Harskamp is the kind of place where everyone knows everyone, a postcard-perfect village of neat houses and tree-lined streets that is home to just over 3,500 people. The idea that the population might increase by 20% overnight came as a shock to some. When the Garretsens neared the Harskamp Barracks, around 250 young local men were burning tyres, hurling fireworks, and howling “Our own people first!” and “Harskamp belongs to us!” Garretsen immediately got her son out of there. “There were fireworks everywhere,” she told me.

Today, on a spring afternoon on the same spot, it is hard to imagine such a scene. The Afghans have left, and the barracks are now home to around 650 people who fled the Russian invasion of Ukraine. On a grassy patch outside the gates, a large Ukrainian flag flies. Refugees cycle past on bikes loaned by locals, giving cheery waves. Volunteers from one of the local churches hand out Dutch syrup waffles to children. A short walk away, Garretsen shows me a clothing bank, brimming with items donated by Harskamp residents.

Harskamp is representative of a wider contradiction in Europe’s treatment of refugees. In 2015 the arrival of more than one million people (most fleeing the Syrian civil war) saw wealthy European nations descend into panic and bickering. Southern nations accused their Northern counterparts of not doing enough to help. While Germany briefly opened its doors to people fleeing war, Eastern European countries rolled out razor wire at their borders, and since then the EU’s refugee policy has focused on keeping people out.

The arrival of more than six million Ukrainians, however, has been met with an outpouring of goodwill and a spirit of cooperation. For the first time, the EU has activated its Temporary Protection Directive, which means Ukrainians arriving in an EU nation have the right to live, work, attend school, and travel freely to any other EU country. There has been very little resistance: even the anti-immigrant populist parties who saw their support surge after the 2015 crisis have been broadly supportive.

The contrast between the warm welcome offered to the largely white, Christian Ukrainians compared to the more hostile reception for people from other cultures and religions has raised valid questions about racism and prejudice. Still, in Harskamp, the new spirit of tolerance appears to extend to everyone. Those I spoke to were embarrassed about the events of eight months ago. “The people here demonstrated and that’s not good,” says 29-year-old Bas Sturm, a deliveryman who organises football games between people living at the barracks and the villagers. They are determined to get it right this time.

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While the Afghans have left, about half the people staying in the barracks are non-Ukrainians, who were in the country for reasons such as work or study when Russia invaded. “We were welcomed [in Harskamp] in a way we never thought we would be,” says 20-year-old Algerian Guedah Siefedinne, who was studying business administration in Kyiv. “They didn’t care if we came from Ukraine or not. It was just, ‘you need help: you will eat, you will feel safe.’” Nigerian languages student Franklyn Ibeawuchi agrees: “They take care of us, the hospitality is so great. They have been asking us what we want, so they can assist us.”

But spend some time talking to the residents of Harskamp, and it becomes clear that their reserves of goodwill come with a significant caveat: that the refugees will eventually leave. And there is every indication that Vladimir Putin understands this.

European fears around migration have long provided opportunistic autocrats with the potential for blackmail. Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi was expert at exploiting concerns about unmanaged migration, extorting various financial pledges from the EU to keep people away.  The current Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan frequently threatens to renege on a €6 billion deal signed with the EU in 2016 to stop people crossing the Aegean Sea. Last winter, the regime of Belarus’s leader Aleksandr Lukashenko started bussing people seeking asylum to the border fence with Poland, in retaliation for EU sanctions.

Lukashenko’s ally Putin no doubt closely monitored that move. Putin has a history of stoking anti-migrant sentiment to try to destabilise the EU, both with disinformation campaigns that spread negative stories about migrants and financial assistance for anti-migrant parties. Now he is trying to light the fuse of the powder keg he created.

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The relentless Russian targeting of civilian and vital infrastructure in Ukraine — schools, hospitals, farmland, grain silos — seems calculated to make Ukraine uninhabitable, thus forcing an unprecedented number of people out of its borders. As the New York Times put it in a recent editorial: “Refugees are not a design flaw of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.”

If Putin’s aim was to exacerbate the divisions of the 2015 crisis, however, so far he has failed. Across Europe, governments and volunteer groups have come together and found short-term solutions to house the people fleeing war. Hundreds of thousands are staying in the homes of volunteers. Governments have found innovative solutions. The Netherlands has come up with 55,000 beds, including in monasteries, holiday camps, and cruise liners.

