Ideological affinity, state toleration and the transnational expansion of the far-right Russian imperial movement

How do far-right groups transplant abroad without the kin or diaspora ties that typically abet criminal mobility? This article offers a qualitative, single-case study of the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM), drawing on eleven semi-structured elite interviews, systematic observation of social media content, and open-source documents collected between 2023 and 2025. The analysis shows that RIM embedded foreign nodes where three conditions converged: permissive conflict arenas that furnished combat experience and local brokers; a shared ultranationalist-monarchist ideology that substituted for kinship by generating cross-border trust; and tacit home-state toleration that enabled paramilitary infrastructure in Russia to operate as an international training hub. The findings extend transplantation theory by demonstrating that ideological trust and selective state collusion can perform the gate-opening functions long attributed to ethnicity and diaspora.