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COMMENT: In a previous post, we noted that elements of the 173rd Airborne Brigade are to begin training of Ukraine’s national guard battalions. Those battalions include the “punisher” battalions, including the Nazi Azov Battalion. Now comes confirmation that Azov will, indeed, be the recipient of training by the 173rd Airborne, beginning on April 20th [Hitler’s Birthday–D.E.]. In addition, Dmytro Yarosh, head of Pravy Sektor (one of the Nazi OUN/B heirs in Ukrainian power structure and government) will be an assistant to the head of that country’s army, this to “control” the “punisher” battalions, including Azov.
Russian media are alleging that an entire battalion of Pravy Sektor combatants will be incorporated into the Ukrainian army. IF, in fact, this allegation is accurate, it will be interesting to see if it ever is covered by even the most marginal of Western media. Whether or not the Russian allegation is on firm ground, the institutionalization of the OUN/B heirs in Ukraine’s power structure and the Orwellian dismissal of documented fact and well-established World War II history about the Holocaust and Eastern Front campaigns as being “Russian/Kremlin propaganda is reminiscent of “Serpent’s Walk.” (Programs covering the Ukraine crisis are:FTR #‘s 777, 778, 779, 780, 781, 782, 783, 784, 794, 800, 803, 804, 808, 811, 817, 818, 824, 826, 829, 832, 833, 837.)“US Forces to Hold Exercises in Ukraine” [AP]; Stars and Stripes; 3/31/2015.
The United States plans to send soldiers to Ukraine in April for training exercises with units of the country’s national guard.
Ukraine’s Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said in a Facebook post on Sunday that the units to be trained include the Azov Battalion, a volunteer force that has attracted criticism for its far-right sentiments including brandishing an emblem widely used in Nazi Germany.
Avakov said the training will begin April 20 [Hitler’s birthday–D.E.!] at a base in western Ukraine near the Polish border and would involve about 290 American paratroopers and some 900 Ukrainian guardsmen.
Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren said the troops would come from the 173rd Airborne Brigade based in Vicenza, Italy. . . .
The controversial leader of Ukraine’s ultra-nationalist Pravy Sektor paramilitary group, which is fighting pro-Russian rebels alongside government troops, was made an army advisor Monday as Kiev seeks to tighten its control over volunteer fighters.
Coming on the anniversary of the start of fighting in Ukraine, the move marks a key step in government efforts to establish authority over the several private armies that share its goal of crushing pro-Russian separatists in the east, but do not necessarily operate under its control.
While some such militias answer to the interior ministry and receive funding, the powerful Pravy Sektor or “Right Sector” militia, which currently claims 10,000 members including reservists — but will not say how many are deployed at the front — had until now refused to register with the authorities.
Its posture is expected to change following Monday’s announcement by the defence ministry of the appointment of its leader, Dmytro Yarosh, a hate figure in Moscow who was elected to Ukraine’s parliament last year, as advisor to the army chief of staff Viktor Muzhenko.
“Dmytro Yarosh will act as a link between the volunteer battalions and the General Staff,” armed forces spokesman Oleksiy Mazepa told AFP.
“We want to achieve full unity in the struggle against the enemy, because now our aim is the cooperation and integration of volunteer battalions in the armed forces,” he added.
Asked whether the appointment might anger the West, political analyst Taras Beresovets said becoming army advisor “does not make him an influential person in the armed forces.”
“I do not remember hearing official criticism of Yarosh or the ‘Right Sector’ by any country except Russia,” he added. . . .
Reuters — Ultra-nationalist Ukrainian battalion gears up for more fighting
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/25/us-ukraine-crisis-azov-idUSKBN0ML0XJ20150325
The BBC has a piece on the promotion of Dmytro Yarosh as a high level military advisor that makes a rather amusing inadvertant admission: The expert they interview, Andreas Umland, insists that Dmytro Yarosh isn’t a neo-Nazi because he envisions a future for Ukraine where people of all ethnicities and backgrounds can be Ukrainian citizens, unlike those other far-right groups that have recently risen to prominance in Ukraine. Nothing to worry about folks!
