Italian police raid of neo-fascist militants finds air-to-air missile | Hacker News Reader

Italian police raid of neo-fascist militants finds air-to-air missile

arstechnica.com

85 pointsUltramanoid69 comments

Anyone with more insight into all of this than me who can explain why they went to fight on the Russian side? I mean, there surely were neo-nazis around on both sides of that conflict, right? Just different flavours? I wonder how you pick who to support if your core ideology is that "people different from us are bad".

Yeah! The Ukrainians had small but vocal numbers of fascist volunteers on _their_ side, and that got a lot of bad press and the Russian side went to great lengths to paint the whole of Ukraine as fascist. So its really surprising they'd have fascists going to the _Russian_ side.

Russia is funding and supporting several right-wing groups and parties in Europe.

The cooperation is based on mutual pursuit of more power.

Russia is selling itself as a counter to liberal, internationalist hegemony in the form of the EU. Ukraine wants to join the EU and is economically supported by the EU and broke away from Russia's political sphere over it, and the alt right hates the EU political project. This makes Russia and the European alt right natural allies.

That would be a Hollywood version of the ideology. Right extreme groups are quite a tangled mess. Many of these groups in Europe are looking up to Russia (and Poland, and Hungary, and Serbia) right now. Those eastern european countries are perceived as the possible source for a European nationalist renaissance, as they display a strong stance against both european federalism and mass immigration. Obviously, that vision of Eastern European countries' politics is just as oversimplified as Hollywood's neonazism, but the war between Russia and Ukraine has been largely presented by western supporters as a war between nationalism and european blending.

I think those countries stance against liberal ideas like gender equality, lgbt right and so on as well as a rather authoritarian form of government at least in Russia and Hungary might make western European fascists a bit jealous as well.

Very jealous. Russia is simply considered the "good guy", standing up against the perceived oppression from globalism and European federalism.

The people of the EU often want to see ourselves as progressive, but we're a very diverse lot and there's a lot of people who would like to take a few steps back in regards to LGBT rights, Pan-Europeanism and multi-culturalism.

The actual popular support [or opposition] for whatever ideas [or against] are usually very different than what strongly consolidated power hierarchies show. (That is in countries where one party gained significant power, eg. in Hungary and Poland.)

Of course. EU citizens, on average, have very little information about what's happening in the eastern parts of Europe, no matter the subject, and since many people dis-trust mainstream media nowadays it's easy to spread one's own narrative and use that for one's own purposes, while ignoring the fact that such expressive freedom wouldn't be possible without the system that one is critizizing.

I find it weird too, especially considering that Donbass and Luhansk declared themselves People's Soviets. I think it's just shoddy journalism and those people actually fought alongside Ukranian troops.

Doesn't mean anything really, especially as far-right extremists are not the brightest bulbs.

Slovak neonazis were fighting in Donbass on the side of Russians/separatistit, because that side invested heavily in propaganda (abroad, not only domestic) and presented itself as a front against anything modern and especially the EU (which is the incarnation of evil to them), so reactionary forces are naturally drawn to them.

They didn‘t fight on the russian side. For some reason english media mistranslated original press release.

https://www.poliziadistato.it/articolo/225d2c47fb2c9ef299497... It says "avevano combattuto nella regione ucraina del Donbass contro gli indipendentisti". So they were fighting against separatists.

Ars Technica needs to issue a correction to the story. Otherwise I'm going to lose considerable respect for them.

There's a fine line between making a genuine mistake and lying to your readers.

I think if you point it out to them with a correct translation from the Italian police site they will correct it. Also, they're not the only one who made that mistake. The independent said the same thing. It would be interesting to know where the original mistranslation originated from.

I guess it came from the origin of the main suspect Fabio Del Bergiolo. He was was a candidate for Forza Nuova in 2010. FN is a pro-Kremlin far-right party.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Force_(Italy)

It might be a typical American level of ignorance of geography and foreign politics. A wrong assumption of Ukrainian separatists in a Russian land is an obvious mistake to make.

> I'm going to lose considerable respect for them

Hahaha.. as if the bank account was that full to begin with

I think it's you who got it wrong. Some Googling shows that Forza Nuova is pro-Russia, possibly having switched from supporting Ukranian fascist groups in the past.

"Mr. Fiore, of Italy’s Forza Nuova, said Moscow is now the sole guardian of Western values, in the way Rome once was."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/far-right-flocks-to-russia-to-b...

And even Google translate:

> The investigations had begun about a year ago when the police headquarters in Turin, coordinated by the Central Directorate of Prevention Police, had monitored some people linked to political movements of the ultra right and who had fought in the Ukrainian region of Donbass against the separatists.

Wouldn't one expect at least that as part of fact checking?

