Since the beginning of the Ukraine crisis, Russian President Vladimir Putin has accused the authorities in Kiev of being “Fascists” and “neo-Nazis”. Moscow’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, recently condemned the European Union for rising racist tendencies among its member states. In reality, it is Russia, and not Ukraine or the EU, that is nurturing extremist sentiments. It is to Moscow that Europe’s far-right is flocking.

Across Europe, far-right parties are dancing to Putin’s tune. After March’s farcical referendum in Crimea—“international monitors” for which were primarily drawn from a shady Russia-backed organisation led by a Belgian neo-Nazi—a delegation of extremist and populist members of Germany’s far-right Neue Rechte movement visited the peninsula and praised the election as a model for Europe. Bulgaria’s neo-Nazi Ataka party has called on its government to “recognize” Crimea’s absorption into Russia. A spokesman for Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s National Front, defended the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea by arguing that “historically, Crimea is part of Mother Russia.”

With his intervention in Crimea, Putin signaled that the borders established after the Cold War were illegitimate and appointed himself the protector of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers outside of his own country. Many of Europe’s right-wing extremist parties see this agenda as aligning perfectly with their own revisionist forms of nationalism.

Putin’s appeal to Europe’s far right is bigger than this, however: it is to do with the Russian strongman’s combination of imperialist ambition, moral conservatism, and military might. In challenging the global role of the U.S. and EU, the Kremlin is pursuing an anti-globalist agenda (albeit one in which Russia is firmly positioned as a key power). And in developing a political system in Russia characterized by authoritarianism, nationalism, and populism, Putin is providing an ideological and political template for right-wing parties throughout Europe. Through Putin, Europe’s far-right senses that its goal of re-nationalizing Europe is finally in sight.

Since the mid-2000s, the Kremlin has courted the European far right. The Continent’s rightists, in turn, have pledged allegiance. Extremist parties in Eastern Europe supported Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008, reserving special criticism for Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s pro-American policies. Nick Griffin, the leader of the UK’s xenophobic British National Party, commended Russia for having “a robust, transparent and properly democratic system” after the rigged parliamentary elections in 2011. Last year, Italy’s Fronte Nazionale praised Putin for his opposition to homosexuality.