The neighborhood of Exarchia in central Athens has always been home to those who fight the system. Before Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’ left-wing Syriza Party came to power in 2015, groups of police would stand on street corners bordering the area, riot shields at the ready, waiting for the streets to erupt into one of the area’s periodic fits of violence. Syrians, Afghans and Africans; pirated DVDs, cannabis and cocaine, you can find just about anyone and anything on the central square — except ATMs, symbols of “rapacious capitalism” that the anarchists long ago firebombed out of existence. [...]
Zafeiris started to pay attention to the political situation in Ukraine in the aftermath of the EuroMaidan protests, he recalls. “For the first time in recent European history we had a government in a European country with a Nazi element,” he says. He describes EuroMaidan as a NATO-organized coup “to overthrow Yanukovych because he was not interested in [drawing closer to] the EU.” [...]
Far-right parties only managed to secure a tiny percentage of the vote in Ukraine’s post-EuroMaidan elections, but that doesn’t deter Zafeiris from concluding that they’re a controlling element in Kiev. “It’s not a matter of size but of quality,” he says. “There are a lot of Nazis with top posts in the government.” The Ukrainian government, he claims, has become a “puppet for some parts of the U.S. regime.”
In March, Zafeiris decided to take action. He gathered a group of like-minded people and began to communicate with the separatist group in Donetsk, which granted him permission to open the Athens office. It’s not the first of its kind in Europe — there are offices in Italy, the Czech Republic and Finland. In Athens, the founding members put up their own money toward renting the premises to get the ball rolling.
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