But people cannot stay on boats or in military barracks forever. Yulia Popeuchenko, a 38-year-old pharmacist from Krivoy Rog in Ukraine, is sharing one room in the Harskamp barracks with eight other family members. With a ten-year-old daughter, a one-year-old son, and a husband back home fighting, she is worried about what comes next. “It is nice and quiet here but we would like to move to a place where there will be better conditions for the children”, she tells me. “I can’t cook for my children here.”

Ira Koval, a volunteer with the Ukrainians in the Netherlands Foundation, says she sees the same situation across the country, with people becoming frustrated at the temporary solutions and no sign of any long-term planning. Meanwhile, tensions are emerging. There are reports of host families in the UK evicting their Ukrainian guests. In the Czech Republic, which is hosting more than 300,000 Ukrainians, there are concerns about the financial impact.

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It is the next phase — longer-term integration of Ukrainian refugees — that will prove the most politically testing for Europe. More often than not, existing problems in host nations tend to get projected onto new arrivals, when they cease to be seen as guests. The Netherlands, for instance, will have to find a balance between providing homes for Ukrainians when many Dutch people have been waiting years for stable housing. The country is suffering an acute housing crisis, with nearly a million new homes needed by 2030. Germany is facing similar challenges, whereas in Spain the government will have to justify assisting Ukrainians to find work when around 12% of its population is unemployed.

“Once people get the feeling other groups are being preferred over them, that fuels the radical Right and anti-immigrant parties”, says Jasmijn Slootjes, a senior policy analyst at think tank Migration Policy Institute Europe. And that is what happened in Harskamp last year. “People were afraid that they will continue to live here”, says Bas Sturm. “We have few homes here that we have to pay a lot for, and the [perception is that] refugees here get a home sooner.”

Everyone I spoke to in Harskamp laughed off the idea that people staying in the barracks will remain in the village. They tolerate the current situation because it is a temporary one — the refugees are due to leave by 3 August — but where exactly they will go next is unclear. Sturm thinks that the Afghans who left Harskamp last year have been resettled in permanent housing. But Sander Schaap, a spokesperson at the Dutch Council for Refugees, says in fact most have simply been shuttled between different temporary asylum centres. More than 35,000 refugees in the Netherlands were already awaiting permanent accommodation before the Ukrainians arrived, with many living in appalling conditions in tents.

“It’s total chaos at the moment”, Schaap says. “There’s a big lack of permanent and temporary locations all across the board, and the crisis in the asylum system is going to accelerate over the days and weeks and months to come.”

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Nevertheless, the collective experience of Harskamp over the past eight months is instructive. When the Afghans arrived, the local government failed to inform the community. This time round, the mayor held consultations and town hall meetings to discuss any concerns the villagers had. Local authorities across Europe can learn from this example: while it’s important to publicly make the moral case for hosting victims of war, they must also frankly address local worries, whether they be genuine questions over the allocation of resources or misconceptions fuelled by disinformation.

Simple measures can alleviate tensions in the short term. In Harskamp, Bas Sturm started the community football matches after witnessing the animosity towards the Afghans, and saw attitudes change quickly. But the longer-term issues like housing prove thornier. Authorities must take into account the needs of both the existing communities and refugee populations. “Whether you discuss access to housing or access to education,” says Jasmijn Slootjes, “frame it as a long term investment for the entire society and not just for those coming from Ukraine”.

In the past, many European governments have shied away from making a strong, passionate, and informed case for hosting refugees, fearful of losing political ground to the far-Right. But if countries show that having refugees on European soil — whether they are from Ukraine or elsewhere — is not a worst-case scenario but a perfectly manageable situation, they remove one more weapon from Russia’s arsenal. Because while Putin may be waging war on the people of Ukraine, he knows that the battle for Europe’s soul will be fought in placid little villages like Harskamp.

Nearly five years ago, on August 11, 2017, Cytanovic travelled to Charlottesville, Virginia, to attend the Unite the Right rally, a gathering of white nationalists including Klu Klux Klan members, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists. As night fell, the angry crowd marched and chanted racist and anti-Semitic slogans. Cytanovic was in the thick of it, holding a tiki-torch aloft as he screamed at counter-protesters. A photographer captured the moment. Soon, his picture was everywhere. “I was the face of white terror,” he tells me.

At the time, Cytanovic identified as a white nationalist, and held racist views: he supported the deportation of migrants and the creation of a white-only state. By the time I met him, in the summer of 2019, he had recanted. He was nearing the end of a Masters in Political Theory at the London School of Economics, volunteering with a counter-extremism organisation, and optimistic about how he could use his experiences to help others understand — and avoid — the draw of the extreme Right.

But his story raises difficult questions about how far a person must go to make amends, and whether efforts to silence people like him — however well-intentioned those efforts might be — help or hinder the battle to combat polarisation and extremism.

