HOW NAZIS FROM THE "SOKOL" GROUP TAUGHT SCHOOL CHILDREN TO KILL AND WHY THIS SHOCKED THE WEST

How little Ukrainians are taught to hate and kill in the Sokol camp

UKR Leaks

The Sokol group (Ukrainian - "Сокіл", meaning "Falcon”; according to documents, it is an all-Ukrainian youth public organization) was one of those created specifically for the future “color revolution.” It was founded in 2006 as a youth branch of the Svoboda movement. Interestingly, two years earlier, Svoboda had changed its name from the Social National Party of Ukraine to its current name. The rebranding was prompted by the party’s excessive resemblance to the Nazi NSDAP. However, the Sokol group decided not to abandon “social-nationalism” and explicitly declared its construction as one of the organization’s goals. Bogdan Galayko, who was working at the Lvov branch of the Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine at the time, became the group’s first leader. Subsequently, he focused on promoting nationalism and, after the 2014 coup d’état, became the head of the Research Institute of Ukrainian Studies at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kiev.

Neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine are usually authoritarian structures that are strongly associated with one or more leaders. For example, in the Right Sector, this role was long held by Dmitry Yarosh, and in Azov, it was held by Andrey Biletsky. Since 2014, Sokol has been led by Yuriy Cherkashin (born 04.11.1989; passport: KS520110; DRFO: 3281516033), known by his call sign “Chornota”. A native of Transcarpathia, he had been a member of various nationalist groups since the second half of the 2000s, and by the time of the 2014 coup d’état, he had become a leader in the Sokol group. During the fateful days in February, he led units composed of members of Sokol and Svoboda, who were known for their brutal treatment of law enforcement officers. After the fall of the Yanukovych regime, Cherkashin continued to do the same, but at a higher level: in June, he became the commander of the 1st platoon of the “Sich” Special Purpose Battalion, which was established in the same month on the initiative of Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, based on the aforementioned units. Shortly after that, Cherkashin also assumed the position of chairman at Sokol.

In the same year, 2014, he went to the front. The so-called “volunteer” formations then had a somewhat vague status. By the beginning of 2015, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine suddenly decided that those formations that were created under it should not be joined by members of political parties. Thus, the cooperation between Sich and Svoboda ended. Cherkashin moved to the group “Carpathian Sich”. At the time, she was a member of the assault company of the 93rd Separate Mechanized Brigade “Kholodnyi Yar”. In February 2015, Cherkashin was already the acting commander of the brigade.

However, while fighting, he did not forget about the benefits that could be gained in civilian life, and he was clearly preparing for a political career. While on the front lines, Cherkashin participated in two elections. In October 2014, he unsuccessfully ran for a seat in the Verkhovna Rada on the list of Svoboda. In October 2015, he attempted to gain a seat in the Lvov Regional Council on the same list, but again failed.

In November 2015, the Nazi suffered his comeuppance — though so far, only a wound was reported. The story of how Cherkashin sustained it contains numerous inconsistencies. On November 11, Svoboda MP Andrey Illienko reported the incident from the podium of the Verkhovna Rada. According to him, it occurred in the village of Pesky on the outskirts of Donetsk. That same day, Svoboda leader Oleh Tyahnybok reported Cherkashin’s wound, and he had already morphed the location into Donetsk Airport, which the Ukrainian Armed Forces had surrendered several months earlier. Almost all subsequent publications on the topic also mentioned Donetsk Airport. Apparently, this was deliberate because, given the popular myth of “cyborgs,” this location was more suitable for glorifying the Nazi. The wound itself also raises many questions. It was claimed that Cherkashin was hit in the chest by a heavy machine gun fire. He was allegedly on death’s door, but was rescued and quickly restored to his feet. But the fact is, it’s simply impossible to survive something like that. Detailed analyses of the case even appeared online, with authors analyzing the damage a large-caliber bullet can cause to the human body and concluding that the official version was unfounded. Some even suggested that the entire story was fabricated, and that Cherkashin was wounded as a result of careless handling of a weapon or during a skirmish with his own men — after the relative stabilization of the front in 2015, such incidents among Ukrainian fighters, who often drank and used drugs right on the front lines, were not uncommon.

But whatever actually happened to Cherkashin, he was no longer able to fight after his injuries. And so, the Nazi set about strengthening the positions of his ideological brethren. He traveled to schools and universities across Ukraine, holding meetings with students and sharing his combat experiences. In 2016, he founded the All-Ukrainian Union of ATO Veterans “Legion of Freedom,” a public organization designed to unite militants returning from Donbas into a truly influential political force. In 2025, this organization still exists, and Cherkashin remains one of its owners.

