The North Atlantic Fellas Organization is fighting the dissenting voices with the help of the CIA. Photo: Politico
Celebrated in mainstream US media for its anti-Russian trolling, the Twitter operation known as NAFO was founded by a Polish antisemite to raise money for a militia that has hosted war criminals, white nationalists, and wanted murderers.
Whether they know it or not, anyone who has checked Twitter for recent coverage of the Ukraine proxy war has likely encountered at least one of the thousands of trolls that comprise NAFO, or the โNorth Atlantic Fellas Organization.โ Thanks to the efforts of NAFO and its โfellas,โ any journalist or prominent figure critical of Ukraine or NATO on Twitter is likely to receive hundreds of replies accusing them of being paid by Russian President Vladimir Putin (or even performing fellatio on him) from accounts with Shiba Inu dog avatars.
Since its inception several months ago, NAFO has earned gushing praise from the Washington Post, which hailed it for โshow[ing] that the tables could be turned on Russia when it came to trolling.โ The arms industry-funded, Washington DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), meanwhile, hosted an online panel highlighting NAFO as an instrumental weapon in the Russia-Ukraine infowars.
Yet NAFOโs beltway boosters often gloss over its role as a fundraising machine for the Georgian Legion, a US-backed Ukrainian fighting group that stands accused of gruesome battlefield atrocities. Several former members of the Legion have produced first-hand testimony documenting its perpetration of war crimes, including the torture and execution of POWs and civilians.
One NAFO founder explained that he chose the Georgian Legion as a funding recipient precisely because of the unitโs reputation as a band of โmercenaries and criminalsโ that was willing to carry out barbarous acts which could cause foreign governments to shy away from supporting it. Another NAFO founder has praised the Georgian Legionโs leader for โkilling Russians since the โ90s.โ
Among the Georgian Legionโs most notorious members are US fugitive and murderer Craig Lang, as well as Paul Gray, an American whose past involvement in several neo-Nazi organizations was never mentioned during the friendly primetime interviews he was granted by Fox News and its local affiliates.
While providing a financial feeding tube to a militia that revels in its atrocities, NAFO continues to attract effusive support from mainstream US journalists and think tankers who portray the operation as little more than a grassroots expression of online solidarity with Ukraine.
Obsessively online interventionists find meaning and purpose as ‘fellas’
Employing cartoon memes of the Shiba Inu dog breed, NAFOโs postmodern aesthetic, irreverent style, and dedication to viciously trolling any critic of the Ukraine proxy war has garnered the adulation of Western media and interventionist government officials alike.
To outsiders, the lingo that flows through internal NAFO chats might seem unintelligible: โfellasโ refers to members; โnafoarticle5โ is a call to action that urges โfellasโ to dog-pile on a particular social media post; โvatnikโ serves as a pejorative for Russians and virtually anyone critical of the US-backed proxy war. Phrases such as โNAFO expansion is non-negotiableโ and sarcastic claims that they are funded by the CIA (which they simultaneously claim โdoesnโt existโ) are also ubiquitous.
Behind the anonymously named Twitter accounts of NAFO members lies a base of extremely online, mostly male civilians seeking a sense of purpose and community. Some participants have tattooed Shiba Inu avatars onto their bodies while others have published photos of their newborn babies in the arms of an adult sporting a NAFO shirt.
One member of the troll operation tweeted a photo of an elaborate NAFO tattoo emblazoned on his arm but has since deleted it.
In public, NAFO leaders market the image of a charity-focused community of do-gooders, however, many posts by its fellas reflect the kind of psychologically deranged outbursts familiar to young adult men who spend endless hours ranting on a messaging platform built for gamers. In mid-October, for example, an administrator complained that she was forced to ban two members of the NAFO Discord for publicly plotting the murder of a third member of the community.
While US corporate media have declared that within NAFO โthere is no command structure,โ effectively releasing the groupโs founders from accountability for the fellasโ behavior, this reporter found all the hallmarks of an organizational hierarchy. The groupโs Discord server is run by founders, assigned administrators, moderators, and โforgersโ who make memes used for harassing people on social media. โVerified fellasโ are granted access to otherwise locked channels, while regular โfellasโ are assigned more mundane roles.