Cytanovic’s journey to radicalisation follows a familiar path at first. He was born into a working-class family in Reno, Nevada, in 1996. His mother was diagnosed with brain cancer while pregnant with him, and the cost of the treatment would leave the family crippled by a lifetime of debt. His father lost his job as a bookie when a foreign company bought the casino where he worked. Still, Cytanovic graduated from high school with good grades and began studying politics at the University of Nevada.

It was a difficult transition. Cytanovic says he felt a gulf between himself and the generally richer students, particularly as his conservative Catholic views clashed with those of his more socially liberal peers. During his early years at college, he felt dismissed as “white trash”, although he also admits that he often acted like “a genuine asshole”.

He was drawn to Donald Trump because he seemed to understand the frustrations of poor white communities. Then he began to spend increasing amounts of time watching alt-Right content on YouTube — “trying to find myself” —  and soon found himself down rabbit holes of his own biases, now amplified and distorted by the social media algorithms that were offering up ever more extreme-Right content.

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Cytanovic eventually joined Identity Evropa, which the Southern Poverty Law Center says was, at the time, “at the forefront of the racist ‘alt-right’s’ effort to recruit white, college-aged men and transform them into the fashionable new face of white nationalism”. They were one of the organisers of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, and while Cytanovic says he was never anti-Semitic, he was fully aware of the presence of neo-Nazis at the march.

I have quizzed Cytanovic at length about what he believed when he attended the rally and how his views have changed (he has since apologised for his actions and worked with organisations countering hate to try to make amends). I have also spoken to counter-extremism and de-radicalisation experts who have worked alongside him over the past five years. I am confident that he is not a neo-Nazi or a white nationalist.

But that doesn’t mean his transformation has been total. In the immediate aftermath of the rally, Cytanovic was unrepentant, giving interviews about his white nationalist beliefs. The first seeds of doubt were sown when he befriended a young Muslim-American woman affiliated with the Democrat Party: she challenged his views without insulting him, allowing him to understand the hurt he had caused.

“I give her the most credit for being the most patient, for really allowing me to calm down, to loosen up, to realise that I didn’t need to be so defensive and start to really think about everything,” he says. “I don’t think there was a day when I suddenly said, I want to make amends. It developed over time as I realised how wrong I was.”

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Still, his expressions of regret are often countered by self-justifications; he can swing from showing genuine awareness that his past views were racist, to defensive outbursts on issues like migration. He gets agitated when he feels like his socially conservative beliefs are under attack, or when they are equated with the views of the neo-Nazis. An interview with LSE’s student newspaper in Spring 2019, in which he wanted to apologise for attending the Charlottesville rally, backfired when he made derogatory remarks about trans people while trying to explain his Catholic beliefs.

If we are serious about countering radicalisation, though, we do need to pay attention to people like Cytanovic, because his messy and complicated retreat from the extreme reflects the reality of increasing numbers of people across the world. It also poses difficult questions about the consequences far-Right extremists should face. Soon after Charlottesville, the FBI questioned Cytanovic and decided to take no action against him; his judgement lies in the hands of society.

When studying in London he felt like a chance of redemption was within his grasp. He volunteered at Groundswell, a community organisation aimed at countering extremism by building bridges between different groups. But since he returned to Reno, later in 2019, Cytanovic has been struggling to see a future for himself.

He has been unable to find a job outside factory work. When he does find work, he is routinely fired when his past is unearthed. No university will accept him for further study. Even efforts to volunteer at community or religious organisations are turned down. Institutions and groups are, understandably, reluctant to associate with him.

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Meanwhile, as well as receiving death threats, he is still insulted on the street, and bombarded with hate mail. When he tried to join the National Guard, media reports framed it as an attempt by the far-Right to infiltrate the military. All of which leaves him in a Catch-22 situation: “No one ever believes I have good intentions. I’m a Nazi until proven otherwise, but I can’t get the opportunity to prove I’m not.”

Who cares? That’s the question people often ask when I talk to them about Cytanovic, who is one of eight former extremists featured in my book Far Out: Encounters with Extremists. Why should anyone care that a man who openly and knowingly marched alongside the KKK is struggling to build a normal life?

It’s an important question to ask. In the aftermath of Trump’s election, there was a shift in media coverage: many outlets profiled Americans with white nationalist ideologies in an effort to understand the mainstreaming of racist beliefs. But such stories often missed the mark, portraying the “neo-Nazi next door” without offering much insight into the hugely complex radicalisation process. And some unwittingly caused harm by giving a platform to extremist views.

