The Verdict Against Yan Petrovsky
In March, the Russian neo-Nazi Yan Petrovsky – a former resident of Norway –was sentenced for war crimes in Ukraina by the Helsinki District Court.
He uses the name Voislav Torden now. On 14. March 2025, the Helsinki District Court sentenced him to preventive detention with a minimum period of 12 years — the equivalent of a life sentence in Finland — for war crimes committed in Ukraine.
Back in 2014, he played a central role in the paramilitary group Rusich, which fought alongside so-called pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. In reality, the war in eastern Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea marked the beginning of Russia’s imperialist war against Ukraine.
On 5 September 2014, during a ceasefire, Rusich was involved in an ambush against forces from the Ukrainian volunteer Aidar Battalion, allegedly having used Ukrainian flags to deceive their enemy.
In an interview with the Norwegian daily Aftenposten, Petrovsky himself spoke about the incident: — If you boast about being from Aidar, you must take responsibility. We hated them for their attacks on civilians. So we went after them. We shot them and burned them. Three Aidar soldiers were captured by another group. If they had ended up with us, they would not have been alive.
After the ambush, photos began circulating online showing Rusich fighters in the aftermath of the attack. In one of the pictures, Petrovsky poses next to a burning corpse. Rusich also released a video showing a captured Aidar soldier — Ivan Issyk — having a so-called kolovrat carved into his cheek. The kolovrat is a swastika-like symbol used by Slavic neopagans. And by far-right extremists.
The Helsinki court held Petrovsky responsible for the actions of the men he led. This included the murder of a wounded Ukrainian soldier. Torden was also convicted for distributing degrading images of Ukrainian soldiers via social media. There, Rusich had also declared that they would show no mercy.
Yan Petrovsky was born in the Siberian city of Irkutsk. And yet this is also a Norwegian story. Petrovsky came to Norway and to Tønsberg as a sixteen-year-old, after his mother married a Norwegian. In the Aftenposten interview, he called Russia his “motherland,” but referred to Norway as his “fatherland.”
He also said that in his youth he was “very interested in history and historical re-enactment”: — There is a connection between Scandinavia and the northern part of Russia. We share a common past. My faith is pagan, a Norse belief. I represent a Nordic race.
If this sounds like far-right ideology, that’s hardly a coincidence. After a few years in Norway, Petrovsky — who also holds a degree in product design from Oslo — began associating with extreme right-wing circles.
In 2010, the Russian neo-Nazi Viacheslav Datsik, also known as “Red Tarzan,” escaped from a psychiatric hospital in St. Petersburg.
Datsik was a leading figure in the far-right group Slavic Union, which dreamed of precisely that: a pan-Slavic union. He illegally crossed the border into Norway and sought out the community around the tattoo parlour Metal Tattoo in Oslo, a tattoo parlour which in several Norwegian media outlets was described as a gathering place for Eastern European right-wing extremists residing in Norway. After a while, Datsik turned himself in to the police immigration unit, while literally carrying a loaded firearm.
Unsurprisingly, he was arrested. Shortly afterwards, police raided Metal Tattoo and found several weapons.
When Datsik appeared in court for remand, he wore a T-shirt with Nazi symbols and German text, and performed a Nazi salute. In a YouTube video circulated by his supporters, he posed with weapons in front of a banner bearing the SS logo and the phrase “My honour is loyalty” in Norwegian, rather than in the original German: Meine Ehre heißt Treue.
Datsik applied for political asylum in Norway but was rejected. He was convicted of weapons offences and later deported to Russia, where he was since imprisoned for robbery, and later imprisoned again, for forcing a group of prostitutes to walk naked down the street.
Petrovsky also appeared before the Oslo District Court in connection with the case. He was part of the scene surrounding Metal Tattoo and owned an axe that was confiscated during a police search, but he was eventually not convicted.
Afterwards, according to the Aftenposten interview, Petrovsky believed he had been placed under surveillance by the Norwegian Police Security Service (PST), the Norwegian security agency.
In May 2014, Petrovsky travelled to St. Petersburg. Soon, he became part of Rusich — a group that operated as a subdivision of the infamous (and state-affiliated) private army known as the Wagner Group.
Rusich was led by yet another right-wing extremist; Alexey Milchakov, also known as “Fritz”. In an interview with the Norwegian far-right website Frie Ord, Petrovsky said Rusich mainly consisted of volunteers from Russia and other European countries, and that most of his comrades were pagans who followed a “Norse warrior faith” in their fight for “Greater Novorossiya and the future of our people and our families.”