โItโs preferred that people who are not heavily involved in the day-to-day do not speak on behalf of NAFO or what NAFO is to the press,โ one administrator wrote in the serverโs announcement channel.
Inside NAFOโs social media crowdfunding nexus
There are three ways to obtain a NAFO avatar and become a verified โfella.โ The first is to donate to the Georgian National Legion through an email address attached to PayPal and belonging to Taras Reshetylo, a field commander of the Georgian Legion. Another way to join is by donating to an organization called โProtect Ukraine Defenders,โ or merchandise purchase from a website called Saint Javelin. Saint Javelinโs logo depicts the Virgin Mary bearing a US-manufactured Javelin missile.
https://twitter.com/Official_NAFO/status/1571893587725410306?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1571893587725410306%7Ctwgr%5Ef9e1a7264c05b63b7bc36b63337c8fc3e2adfa51%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fthegrayzone.com%2F2022%2F10%2F20%2Fukraine-nafo-troll-war-criminals%2F
Though distinct from NAFO at its foundation, Saint Javelin sold merchandise for the organization and recently incorporated NAFO into its brand. For months, all of Saint Javelinโs proceeds from NAFO merchandise went directly to the Georgian Legion, according to its website. Like NAFO, Saint Javelin estimates that it has raised huge sums for the war โ more than a million dollars.
Besides fundraising for the Georgian Legion, Saint Javelin passes on proceeds to United24, an initiative launched by Ukraineโs President Volodymyr Zelensky โas the main venue for collecting charitable donations in support of Ukraine.โ It also channels money to the Ukrainian World Congress, an organization that has defended the legacy of World War Two-era Nazi collaborator and mass murderer Stepan Bandera, branding him โthe undisputed symbol of Ukraineโs lengthy and tragic struggle for independence.โ
Saint Javelinโs partnership with Zelenskyโs United24 aims to help raise funds to build an โarmy of drones.โ
๐ฅ HUGE announcement.
In our goal to build a Vatnik free Ukraine, Saint Javelins has joined forces with President Zelenskyโs @united24_gov_ua
Together we are building an โArmy of Dronesโ. Donate directly: https://t.co/S551GWwM2H pic.twitter.com/Yk8mZR5dWl
— Saint Javelin (@saintjavelin) July 25, 2022
The Saint Javelin website was launched by a former journalist named Christian Borys whose employment history spans NATO state-funded outlets including Canadaโs CBC and Britainโs BBC. Borys has also authored articles for the US government-sponsored outlet Radio Free Europe.
One of Borysโ most notorious journalistic escapades consisted of a night of bar-hopping in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, where he patronized an antisemitic restaurant and returned with a review for Vice News portraying it as one of the cityโs many weird and wonderful haunts.
https://twitter.com/jh_swanson/status/1492601271383175168?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1492601271383175168%7Ctwgr%5Ef9e1a7264c05b63b7bc36b63337c8fc3e2adfa51%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fthegrayzone.com%2F2022%2F10%2F20%2Fukraine-nafo-troll-war-criminals%2F
The restaurant converts anti-Jewish tropes into a marketing gimmick; its waiters dress as Orthodox Jews who haggle with patrons over the prices of menu items. โIf you play your cards right [itโs] ridiculously cheap,โ Borys gushed in his review.
Noting that Lviv โwas home to around 220,000 Jewish peopleโ, Borys wrote that โthe population now only hovers around 1,100โ, Strangely though, he neglected to explain how the genocidal rampage of Stepan Banderaโs Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists helped violently extinguish the local Jewish population. He merely stated that the restaurant โpays homage [to the local Jewish population] in a weird way.โ
The Ukrainian ethnic-owned restaurant contains a terrace that overlooks the ruins ofย โone of the most important synagogues in Eastern Europeโ.
In the same 2015 article, Borys described going to a bar where โyouโre served by little people,โ visiting another that forces you to recite ultra-nationalist slogans before entering, and emptying an AK-47 clip in a target depicting Putinโs face at a local shooting range.
On Twitter, Borys erupted with glee when a member of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion was spotted wearing a Saint Javelin patch. He seemed equally thrilled when his former employer published photographs from an unstated source of Ukraineโs Defense Minister Olekseii Reznikov handing President Zelensky a Saint Javelin t-shirt.