Now there has been a swing in the other direction, illustrated by a headline a few years ago: ‘We Need to Stop Humanising Neo-Nazis’. Attempts to explore the human motives for extremism are now often considered taboo. Coverage is expected to be outright condemnatory, rather than focused on the potential for rehabilitation.

Since meeting Cytanovic, I have tried to publish articles about him at points when his story seemed relevant — with the election of Joe Biden, for example, when the US might have been seeking solutions to a large radicalised population. Publications would initially be enthusiastic, before deciding not to pursue the story. Reasons given included that Cytanovic was undeserving of any media coverage.

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The focus has shifted now from victims of extremism — which, in many ways, is a good thing. But we’re in danger of oversimplifying the perpetrators. When it comes to their stories, the world wants black-and-white tales of complete U-turns, even when they misunderstand the complexities of de-radicalisation or raise questions about their authenticity. Two organisers of the Charlottesville rally, for example, claimed to have reformed and started a counter-extremism group. Their apparently miraculous conversions earned much media coverage, despite accusations that they were just trying to clean up their images as they faced lawsuits over the Charlottesville violence.

Cytanovic’s attempts at honesty seem to be his undoing. While at times his motives can veer towards self-serving — like most people’s — it is also clear that he has interrogated his past beliefs and is genuinely seeking to help others, while remaining authentic to his religious framework. And if people are serious about countering extremism, it’s important to understand the nuance of de-radicalisation. Cytanovic’s frankness offers an important insight into that process — and provides clues for those planning interventions that can bring people back from the brink.

That’s why we need to have the courage to explore difficult and controversial aspects of de-radicalisation in the media — and understand that while these stories will never be simple, they cannot simply be erased.

By eternally excluding him, society runs a risk. Feelings of alienation and isolation can help drive people to extreme groups, so marginalising anyone attempting to reject those groups is likely to eventually backfire. It could lead people to return to hate groups, and enable re-radicalisation.

Right now, Cytanovic shows no sign of returning to the far-Right. He says he wants to make a positive difference in the world, and has become an advocate for labour rights. This should come as a relief. He is an intelligent young man and a persuasive speaker with a comprehensive knowledge of political theory. Had he remained with the far-Right, he could have employed those skills to become a potent propaganda tool and recruiter — or even a leader — for the movement.

That’s not to say Cytanovic isn’t ultimately responsible for his own actions. It’s essential that he recognises the consequences of those actions will be long-lasting; making amends for harm done is a lifetime’s commitment. But there also must be opportunities for atonement, whether that be through state-assisted volunteering programmes or community initiatives like Groundswell. Because if we deny people the chance to try being better, we risk perpetuating the cycle of extremism.

The West was still panicking over Islamist extremism but far-Right violence was on the rise, and Ukraine’s Azov Battalion had become legendary in white supremacist circles. It had a reputation as the only well-armed and well-organised white nationalist group training foreign fighters as it battled Russian incursions into Ukraine. Toby was desperate to join them.

He had little interest, however, in the battle against Russian imperialism. And although he embodied the stereotypes of a far-Right thug, he had little interest in neo-Nazi ideology either. He slept under a swastika flag, wore T-shirts emblazoned with Nazi slogans, and would happily do Heil Hitler salutes for the camera while knocking back bottles of strong cider. But what mattered to him was having a cause, a purpose, and sense of meaning in his life — and that could have come from anywhere.

“If it had been radical Muslims who got to me before the far-Right, I probably would have joined ISIS,” he told me, after leaving the movement. “If it had have been radical leftists, I would have been a leftie.”

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Throughout the 2010s, as many parts of the world experienced a surge in extremism, pre-conceptions flourished about what kind of person became what kind of extremist. Efforts to combat radicalisation, therefore, often focused on countering specific ideologies, rather than looking at the individual needs and broader social factors that drew people to fringe beliefs.

Measures to combat extremism in the UK and the US for a long time disproportionately targeted Muslim communities, for example. Meanwhile, public awareness campaigns supposedly tailored to people vulnerable to far-Right and conspiratorial disinformation ended up reinforcing narratives of a shady global cabal trying to brainwash people.

But in the years spent researching my book on extremism, for which I interviewed dozens of people who found themselves drawn to extreme beliefs, what was striking was how rarely people fit the narrow mould of who or what we might expect an extremist to be. A child of Muslim-American refugees who fled ethic nationalism in Bosnia is drawn to white supremacy. A Hindu nationalist becomes an Islamist extremist. A Norwegian aristocrat finds herself sucked into a Marxist cult. Toby has an Iranian grandfather, yet railed against non-white immigration.

