The Nordic Resistance Movement: A Violent History of Fists, Steel And Fire

Source: NRM’s Telegram channel

Inside a busy shopping center in Oulu, Finland, a man pulled a knife and attacked a 12-year-old foreign-born Finnish citizen. Authorities alleged the same man chased another child but was tackled by a security guard and arrested shortly after by law enforcement.

The suspect has been identified as 33-year-old Sebastian Lämsä, a man with a long history of violence, far-right activism, and was at one time a member of the Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM), a pan-European neo-Nazi organization banned in Finland with chapters in Iceland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.

Held in custody on two counts of attempted murder since the June 16 incident, Lämsä admitted to the attack but denied that he intended to kill the boys or that racism played a role in the stabbing.

The same man was arrested in 2021 after police found bomb-making components had been mailed to him — one publication identified a box removed from Lämsä’s car as that for the Forcit Explosives’ moldable PENO explosive.

He also took part in a 2013 attack on an event focused on the release of a book critical of the far-right at a Jyväskylä library. Lämsä stabbed a doorman before fleeing. He received a conditional sentence of aggravated assault.

The year before he was also implicated in pepper spraying a left-wing politician during an LGBTQ event.

Expanding to Finland in 2008, a ban on NRM was cemented in 2020 by the country’s supreme court. Hours after the Oulu mall stabbing, the United States announced that it would be adding NRM, and three of its leaders, to its list of designated terrorist entities.

The most recent attack in Finland was not listed among the reasons, rather the designation focused on the organization's almost 30-year history of violent action.

“NRM’s violent activity is based on its openly racist, anti-immigrant, antisemitic, anti-LGBTQI+ platform. The group’s members and leaders have carried out violent attacks against political opponents, protestors, journalists, and other perceived adversaries,” the State Department said in a release. “NRM members have also taken steps to collect and prepare weapons and explosive materials, including on behalf of the group and in furtherance of its goals. In addition, NRM has organized training in violent tactics, including hand-to-hand combat and knife fighting.”

In response, Tor Fredrik Vejdeland, who assumed the leadership of NRM in February 2024 and was named alongside Par Oberg and Leif Robert Eklund by the State Department, released a statement following the decision by the US.

Calling the designation “absurd” and “without any basis in reality,” Vejdeland blamed “Jewish activist and Foreign Minister [sic] Anthony Blinken.”

“Outside observers, depending on their view of us, may either hope or be horrified that the US terror classification will bring down the Nordic Resistance,” Vejdeland wrote. “As far as our enemies are concerned, this is a natural approach because they are in power, they have never experienced repression, and they are opportunists who lack principles for which they are prepared to sacrifice themselves.”

He added, “Our friends and comrades, however, need not worry. You know what we stand for and that our struggle is eternal.”

Background

Image posted by NRM in June 2019. Source: NRM Telegram

NRM traces its origins to the 1990s Swedish neo-Nazi network, Vitt Ariskt Motstand (White Aryan Resistance — VAM), which drew partial inspiration from American groups like Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance (WAR) and Robert Jay Mathews’s The Order. Initially intended to be a nameless organization, the media’s reporting on a series of arrests and robberies attributed to the network cemented the VAM brand.

Several network members, including a man named Klas Lund, were arrested and jailed in 1991 for a bank robbery using weapons stolen from a police station and manslaughter. Lund became a folk hero to the Swedish far-right during this period and, according to Expo magazine, multiple bomb threats were called in demanding his release.

After a multi-year stint in prison, he emerged from his incarceration to find that VAM had collapsed nationally, survived only by smaller local branches and splinter groups. He founded the Swedish Resistance Movement (SRM) in 1997 and rebranded as NRM in 2016. Lund would lead the group until 2015, when he left with several others to found another organization, Nordisk Styrke. Under its new leader Simon Lindberg in 2016, the Nordic Resistance Movement was born.

Shifting away from a focus on Sweden to a pan-Nordic model, NRM aims to overthrow liberal democracy in favor of a National Socialist government that would deport those without Nordic ancestry.

SRM and NRM were vastly different from the leaderless model of their predecessor VAM, as Lund and the other founders deliberately set out to create a hierarchical organization dedicated to holding public demonstrations and beginning preparation for a coming revolution. Like many other activist groups, NRM trains its members in combat sports and marksmanship, and many members have been arrested for illegally acquiring or producing craft-made weapons.

Sweden remains the largest and most active chapter with members regularly holding street demonstrations and protests. Estimates have previously put the organization’s total strength at around 200 members.

Violence & Criminality

Since its inception, NRM members and affiliates have been linked to hostile rhetoric and acts of real-world violence. According to the Right-Wing Terror and Violence (RTV) Database, NRM members were responsible for 23 events between 2007 and 2019. Since RTV only records very severe acts of violence, much of NRMs violent activities would be left out. The incidents captured in the dataset include a tear gas attack on a Pride parade in Helsinki, “lethal attacks” against people opposing the group’s public events, and targeted attacks against activists and politicians.

Besides the most recent stabbing in Finland, in 2020, only months after NRM was banned in the country when Samuli Matilainen vandalized fellow NRM member Toni Hakulinen’s car with a kettlebell before forcing his way into another member’s apartment and brutally killing Hakulinen.

On the anniversary of Kristallnacht—an organized pogrom against German Jews by Nazi paramilitaries in 1938—two NRM activists, including a regional leader, desecrated 84 graves in a Jewish cemetery in 2019.

An NRM member and another man fight during a December 2023 demonstration in Västerås. Source: NRM Telegram

“We will anonymously attack Jewish targets,” a message claiming to be from NRM leader Simon Lindberg said, according to the courts. “We go for Jews or Jewish businesses. Not half-Jews or Zionists. Your task the coming month is to find out whether there are any Jewish targets in your areas. This is top secret information.”

In 2019 a man with connections to NRM hijacked an ambulance in Oslo, Norway with a shotgun. Jumping the curb and hitting random people, he also tried to hit a police cruiser, according to the chief of Oslo police. Despite authorities firing at the vehicle in an attempt to stop it, the chase came to an end when the driver crashed into a gate. Police found an Uzi submachine gun and “large quantities of drugs” inside the ambulance.

An alleged plot to kill two journalists was disrupted by Swedish security services in 2018 after a search of an NRM member’s computer turned up files containing the targets’ personal details, including pictures of the Mittmedia reporters' homes. The suspect was also found in possession of a firearm, a suppressor, and ammunition.

In 2017, three men connected to NRM were found guilty for their part in a series of bombings in western Sweden. Two bombs detonated at a left-wing bookstore and an asylum center, leaving one man seriously injured. Another bomb was found outside of a campsite accommodating migrants. Prosecutors did not find a direct link between the attacks and NRM. Two of the perpetrators were reported to have received paramilitary training in Russia.

The same year, an NRM demonstration planned to pass in front of a Gothenburg synagogue during Yom Kippur. Ordered to remain within a certain area by a Swedish court, NRM members fought with police and counter-demonstrators who blocked them from proceeding; 50 demonstrators were detained and 35 were arrested as a result including NRM’s then-leader Simon Lindberg.

When a bystander criticized NRM members engaged in a Helsinki street protest in 2016, one of the men attacked him, kicking the victim in the chest, causing him to fall and hit his head. NRM later posted videos online of Jimi Karttunen lying bloody on the street. Karttunen was initially released from the hospital but suffered a brain hemorrhage and died six days later. NRM member Jesse Torniainen served two years for aggravated assault, escaping a manslaughter charge. This case would result in NRM’s ban in the country.

In 2013, Sebastian Lämsä and two others stabbed a doorman at the Finnish city of Jyväskylä after being denied entry to a book release on right-wing extremism at the city library. That same year in Sweden, NRM members planned and carried out an attack against a 200-person demonstration protesting the rising far-right in their neighborhood.

Propaganda & Networking

Outside of protest actions, NRM has developed a robust propaganda apparatus that it uses to reach prospective members, bolster the organization’s status at home and abroad, and network transnationally with like-minded far-right organizations.

One of the most startling examples of cross-border cooperation is one of the leaders of the Russian private military company Rusich (a neo-Nazi reconnaisance group operating on the Russian side of the current conflict in Ukraine). Yan Igorevich Petrovskiy was born in the Soviet Union but grew up in Norway. He travelled to Eastern Ukraine in 2014 to join separatist forces. Previously a fixture in Norway’s neo-Nazi scene, Petrovskiy lived with Ronny Bårdsen, alleged to be a longtime member of NRM Norway. Oslo deported Petrovskiy in 2016 after declaring him a threat to national security. Petrovskiy was also designated by the US Department of Treasury for furthering Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Unlike many far-right organizations, NRM has supported Russia in its war against Ukraine since the outset.

Two of the three individuals charged with the Swedish bombings of refugee centers and leftist bookstores were reported to have received training from the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM). The men allegedly learned to build explosive devices through RIM’s “Partisan” course in St. Petersburg.

NRM has also built ties with the American white supremacist Patriot Front, who initially met when the latter traveled to Europe in order to network with various far-right nationalist groups.

Picture of Stanislav Vorobyov during an NRM conference in 2015. Source: NRM

RIM’s leader Stanislav Vorobyov also spoke at a summit held by NRM in 2015, casting the two organizations as together in a joint battle against “Jewish oligarchs in Ukraine” and claiming to have donated money to NRM. The Trump administration designated the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM) a terrorist organization in 2020. RIM and NRM are the only two white nationalist organizations to carry this designation from the US State Department. 

NRM also produces articles, videos, and multiple podcasts in the languages of each individual branch’s native language. Its English language podcast, Nordic Frontier—”the final solution to your podcasting needs''—has also featured numerous individuals from the transnational far-right movement including figures from Hungary, South Africa, Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Likewise, Nordic Frontier host Andreas Johansson (Andreas Holmvall) has appeared and even traveled internationally to network with other fascist groups like the UK’s Patriotic Alternative.

The preparation for violence, and violent self-defense, has long been a core principle of NRM’s philosophy. While they do not endorse lone actor killings, in the wake of the 2019 Christ Church shooting leader Simon Lindberg released a long statement.

“It is hard not to feel sympathy for the two main motifs [Brenton Tarrant] states in his manifesto. […] After all, it is really not strange that what happened today in New Zealand has happened. In fact, what is most remarkable is that this does not happen more often,” he said.

Adding after that “we whites have involuntarily been embroiled in a low-intensity extinction war” and that Tarrant “seems to have chosen his targets carefully to avoid hitting those that are completely innocent.”