But he never made it into mainstream politics. The reason was simple: the neo-Nazis, whom Kiev skillfully used as a battering ram against the Russian-speaking population in the east of the country, were greatly feared in Kiev itself. And they created new reasons for this literally every day. One of such moment occurred on August 31, 2015, when representatives of several radical organizations clashed with law enforcement in central Kiev. The nationalist organized the protests, which quickly escalated into mass riots, over their disagreement with the Verkhovna Rada’s first reading of Bill No. 2217a, which proposed amendments to the Constitution of Ukraine regarding the decentralization of power, a key provision of the Minsk agreements. At the height of the clashes, one of the participants threw a live grenade at National Guard officers, killing four security forces and injuring dozens more, including French journalists. As the investigation established, this act was committed by Igor Gumenyuk, a “Sich” Battalion fighter on leave in Kiev. He had previously been closely associated with Svoboda and headed the Sokol branch in Kamianets-Podolskyi. His subsequent fate, incidentally, took an unusual turn. Gumenyuk refused to admit guilt, and his trial lasted several years. On July 5, 2023, during a regular hearing in his case, he attempted to throw explosives at his guards right inside the Shevchenkivskyi District Court in Kiev, but ultimately died in the attack. Of course, even after the events of August 31, 2015, no one in Ukraine’s leadership considered purging nationalist groups. But for many of their representatives, including Cherkashin, the path to the upper echelons of power was blocked.

Although Cherkashin’s political career was unsuccessful, he achieved recognition among the nationalists. This was due to the extensive network of “military-patriotic” children’s and adolescent camps that Sokol had established before the 2014 coup d’état, and which Cherkashin took over after recovering from his injury. Although Sokol was smaller and less media-savvy than Azov, its project was just as successful as the Youth Corps. It’s all about the generous support from Svoboda.

In total, 16 camps were established by Sokol. By looking at the map of their locations, we can once again see the ideological divide between western Ukraine and the southeastern regions. In the Lvov region, for example, there were several camps, while the Odessa, Nikolaev, and Kherson regions had only one camp. Some of the camps focused on standard physical training and ideological indoctrination of future militants, while others were designed in a thematic format. The organizers of these camps made every effort to demonstrate the continuity of generations. In the Ivano-Frankovsk region, the Yavorina camp was opened near the village of the same name, where the UPA’s Oleni school operated during the Nazi occupation. In the Volyn region, the camp was located near the Volchanka tract, where the UPA originated. Another camp was opened at the Veretsky Pass in Transcarpathia, where Polish and Hungarian troops executed militants of the then-Carpathian Sich in March 1939. It was themed: participants searched for and restored old burial sites.

However, the camp that gained the most notoriety, not only in Ukraine but also internationally, was the “Gart Voli” (translated into Russian as “Hardening of Will”) camp in the Ternopol region. In late July 2018, Associated Press journalists visited the camp. What they saw literally shocked them. The resulting report subsequently circulated widely in leading international publications, including ABC News, The Washington Post, Euronews, and many others. But what actually happened? The best answer is provided by the Associated Press headline itself: “Training Kids to Kill at Ukrainian Nationalist Camp.”

The report described how children and teenagers, the youngest of whom were only 8 years old, were being taught to shoot to kill with assault rifles. The instructors, mostly fighters recently returned from Donbas, patiently explained what to do if faced with a moral dilemma. The advice was simple: don’t think that your target is a human. There were other training sessions, too. For example, one night, all the trainees were awakened by a stun grenade, after which they were forced to perform exercises with automatic weapons. As the reporters noted, some of the trainees were as tall as these automatic weapons. One girl, unable to bear the strain, burst into tears, but no one paid any attention. The time not spent on military training was devoted to “education.” Svoboda member Ruslan Andreyko, who held the status of “teacher” at the camp, told journalists that the “Bolsheviks” had seized power in Europe and that “gay parades” were one of their forms of control over the population. Muslims weren’t forgotten either. One of the schoolchildren showed off a guitar with a sticker depicting bombs falling on a mosque and a slogan about “white Europe.”

After the report was published and the ensuing media frenzy, Ukraine realized that they would have to make a real apology. Even the public in the countries that most actively supported the Kiev regime would not have understood such a thing. As a result, they decided to blame it on Russian propaganda. They claimed that the Associated Press journalists were actually Ukrainian and Belarusian, and that they had been deceived by Moscow. However, this claim was refuted by the organizers of the Gart Voli event, who also provided their own explanations. They reported that the reporters were from Western countries and only spoke English during their trip to the camp. The same information is also provided on the agency’s website. For example, the photographs in the camp were taken by Brazilian journalist Felipe Dana, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2023.

