Published: Less than 10 min ago
Ukraine and Russia have a common enemy: young people in spider clothes.
The teenagers call themselves “Ryodans” and love the Japanese anime series “Hunter x Hunter”.
Politicians and police single them out as members of a violent cult.
In the last month, police in both Russia and Ukraine have mass-arrested Ryodans.
It has caused concern in the Russian media. Parents are guided on how to discover if their children are in the “army”, and the Russian parliament considers how to neutralize the youth movement.
The police in Saint Petersburg even claim that Western security services are behind the teenagers, according to the journalism group Bellingcat.
Other assessors believe that it is all one big misunderstanding.
– Old people do not understand young people, the internet or the modern world, notes the Telegram channel Ptitsa Govorun.
Based in series
It all started with the anime series Hunter x Hunter, published in Japan since 1998. There is a group of thieves, called Ryodan.
Russian followers of the series have long gathered in various groups on social media, dye their hair black, dress in black hoodies with a spider print and wear checkered pants.
Jokingly, some followers began to call themselves “Private army Ryodan” in an allusion to the private army Wagner. Somewhere, the course of events began to derail.
On February 19, a fight between some young people was filmed at the Aviapark shopping mall in Moscow. It was Ryodan’s versus “bald shitboots in Adidas,” as one Telegram channel described it all.
When the video went viral, a spiral of violence was set in motion, according to Bellingcat.
Gopniks – young Russian skinheads – began to organize themselves into anti-Ryodan groups. They filmed them attacking Ryodans and cutting their hair with a knife.
– Crush Ryodans like shit, reads a slogan on an anti-Ryodan site.
Over 200 arrested
In a short time, police arrested Ryodans in at least five Russian cities, according to Bellingcat. The largest mass arrest took place in the Russian city of Saint Petersburg, where over 200 teenagers, some under the age of 14, were arrested on 26 February.
The movement spread to Ukraine and Belarus, where arrests also took place at the end of February. In a statement, police in Ukrainian Kiev described Ryodans as a tool in the hands of Russian propagandists and as an attempt to “destabilize the situation in Ukraine.”
But while Russian media have described the animé teenagers as a fight club and a cult of violence, in reality the fights between the followers and their opponents appear to be fairly innocent fights. Very few young people have been injured.
Adults who misunderstand young people
The conclusion is, according to Bellingcat, that it’s all about adults misunderstanding young people as usual. Or as the signature Ptitsa Govorun writes in his Telegram channel:
– What happened? The Gopniks saw some anime youth wearing strange clothes in a shopping mall, mocked them for their clothes and slapped them in the face. The anime youth gathered their strength and went on the gopniks. It was so funny that the internet started calling the anime youth the Private Army Ryodan, writes Ptitsa Govorun and continues:
– Other gopniks didn’t like that, so they started looking for the private army and indiscriminately attacked anime youths, who in turn fought back. The police came to stop the fighting and made arrests. Then the media began to write that “the leaders of the aggressive Private Army Ryodan have been arrested” (when in fact it was gopniks who were arrested). Then MPs started calling for bans on anime series…