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Today, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is raising concerns about deeper radicalisation, in part because people like Toby are now being actively encouraged to head to the war zone. But the conflict has also exposed the shallowness and fluidity of extreme belief. If we examine activity in far-Right channels today, we see neo-Nazi, white supremacist, and conspiracy groups mobilising both for the Russian President and recruiting for Ukrainian militia.

This reveals the tangle of extremist contradictions that has been manipulated — and even manufactured — by the Kremlin over the past decade. As the EU bickered over the refugee crisis in 2015 and 2016, Putin saw his chance. Russia fuelled disinformation about migrants, including the infamous “Lisa case”, in which a German-Russian woman falsely accused a Muslim migrant of rape; the story was then amplified by Russian state media and the German far-Right. Many of Europe’s far-Right parties have received Russian funding, while the US intelligence community believes Russia provided indirect support to openly neo-Fascist groups too.

But now Putin justifies his brutal invasion of Ukraine by claiming to be countering extremism himself; he has promised the “de-Nazification” of Ukraine.

The far-Right’s response has not been coordinated. Some groups are spreading Russian disinformation; others are lionising Putin as a hero of the far-Right, with white nationalists fawning over his culturally conservative ideology. But other far-Right groups in Europe are encouraging their supporters to sign up to fight or fundraise for Ukrainian militia with white supremacist links, both because of ideological animosity towards Russia’s communist past and — more opportunistically — to gain direct military experience.

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The far-Right ecosystem has never been a coherent space, encompassing everything from National Socialists to incels. But Tim Squirrell, who monitors far-Right activity for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, believes the Ukraine War has the potential to split the far-Right more than any other issue. While he has observed many conspiratorial groups latching onto the false claims of US-funded bio-labs in Ukraine, there is still what he calls a “Balkanisation” of the space.

That fluidity does not necessarily harm the movement. QAnon showed that extreme beliefs do not have to be logical, and collective brainstorming is part of the draw for people seeking feelings of power and inclusion. “People can make all sorts of ludicrous, outlandish claims, and they won’t necessarily suffer for it, because the idea is that you are building a shared worldview,” Squirrell explains.

The far-Right’s contradictions over Ukraine demonstrate that extreme recruitment is not about ideology, but opportunism; it exploits individual human experience, rather than beliefs. While this shallowness may not undermine the movement, it can help us better understand why people are attracted by these groups, if it is not by the ideology itself.

“You need to understand what need a conspiracy, ideology, or a world view is filling for someone,” Squirrell says. “Once you identify that, then you can start to target it and try to understand what you might be able to do to get them out of it.”

It is more important than ever that we recognise this, given that the Covid-19 pandemic had already created the conditions for a surge in fringe beliefs. All the feelings that the pandemic sparked in the population — powerlessness, trauma, loneliness, alienation, fear, uncertainty, distrust — allow extremism to thrive. Indeed, Covid-19, like this war, upended some of our assumptions about who or what an extremist is, as we saw how people can cast around in a confused world and seek solace in conspiratorial narratives. The pandemic saw a convergence of the far-Right and far-Left around anti-vax and anti-lockdown movements, creating a confusion of paranoia and division.

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Powerlessness is one of the strongest drivers of extremism — and powerless is how many now feel, watching the conflict between Ukraine and Russia from afar. The more uncertainty and fear there is in the world, the more we cling to those things that promise to bring meaning and control. Sanctions against Russia are also likely to lead to greater economic strain, and the political fringes are adept at exploiting financial hardship, as we saw during the eurozone crisis. And while most people volunteering to fight in Ukraine are not neo-Nazis, large numbers of people traveling to a foreign war zone carries inevitable radicalisation risks.

Toby never made it to Ukraine. Australian intelligence intercepted his communications, confiscated his passport, and enrolled him in a deradicalisation scheme. In the end, it wasn’t government intervention that drew him back from the brink, but encounters with ordinary people who simply engaged with him and showed him that he could live a fulfilling life outside of the far-Right. He has since left the neo-Nazi movement, and has spent the last few years reflecting on the underlying insecurities that drew him to the fringes of society.

Toby’s story illustrates the need for society to focus on the genuine drivers of extremism. The most successful counter-radicalisation programmes do not focus on changing people’s minds and refuting ideologies, but working on their underlying problems. After all, extremist recruiters know all too well the complex web of hopes, grievances, fears, insecurities and disappointments that can make people susceptible. Unless we recognise them too, the Ukraine War will be yet another global tragedy ripe for their exploitation.