The Russo-Ukrainian war began in February, 2022 and by May of that year the North Atlantic Fellas Organization was founded by Kamil Dyszewski (@Kama_Kamilia on X, formerly Twitter) after Kamil started making these little soldier dogs out of the "cheems" meme template, but the bodies were different, being little uniformed cartoon soldiers of different units and countries. Dyszewski was allegedly making them for friends, and it spread like wildfire, and like with so many social media storms, organizations were quickly formed so the movement would have online homes. NAFO-OFAN started somewhere in December 2022, Saint Javelin goes back to March of 2023, the NAFO-related Dzyga's Paw website and organization started in July (this is still a website focused on running a charity fund seeking things for the Ukrainian military; it should be noted that all the NAFO websites have/had stores selling items with a "guarantee" that profits would be sent to Ukraine....put a pin in that.) Moss Robeson, a researcher into Ukraine's far Right wrote a piece on NAFO in October, 2022 and he gets into the constant verbal fights between the leading players and other politically stupid elements. After a flurry of news stories about NAFO which all seemed to stop coming after 2023, things settled down into a series of online meetup, and sales, and stickers being put everywhere.
Things are not going well, 2026
One of the major changes has been the collapse of the NAFO-OFAN website. There is a page, but it's only a "we're closed, here's an email" page.
No more chance to buy a LazerPig coffee mug.
Or a transgender LazerPig coffee mug (the gif still flips automatically so we get two overlapping images.)
Or the flags.
The constant refrain of NAFO using 'bots on X/Twitter may have some truth, or not, you have to have an X account and the time to run accounts through a bit of 'bot checking software. I will go through the grind of this later.
As for Saint Javelin, the site is still operating, but it looks more like an online clothes store than a charity built around helping the defense of a nation.
The Georgian Legion
This is the pin I mentioned....the Georgian Legion, a collection of people who had fought in a number of recent wars inside the former Soviet Union and outside of it and had been fighting in Ukraine since 2014, were getting funds from NAFO for something (food, bullets, bandages, socks?) and then some of the funds were getting diverted, possibly into the leadership's wallets, and that story stopped. I still have endless questions about how much money was actually sent to Ukraine and to whom in Ukraine, but that's up for the FBI or Interpol when The Law finally gets involved.
Projections
Either NAFO is doomed to fade away like the Victory in Vietnam Association or become another Ukraine-centric group like the Organization for Defense of Four Freedoms for Ukraine....which has been accused by Moss Robeson as being part of a group of cover organizations for a post-WWII survival of the OUN-B, aka the pro-Stepan Bandera wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (Організація українських націоналістів). For the Dog People to truly become a force in politics, they are going to have to drop all the Terminal Online trappings and Redditor dorkery, which means they are going to have to talk to Normal People and somehow appeal to their basic decency. I don't think they have it in them.