Edit: Damn, so perhaps the poliziadistato.it article got it wrong. At least, according to Wikipedia.[0]

> Forza Nuova leader Roberto Fiore was once closely allied with the Ukrainian far-right Svoboda party, but following the beginning of the War in Donbass, Forza Nuova and Fiore "made a considerable shift to the pro-Russian camp." According to the Political Capital Institute, a Hungarian think tank, Forza Nuova is one of a number of Russian-backed radical right political parties in Europe.

But the supporting cites are from 2014-2015, so who knows?

0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Force_(Italy)

Seriously, you prefer wikipedia over official police report?

Judging from the other comments, Wikipedia may be correct in this case. Although, as I noted, the cites are a few years old. So FN could have switched sides again.

Also, given that I don't know Italian, I don't really know what the police report said.

This does not seem to be correct, Forza Nuova seems indeed to be supporting the (Russian backed) separatists. According to the Wikipedia article (with sources) [0], the party used to be allied with neo-fascist Svoboda but switched sides during the Donbass conflict and is in return also backed by Russia.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Force_(Italy)#Presence_out...

Official police report looks like much more reliable source than article in Wikipedia (especially an article about politic and such topics).

Can't "indipendentisti" mean in favor of Ukraine's independence to Russia?

More likely, Donbass "independence" from Ukraine.

I'm coming to wonder whether it could be a typo in the Italian Police's report, that other media may have corrected. Pretty much all media have written that they fought ALONG the separatists. See French Le Monde and German Deutsche Welle right now, who agree that'd be PRO separatist.

Italy's right wing movements have had a fondness for Russia for quite a few years now; Ukraine fascists are just not as famous as Russian ones, nor as powerful, so I guess it was an easy pick. An anti-EU stance might also have been a factor.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/08/russia-is-...

TLDR: Russia backs these groups to undermine Western societies. Nazis admire Putin because of shared disdain for democracy.

I wouldn’t want to associate with Nazis then, clearly they support supremacy, secrecy, and a criminal state. Democracy is associated with fairness, openness, and justice.

I would like to think that the US educational system inoculates everyone from those dreadful -isms.

People who feel shafted by society will reject its values. No amount of inoculation prevents that. The best way of prevention is to genuinely care for the rejected.

Then Nazism is truly tragic, for those that follow it are the most prone to rejecting others. It seems so trivial, and yet we fall short.

If it wasn't the far-right it would be anything else. It's just a geopolitical game.

How nihilistic, it seemed possible you would be willing to endorse and encourage greater ideals.

There are no* neo-nazis from the Ukrainian side, it's a Russian propaganda myth. Since WW2, they've been putting a "neo-nazi" label on anyone who thinks that Ukraine shouldn't be a part of Russia.

* I mean that ocurrence of neo-nazis is approximately the same as in any normal country. You can never say there are no neo-nazis in any particular group of people, of course.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-30414955

Yeah, good example of "post-truth" world. Russia is rich and large and influential enough to influence even BBC. In fact, the ideology that drives the Russian side of the conflict indeed has something to do with nazism, while Ukrainians are just protecting their own country. Ukrainians don't fight on non-Ukrainian soil, while Russians do fight on Ukrainian soil.

Today, both president and prime minister of Ukraine are Jewish both by ethnic origin and by religion, by the way.

I sympathize with the tendency to have polarized views when deeply involved in a conflict, especially an armed one. But for the record, this BBC article does not have the common hallmarks of a viewpoint pushed and purchased by the Kremlin, or a post-truth world. On the contrary.

For the large part it comes across as balanced and informed IMO, and your sweeping dismissal does not answer the factual issues it raises, particularly the role of the Azov Battalion and the Patriot of Ukraine organisation, "which considers Jews and other minorities "sub-human" and calls for a white, Christian crusade against them, it sports three Nazi symbols".

In my opinion, this piece on atlanticcouncil.org sorts out the misconceptions: there is in Ukraine no more support for extreme-right or neo-nazi organizations than other European countries (which however is on an alarmingly upward trajectory). However, "More ominously, Ukraine’s far-right, para-military formations and their penchant for vigilantism remain a problem that must be more vigorously countered by the state and their sources of funding investigated thoroughly." [0]

It is really necessary get a grasp of the whole picture.

[0] https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/ukraine-a...

The problem with the article is that it's balanced between fake propaganda and truth, which makes it unbalanced relatively to pure truth.

https://static.timesofisrael.com/www/uploads/2016/08/bandera...

During WW2, there were two opposing camps in Ukrainian forces: Andriy Melnyk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andriy_Atanasovych_Melnyk) who wanted to cooperate with Germans, and Stepan Bandera who opposed that (and actually spent almost all of WW2 as a concentration camp prisoner). Melnyk was much less popular back then, and today there is no glorification of him either. We honor Bandera who fought against both Nazis and Soviets. Of course, Russian propaganda can't stand the latter part, and tries to defame his memory as much as possible.