In the NAFO Discord chat, Borys suggested paying protesters to hold NAFO demonstrations outside Russian embassies.
A retired Marine and amateur conflict pundit named Matt Moores claimed to have established the relationship between NAFO and Borys after co-founding the former organization. On October 7, NAFO was incorporated into the Saint Javelin brand, with the latter becoming the formerโs parent company, according to a post by a NAFO administrator on the Discord serverโs announcement channel.
The third organization for which NAFO fundraises, Protect Ukraine Defenders, was launched by a well-connected functionary of the Brussels-based intelligentsia named Ievgen Vorobiov. Vorobiov started as an intern for the European Union state-funded Centre for European Policy Studies think tank, then moved on to gigs at the Polish government-founded Polish Institute of International Affairs and Foreign Policy magazine. Before founding Protect Ukraine Defenders, Vorobiov spent nearly four years at the European Union Advisory Mission in Ukraine.
The mural "Saint Javelin" is completed, #Kyiv. It was realized by artists from the creative group Kailash-V.
๐ธZMiST pic.twitter.com/emHCvoTama— UkraineWorld (@ukraine_world) May 28, 2022
An anchor for amplifying pro-proxy war Twitter accounts
While Twitter has responded to NATO state pressure to suppress accounts associated with Russian state media and has banned numerous other users for simply questioning the official Western version of events in Ukraine, organizations connected with NAFO have seen explosive growth since the Ukraine proxy war began. Saint Javelin, for its part, has received verification from Twitter and amassed nearly 70,000 followers since launching an account this February.
A NAFO founder who operates under the pseudonym โKama Kamiliaโ had less than 200 Twitter followers in April 2022; today they broadcast to an audience of over 22,000. NAFO co-founder Christian Borys had less than 5,500 followers in February 2022 and now boasts more than 36,000. Similarly, Matt Mooresโ Twitter account grew by more than 16,000 followers since January.
โKama Kamiliaโ has explicitly linked the Georgian Legionโs follower count to the popularity of his NAFO organization: โI think they had 4,000 followers when we started [now] they haveโฆ more than 20,000.โ As of early October, that number is more than 110,000.
In September, the Discord tech company granted NAFO โpartneredโ status, meaning it now serves as a corporate โrole modelโ and is considered one of โthe best servers out there.โ Yet it is composed of just over 3,000 members, raising questions about the tens of thousands of new followers NAFO has suddenly accumulated on Twitter.
NAFOโs expansion has also driven the growth of hundreds, if not thousands, of otherwise insignificant Twitter accounts which have participated in online harassment and used the group to push crowdfunding efforts.
One NAFO-stylized account which the Georgian Legion follows and at least one administrator of the NAFO Discord boasted that they were able to purchase gear for a Ukrainian soldier named โIgor.โ In the photographs attached to the Tweet, Igor can be seen wearing a Nazi Sonnenrad patch.
Guys, you remember Igor?
Here is he with the helmet, the plate carrier, and boots we got him.
Rain uniform and gloves are on the way.Happy soldier! โฅ๏ธ๐ซก
Thank you #NAFO pic.twitter.com/R7qytI0r3o
— โจะดัะฐะฝะฐ ะบัะปะธะบโจ (@IamBohhi) October 12, 2022
The war crimes of the Georgian Legion
Behind the goofy Shibu Ina avatars and rambunctious chat sessions lies a mission that defines NAFO: to raise as much money as possible for the Georgian National Legion. One administrator of the official NAFO discord put it succinctly: โNAFO has always been about supporting the Georgian Legion first and foremostโ.
^^^ NAFO has always been about supporting the Georgian Legion first and foremost. The list doesnโt mean that these are the only legit charities/battalions. Fellas are more than welcomed to support whoever they want. I support Dimko and heโs not on the list.
— goblin๐บ๐ฆ (@goblin__soup) September 6, 2022
Another administrator stated on July 2 of this year that โ$43,000 (USD) has been raised by the fellas for the Georgian Legion.โ Three months later, a NAFO member estimated the figure to be โlikely totaling over $1 million,โ a metric of the explosive growth of the group. โIt is the most organic movement Iโve been involved with,โ he told the Wall Street Journal.