Ukrainians, on the other hand, were portrayed as “separatists trying to escape our common culture and history.” This fits with a worldview shaped by a mixture of far-right extremism, fantasies about a pan-Slavic empire, and ideas of Slavic neopaganism. It also echoes official anti-Ukrainian propaganda from the Russian authorities.
When the Frie Ord interview was published, Petrovsky was already back in Tønsberg.
In the early hours of Sunday, 14 February 2016, the far-right group Soldiers of Odin held their first march in Norway — a small group dressed in black hoodies with Viking helmets and Norwegian flags on their backs walked through the streets of Tønsberg.
The very concept was imported; a Norwegian offshoot of a Finnish anti-immigration vigilante group founded by Mika Ranta. Ranta had ties to the neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement, and the Finnish branch of Soldiers of Odin overflowed with both racism and far-right symbolism.
In Norway, Ronny Alte served as spokesperson. He had previously played key roles in the – admittedly rather amateurish – efforts to establish Norwegian branches of the anti-Islam groups English Defence League and Pegida.
Among those who marched with Alte in Tønsberg was Yan Petrovsky. So too was a Norwegian friend of both Petrovsky and Datsik: Ronny Bårdsen.
Bårdsen had, in an interview with Tønsbergs Blad years earlier, expressed support for Datsik, but claimed not to be a right-wing extremist himself, rather proclaiming himself as a nationalist who “distanced himself from the swastika and the Nazi salute.” In reality, he too had a background in a neo-Nazi group from southern Norway.
Norwegian Soldiers of Odin quickly fizzled out.
In October 2016, Yan Petrovsky was arrested by armed police after losing his residence permit in Norway. He was soon deported on grounds referred to by the Police Security Service as “fundamental national interests.”
The following year, the Russian online newspaper Fontanka reported that Rusich was active in Syria, fighting on the side of the Syrian regime led by the dictator Bashar al-Assad. Assad also had support from Russia. In a photo also published by NRK, Alexey Milchakov was seen smiling in a swimming pool at a Wagner Group base in Syria.
There are strong indications that Petrovsky was also in Syria, now under the alias “Norðmaður” — Old Norse for “Norseman”.
Rusich was involved in combat against ISIS in Palmyra, among other places. Ironically, one of Petrovsky’s old friends from Norway — Oleg Neganov — had by then become an ISIS fighter, having not only converted to Islam but also switched from one form of hateful extremism to another.
In 2022, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, no longer under the guise of “separatists” in the east. Petrovsky took part. While Russian propaganda claimed the goal of the “special operation” in Ukraine was “denazification”, Russian far-right extremists were on the front lines. One of them had ties to Norway.
He had now changed his name to Voislav Torden.
On 18 June that year, a funeral was held in St. Petersburg for a fallen Russian soldier. After a speech by a Russian Orthodox priest, Torden took the floor, according to Fontanka and a later article in Aftenposten. He praised the fallen soldier:
— He was the first in my unit to cross the border and begin clearing our Russian lands of the invaders, said Torden. — His death is an example for future warriors who choose to follow this difficult path to defend our homeland from enemies (...), from enemies who are inside our country and who try to tear it apart. (...) Before him, the gates of Valhalla have truly opened. He will walk through them with honour and courage. One day we shall meet him there, gather around the same table, and feast. Long live Russia!
A local political figure, Yevgeny Razumishkin, was also at the funeral. Fontanka notes that he quite obviously felt out of place: “He later whispered to a 'Fontanka' correspondent that this was the first military funeral he had ever attended. It made one want to tell him that, usually, they go a bit differently.”.
On 19 July 2023, Torden — Petrovsky, if you prefer — crossed the border into Finland.
Perhaps he had become disillusioned after Putin’s failed blitzkrieg. Under his new name, he had been granted a residence permit in Finland, where his wife was a student.
The following day, he attempted to travel on to Nice, but ended up being arrested at Helsinki Airport. Ukraine requested his extradition, but the Finnish Supreme Court rejected it, citing poor conditions in Ukrainian prisons. Instead, he was tried in Finnish court. Last week, he was convicted. It was the first Finnish conviction for war crimes in Ukraine, and soon welcomed by Ukraine´s chief prosecutor office. Russian authorities, however, claimed that the sentence was “shameful and politically motivated”.
The verdict has been appealed and is therefore not legally binding.
Nonetheless, it appears that Yan Petrovsky’s past has finally caught up with him.
This article was originally published in Norwegian at oyvindstrommen.substack.com, on 18. March 2025. The English version has been slightly adapted.
Notes on the Antiliberal is written by Norwegian journalist Øyvind Strømmen. It will include articles on the radical right, extremism, conspiracy theories and other challenges to liberal democracy.