Of course this isn't true - Bandera plainly did not oppose cooperation with the Germans - he cooperated with them very enthusiastically, both before and after his arrest. And he did not spend "almost all of WW2" in concentration camps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UNRA_sl.jpg

I find it surprising that somebody still finds it surprising.

Neonazism was for all purposes Putin's de-facto state ideology for Russia since around 2005 or so.

The only fig leaf they have is the official denial of connection in between the skinheads and other neonazi groups and the state. That is only skin deep of course https://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/Images/2017/11/23/dbb8470a...

Putin is of course afraid of image taint and loosing personal access to the Western politicians if he were to dress like a nazi himself. So he keeps himself nominally distanced

The Soviet Union was always fundamentally fascist, and so is the current Russian government. Or at least, after the second 1917 revolution, when the gangsters took over. But now more openly kleptocratic.

What's the yellow weapon that they showed in the haul?

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Scree...

That's the receiver and stock group for a Steyr AUG. There are complete examples in the top right corner.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steyr_AUG

Ah thanks, I see, it's just missing it's barrel

Looks like a Steyr AUG

How dangerous is one of these things without the surrounding targeting system? And how useful would this be to a foreign government that somehow doesn't have access to other air-to-air missiles?

It seems to me like a bit of a sensationalist headline, and the more dangerous weapons are actually the small arms.

Not very, since it lacks a warhead. And it's a late-70s era missile, so not even valuable for reverse engineering.

I’d love to watch a teardown on YouTube.

A guy did a teardown of the seeker head from a russian Knock-off of the AIM-9. Rather interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbxcS1AwquA

The 530 is a SARH missile. It requires a radar system (found in the French Mirage aircraft for example) to lock and paint it's target the entire time for the missile to track and eventually detonate. It would be pretty difficult to do and the acqusition/targeting radar would need to be cooled and energized for the duration of the flight. Launching A2A missiles from the ground is pretty rare but it is possible as evidenced recently by Yemen ground launching a Russian R27T infrared missile successfully at a Saudi F15.

For anyone else not familiar with military hardware: SARH = semi-active radar homing. The missile itself passively detects a radar signal reflected off a target by an external source, such as the launching aircraft.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-active_radar_homing

It's become somewhat common to see AAMs fitted/designed to be surfaced launched. See Iris-T SL or Rafael Spyder system. Most Python missiles being produced/retrofitted are for ground launch.

> How dangerous is one of these things without the surrounding targeting system?

30kg fragmentation warhead is enough to kill a lot of people.

Few kg IEDs kill and maim up to a hundred people, now imagine how a factory made 30kg warhead will perform.

This is being reported elsewhere with other details. Reports that there were multiple raids across the region on a number of groups who were connected, although details are scarce. I’ve seen it reported that the weapons belong to a member of a Juventus Ultras group.

Links:

https://www.football-italia.net/140792/juve-ultras-neo-nazi-...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/01/nside-talys-ul...

They were only a few steps away from development of a milkshake capability.

How useful is this in actuality?

Could I launch it from the ground, or does it need to be launched from the air? Could i just strap it to a Cessna, or does it need other systems (radar?) to work? Does it need the original war head, or can you attach any old explosive device.

In short, if I as a potential terrorist wanted to shoot down a plane, would this be a reasonable starting point?

They were trying to sell it, not use it directly. At which point it may end in the hands of someone who might know how to use it or how to retrofit it for other uses.

Not at all useful, needs to be fired from the air, from a specific outdated French jet weapon system that essentially nobody uses any more. Speculation was that maybe Libya would have a use for it. And yes, its target needs to be painted with a radar for the entire flight.

30kg of high explosive could be useful to a generic terrorist but it's unlikely that the missile itself would have been used.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28976/italian-cops-rai...

That's kind of what I thought.

But then the asking price seems high, it doesn't seem to have a warhead so this is just the missile.

I would be much more concerned about the Chinese MANPADs that Qatar acquired and made their way into Syria and beyond.

I think the fuel and the explosive in it are individually useful/ valuable. The missile itself is a semi-active radar guided air to air missile and I doubt these guys had the resources to use it is originally intended to.

Italian here, in the news they said it looks like the rocket was empty. So explosive was probably removed to be used by itself.

The linked article said it didn't have a warhead. Are you saying it didn't have any propellant either? In that case an expensive tube?

The more that comes out about this story the more boring it seems.

According to some sources, no warhead, but there's no mention of propellant.

Some sources say "ready to be armed and used" but with no other detail.

Some others are mentioning Matra as the manufacturer.

Probably not very useable at all. But it points out how independant actors are able to access weapons that are otherwise not sold to anybody who isn't the state.

Which leads to the question, if an incompetent party that was careless enough get busted has access to an old and useless missile, then what do the competent independent groups have access to?

But maybe they only bought it because they were incompetent? Maybe the competent groups know that some random air to air missile is worthless, and steered well clear.

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