While NAFO fundraises for several allied organizations, supporters are most frequently directed to donate to the Georgian Legion. Matt Moores, the US Marine veteran who co-founded NAFO and describes himself as โvery online,โ has explained in interviews that NAFO โstarted as a fundraiser.โ
โBeyond the memes, beyond the jokes, beyond the humor, there is a real component of it with, you know, fundraising. These little cartoon dog avatars that they have, each one of them is made by a volunteer, a fella forger, in our community and these little small donations have raised close to $300,000 so far,โ Moores explained.
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With an existing Twitter following, Moores reached out to someone who posts online under the Kama Kamilia in May. It was then that NAFO was born.
โI was looking and saw that someone was posting these little cartoon dogs and using them to, you know, mock and to belittle these, you know, propaganda statements and the supposed achievements of the Russian military and just trying to throw these little jabs wherever you could get them in,โ Moores said. โOne day someone asked Kamil โhow do I get one of these?โ And he said โif you send $20 or whatever it is to the Georgian Legion weโll make you one of these.โ So from there, it has gotten quite out of hand.โ
Little is known about the NAFO co-founder โKama Kamilia,โ as corporate media outlets hyping them as a pro-Ukraine influencer extraordinaire have refused to disclose his real name. However, this reporter and researcher Moss Robeson have determined that he is Kamil Dyszewski, a 29-year-old Polish national and failed criminologist-turned-video game reviewer living somewhere near London.
The NAFO founder has posted several antisemitic memes, including some mocking Jewish victims of the Holocaust, seemingly glorifying Adolf Hitler, and calling for the deportation of President Trumpโs Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to Tel Aviv.
https://twitter.com/mossrobeson__/status/1581069641945784320?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1581069641945784320%7Ctwgr%5Ef9e1a7264c05b63b7bc36b63337c8fc3e2adfa51%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fthegrayzone.com%2F2022%2F10%2F20%2Fukraine-nafo-troll-war-criminals%2F
โI just stumbled my way through life, now into this. What fuels it for me is the absolute hatred and vitriol I have towards the Russians,โ Dyszewski has said. โI just found a way in which we could expedite the process of getting them [the Russian government] removed.โ
Dyszewski explained that he chose the Georgian Legion to be the recipients of the funds he raised because he believed their reputation as โmercenaries and criminalsโ would preclude them from receiving support from foreign governments.
The fighting group, which was incorporated into the official Ukrainian military, is led by Mamuka Mamulashvili, a Georgian-born veteran of several conflicts against Russia who swore to execute Russian POWs, an act that constitutes a war crime under the Geneva Convention.
โWe will not take Russian soldiersโฆ we will not take prisoners, not a single person will be captured,โ Mamulashvili has said. โYes, we tie their hands and feet sometimes. I speak for the Georgian Legion, we will never take Russian soldiers, prisoner. Not a single one of them will be taken, prisoner.โ
Mamulashviliโs comment came in response to a viral video that depicted one of his fighters casually executing wounded Russian POWโs.
Mamulashvili is a key suspect in the massacre by snipers of 49 protesters in Maidan square in 2014, a likely false flag attack designed to intensify opposition to the elected government of Ukraine. At the same time, he has been awarded the National Hero of Ukraine recognition, the highest national title in the country.
As warlord Mamuka Mamulashvili boasts of executing Russian POWs, the legion he commands carried them out just five miles from Bucha on March 30. I expose this war criminal's longstanding ties to key American foreign policy officials for @TheGrayzoneNews https://t.co/naSeNsEJgm
— Alex Rubinstein (@RealAlexRubi) April 8, 2022
In a March 2022 interview with this reporter, Henry Hoeft, an American veteran named who volunteered with the Georgian National Legion, described witnessing war crimes committed by members of his unit. According to Hoeft, two men โblew a checkpointโ after members of the Georgian Legion accused them of being Russian spies. His fellow soldiers โshot their car up [and] black-bagged them.โ
Georgian Legion fighters then โfucking slit their throats in the basement of the fucking building,โ Hoeft recalled. โWe donโt even know if they were actually spies or just people who ran a checkpoint.โ
Former Ukraine volunteers describe savage war crimes by the Georgian Legion โ the same group that NAFO was founded to fundraise for as its founder believed their reputation as "mercenaries & criminals" would preclude them from foreign support. Read more https://t.co/4OIo8PSK8y pic.twitter.com/zhkvGFfQ98
— Alex Rubinstein (@RealAlexRubi) October 20, 2022
Another former American volunteer in Ukraine known only by the alias Benjamin Velcro described witnessing fellow Georgian Legion volunteers torture and execute a captured teen whom he estimated was โabout 18.โ
Velcro remarked, โWeโd been told to take no prisoners.โ
The Georgian Legion veteran continued: โWe made a lesson to him. We fucking cut his Achilles heels and made him swim across the Severdonetsk river and he drowned. Or he was shot. We were all taking kind of like practice shots at him to see how well our shot was as he swam without Achilles heelsโฆ either way heโs dead,โ Velcro said.
