I like to research ancient religion and, in my personal classification, the two largely unknown yet massively distributed religions of prehistoric times seem to have been what I call “The Mountain Religion” and “The Tree Religion”.
We see the Mountain Religion pop up among the Greeks, Romans, Hebrews, and the Indians. We have deities who live on a mountain, the supreme deity is often represented as or with a bull, and one of his sons was a storm god.
The Tree Religion, on the other hand, was far more widely spread, with its symbols and legacy stretching from Germany to Japan. The most universal symbol of this is the importance of the tree, and its connection to the spiritual world:
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Tengriism
There is overlap here, between these two groups. Christianity, for example, has the Tree of Knowledge, which features a serpent. The World Tree in most Eurasian traditions also has a serpent, often fighting with a bird of some form. There are other overlaps, as well. It’s difficult to know if there was a single origin, with the focus drifting in two different general directions, or if the two groups poached from one another over the millenia and gained some commonality.
The reason that I bring this up today is because it may be a useful time to know and understand some of this, as it has propagated through to modern times.
First, we have the solar cross symbols that were common through the Scandinavean, Germanic, Slavic, and Mongolian regions:
Two of these that are somewhat famous are the Swastika and the Black Sun, which were taken from the symbols present in the local archaeology of Germany, from their history as followers of a religion similar to Norse Mythology and Tengriism.
The Sun symbol generally represented the local equivalent to Tengri/Odin, who was the God of the Sky.
Around the same time that Hitler started to take on his own fascination with Germanic/Aryan religious history, so did others.
We have, for example, the Book of Veles that was crafted probably some time around the 1940s to try and recreate the lost, pre-Christian religion of the Slavic people; in Armenia, Hetanism was formed by a Nationalist leader named Garegin Nzhdeh; Wicca was formed in England by Gerald Gardner; Zalmoxianism in Romania; and I presume others. Very loosely, one might say that these were tied to anti-foreign movements with the idea that other nations had taken over the land and forced their religion (Christianity) onto the locals, and the goal was to recreate their native religion and culture. But, like Wicca, that’s not necessarily tied to violence or much beyond a fondness for going out into the woods and chanting to the sky.
In the Slavic regions, these became what is now called Rodnovery. And, notably, the Book of Veles is taught in Ukrainian schools and accepted as a true, historical compilation of ancient writings.
But, likewise, there is the same movement in Russia:
But Ukraine does seem to be the furthest out ahead on this with the Native Ukrainian National Faith.
This faith has a cosmology which is illustrated like so:
Within South-Eastern Ukraine, there are a variety of Rodnovers who have joined the military and formed together, for example the Svarog Battalion and Azov Battalion. As it happens, the Svarog Battalion is fighting on the side of Russia: