer and his government going to get out properly in front of all this horror and blast Restore, Robinson and Reform off their insufficiently robustly rejected agenda.
I know it's not the same, but I cannot help thinking about how Cameron's arrogance, lassitude and ineptitude in (not) facing down the Leave campaign lead to a wholly avoidable disaster.
And what we are facing now from the far right in fact stems largely from that.
While the UK has for decades had an extreme right wing fringe, from at least Mosley, and its support has fluctuated, it seems far more dangerous today fuelled by social media. I agree with Adrian that this latest iteration seems to have been kick-started by Cameron’s cowardice, his hubris and ineptitude in calling for a referendum rather than dealing with the malcontents.
May’s “hostile environment” and her “Go Home”vans gave the green light to the racists and bigots to come out of the closet and although Brexit was about more than immigration it was another huge own goal that allowed racism and bigotry flourish and for Farage to step into the limelight with his barely disguised racism and the bonhomie of a man of the people caricature.
Nor has the language of some prominent politicians helped - their “swarms” & “illegals” & “strangers in their own country” have fed the bigotry.
I feel we have some of the worst, most useless, ineffectual politicians at a time when we need people who are going to face down the bigots and racists instead of trying to occupy the same ground and when we have existential problems of “forever” wars and the biggest of all, the approaching climate catastrophe which none of them is taking seriously. Nero and Rome come to mind.