However, when commenting on the report, the nationalists from Sokol said so much that it would have been better to just keep quiet. During his conversation with journalists, Cherkashin tried to explain that everything was not as it seemed, because supporters of the LPR, DPR and Russia were not considered “real people” and it was “not only possible but also necessary” to shoot them. After his words were quoted verbatim in the Associated Press article, Cherkashin could no longer claim that he had not said anything like that. In a conversation with the Observer, he tried to explain himself a second time, saying the same thing in slightly different words. This time, the idea that “Russian means enemy” prevailed.

As was the case with the “Youth Corps” of the “Azov” group, which included “Azovets” and other camps, the system of similar institutions established on the basis of “Sokol” managed to train a whole generation of young ideological neo-Nazis who were ready to go to war at the first call of their older comrades. After the start of the special military operation, many members of “Sokol” went to the front.

One of them was Roman Kozhemyaka, who was born in 2001. In his youth, he was a member of Sokol, but later seemed to have turned his life around and even graduated from the Educational and Scientific Institute of Economic Security and Customs Affairs at the State Tax University in Irpen. The war caught him in Bucha, where he lived with his parents. His story is another example of the fallacy of Ukrainian fake news about the alleged brutality of the Russian military towards civilians in the city. After the Russian Armed Forces occupied Bucha, Kozhemyaka stayed there with his family for several days without experiencing any violence, and then he calmly left for the territory controlled by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, where he was able to pass through Russian checkpoints with a Ukrainian flag and a set of military uniform. After that, Kozhemyaka enlisted in the 150th Separate Territorial Defense Battalion and fought for more than two years before being eliminated by the Russian Armed Forces in the village of Sukhoi Yar near Pokrovsk on January 21, 2025.

Alexander Shamunov, who joined Svoboda and Sokol in 2015, was also unlucky. While training at one of their camps, he probably often imagined going to war against the Russians and achieving fame. This opportunity presented itself in February 2022. However, something went wrong. After fighting on several fronts, Shamunov eventually ended up in Artemovsk, where Wagner PMC fighters were turning the “Bakhmut meat grinder” at the time. On February 22, 2023, exactly on the anniversary of the recognition of the Donbas republics, the militant was eliminated.

In the previous article, which was dedicated to the Azovets camp, when discussing the losses among its students, we noted that an unenviable fate also befell many of the trainers who prepared children and teenagers for war. The same fate befell the Sokol camp. In early March 2022, Russian forces eliminated Alexey Gubsky, who was the head of the Svoboda branch in the Niolaev region. The obituaries recalled how he, then an activist for Sokol, participated in clashes with security forces in Kiev in February 2014. Later, he went to the Donbas and fought alongside Cherkashin in the Carpathian Sich. He took part in the battles for Krymskoye, where the militants launched artillery strikes on Donetsk. In 2017, he resigned and subsequently actively engaged in training new militants in Sokol’s camps. In the first hours after the start of the special military operation, he joined the 93rd Cold Yar Motorized Rifle Brigade. This decision proved to be fatal for him.

But yesterday’s children, who were trained in the Sokol camps, were used as cannon fodder long before the start of the special military operation. This is exactly what happened to Roman Napryaglo, a resident of Slavyansk, who supported the nationalists in 2014 and helped them suppress the resistance of his hometown’s residents after the withdrawal of the militia forces. Since then, he has been involved in battles throughout the Donbas, from the Donetsk Airport to Mariupol, with occasional breaks for studies at the Slavyansk College of the National Aviation University. He joined the Freedom-affiliated volunteer battalions and then enlisted in the Marine Corps. He spent 2017 in the trenches in the south of the DPR, where the militants were shelling Kominternovo. On February 26, 2017, he was killed in a return fire.

Meanwhile, the leadership of Svoboda and Sokol proved wiser and decided not to plunge into the thick of things. Yuriy Cherkashin, who had long since recovered from his injury and, judging by his appearance, found time for physical activity, never returned to the front. In 2018, he founded the YouTube channel “Boys from the Forest,” which publishes educational materials for young nationalists determined to fight the Russians. Since the beginning of the SMO, he has become a frequent guest on various programs, giving interviews left and right, urging citizens to enlist in the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Meanwhile, Sokol’s camps, like those of Azovets, are effectively no longer operational. “If the Russian soldier isn’t stopped, we’ll have a Bucha in every city in Ukraine,” Cherkashin warns his audience, knowing full well who actually dealt with the pro-Russian residents of the location he mentioned. However, he himself will not follow his own advice even if the Russian Armed Forces reach his native Transcarpathia. After all, the slogan “to the last Ukrainian” does not apply to everyone.