โOf course, those fucking Georgian Legion guys did that stuff because theyโre Georgians and theyโre retards,โ Velcro remarked.
The Georgian Legion has hosted two other notorious US foreign fighters profiled by The Grayzone: Craig Lang and Paul Gray. Lang was a member of the group before he returned to the United States, where he is wanted for robbing and murdering a married couple to finance his return trip to Ukraine. The Federal Bureau of Investigations has obtained video showing Lang participating in war crimes in eastern Ukraine, including โbeating and drowning a girl after a fellow fighter injected her with adrenaline so that she would not lose consciousness as she was drowned.โ
DHS is 'concerned' over Nazis returning after fighting in Ukraine. I examine two Americans now fighting Russia, one a veteran of various street brawls against leftists and the other a lunatic that murdered a couple in Florida & tortured women in Donbas https://t.co/3zkGHAznhN
— Alex Rubinstein (@RealAlexRubi) May 31, 2022
Gray, who is still active with the Georgian Legion, has been involved with multiple US-based neo-Nazi organizations, including Atomwaffen, which is listed as a terrorist organization by several countries. On its Twitter account, the Georgian Legion promoted a Fox News appearance by Gray. Similarly, Mamulashvili has posted Langโs photograph on his Facebook page.
The Georgian Legion boss, Mamulashvili, has enjoyed close ties to Washington throughout years of low-intensity conflict in eastern Ukraine, junketing to Capitol Hill for meetings with lawmakers with seats on foreign affairs committees in the House and Senate.
Though NAFO co-founder Moores speaks only infrequently about the Georgian Legion, he makes no secret of his support for the outfit: โAnywho, how about those Georgians,โ he has written on Discord. โBoy they sure do kill Russians good, Iโll tell you what.โ Similarly, Moores has praised the warlord Mamulashvili, marveling that โthis dude has been killing Russians since the 90s.โ
On Twitter, Moores posts under the handle โ@iAmTheWarax,โ where he has discussed Mamulashviliโs surprised reaction to the fact that โcartoon dogsโ were raising thousands of dollars for his legion.
also very funny to me that journalists have to explain this to their audiences
— matthew. (@iAmTheWarax) September 5, 2022
Moores, a former banker who joined the Marine Corps to โpursue his childhood dreamโ of becoming a tank operator, was first deployed to Libya in 2011, where the US and NATO overthrew and murdered the countryโs longtime leader, Muammar Gaddafi, instantly transforming a once prosperous African country into a despotic hellhole. Moores has described his experience in Afghanistan, a country occupied, destabilized, and abandoned by the US military, as โbased.โ
For his part, Kamil Dyszewski โ or Kama Kamilia as he is known online โ has promoted the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and celebrated the Ukrainian governmentโs October 8 suicide bombing attack on the Kerch bridge, retweeting several posts from fellow NAFO members that photoshopped Shiba Inu dogs into the scene of the attack. In the Discord server, Dyszewski wrote, โI need Russia to apologize for its audacity to exist. It can do so by ceasing to exist.โ
The Grayzone has closely reviewed NAFOโs Discord server and gained access to channels accessible only to verified members. As the second part of this two-part investigation will show, the server is a cesspool of hatred, with fellas delighting in videos of wounded and dying Russians and cracking gay jokes at their expense. Prominent journalists can also be found in the chats colluding with NAFO leaders on how to spin their coverage of the troll farm and cultivate support from DC power brokers.
