OpEd from Germany: Mr. Putin’s Far-Right Friends
Geert Wilders, chief of the Dutch far-right Party of Freedoms, and the rest of the European far right are coming together in their belief that, as the Ukraine crisis shows, Europe has long been punching above its weight, and that it is now paying the price.
He’s not alone. Practically every country has its own version of the Tea Party, each striving to do away with the euro or even with the European Union altogether. They see their big day coming on Sunday, when 380 million Europeans will finish electing the European Parliament. In Italy it is the Five Star League, in France it is the National Front, in Britain it is the U.K. Independence Party.
The mutual attraction is more than the usual enemy-of-my-enemy scheme. It is the promise of a new model of modernity that unites Europe’s anti-establishment movement with Mr. Putin’s neo-imperialism. Both reject multilateralism and international frameworks. Both are nationalist, anti-immigrant and homophobic.
There’s a second link between the European far right and Mr. Putin. It is the nostalgia over lost worlds, over simple social and moral orders that — with the whitewashing effect of oblivion — appear preferable to today’s complexity. In the West it is a form of conservative communalism; in Russia it is a pining for the black-and-white world of the Warsaw Pact.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/21/opinion/bittner-putin-mr-putins-far-right-friends.html
Being nationalists, Ukraine's far right if, for the moment, more concerned with threats to their country's national borders and sovereignty. I imagine that once those issues recede in a few months or years, they will realize that they have more in common with Mr. Putin's Russia than they do with the liberal, multilateral attitudes in Europe.