Note that Andreas Umland might be dismissing Yarosh’s extensive ties has openly criticized the Kiev government for its embrace of the neo-Nazis, like this November 7, 2014 Facebook posting where Muland warns:
Umfeld also has a Facebook posting about this BBC article about Yarosh where he laments the usage of a picture showing someone in a Baklava with a Wolfsangel symbol because:
So it sounds like the spin in Yarosh is something like: Don’t worry, Yarosh isn’t an neo-Nazi, unlike all those neo-Nazis groups like Azov, “Patriots of Ukraine, and SNA, he’s just sort of hung out with groups like that a lot (and let’s just ignore that fact that “Patriots of Ukraine” and SNA were founding of Right Sector).
The US involvement in Ukraine’s civil war just got a little more complicated, in a good way this time:
Well, it’s progress. One down and who knows how many to go. So let’s hope the US congress expands on this move, ideally by halting all of the military aid that’s only going to fuel this conflict for years to come.
But if the military aid is destined to continue, hopefully the cut off of aid to the neo-Nazi battalions ends up cutting down their recruitment numbers too. Because as John Conyers pointed out, when you give violent extremists whack jobs a bunch of weapons and training to go kill the people you want them to kill, they don’t tend to stop the killing once they’ve done your dirty work:
Yep.
It looks like the Azov Battalion is about to receive some gifts from Uncle Sam. Gifts that the US House of Representatives explicitly banned in a unanimous vote. At least, based on the early Christmas present the US Congress just gave to the group, more gifts for Azov seem highly likely:
“Whether White House spokesman Josh Earnest was referring, in part, to the Conyers-Yoho amendment as one of those “ideological riders” the administration fought to defeat is unclear. What is clear is that by stripping out the anti-neo-Nazi provision, Congress and the administration have paved the way for US funding to end up in the hands of the most noxious elements circulating within Ukraine today.”
This is one of those sentence fragments that you pretty much never want to be used in a non-Onion sentence:
“What is clear is that by stripping out the anti-neo-Nazi provision, Congress and the administration have paved the way for...”
@Pterrafractyl–
Note that the Lukhansk‑1 battalion, formerly commanded by Artyom Vitko, an unabashed Nazi, received U.S. training.
http://m.jpost.com/Diaspora/Ukrainian-legislator-toasts-Hitler-438561#article=6024OEFFMUUzRTczNzUxNkZDNTY3NENDQkZENUE2NzIzM0E=
Then again, this is no surprise, since elements of U.S. intelligence, as well as the GOP’s ethnic heritage outreach organization, have supported the OUN/B from the end of WWII to this day.
Best,
Dave
Here’s an unusual bit of good news regarding the US policy towards Ukraine: For the past three years, the US budgets passed in the House of Representatives have included a ban on US aid to Ukraine going to the Azov Battalion. But that provision was always removed before the final passage of the bills.
This year, however, it looks like the provision made it all the way through, with Democratic representative Ro Khanna leading the charge on this matter. As a result, the final version of this year’s spending bill contains the language, “none of the funds made available by this act may be used to provide arms, training or other assistance to the Azov Battalion.” That said, the omnibus spending bill this year still has about $620.7 million in aid for Ukraine, including $420.7 million in State Department and foreign operations funds and $200 million in Pentagon funds, so odds are some of that military funding is going to be heading in the direction of the Azov Battalion. But at least it won’t be officially approved when that happens. It’s progress:
“House-passed spending bills for the past three years have included a ban on U.S. aid to Ukraine from going to the Azov Battalion, but the provision was stripped out before final passage each year.”
Yes, the provision to ban US aid going to the Azov Battalion was always stripped out. Until now. And Rep. Ro Khanna appears to be the most outspoken advocate of keep that ban in place:
“The State Department should pressure Kiev to dissociate itself with this group and investigate whether any of our weapons or training have already been provided to them...This is just one of many reasons why lawmakers should be concerned about channeling huge amounts of weapons into this volatile conflict zone.”
Bravo for Rep Khanna. It will be interesting to see what kind of political push back he experiences.
So will this ban actually prevent aid to flowing to the Azov Battalion? Well, if the following incident last year — a video showing up online of Azov members testing US-made grenade launcher, followed by a removal of that video and a denial by the Ukrainian National Guard that Azov was in possession of these grenade launchers — is an indication of what to expect, which should probably expect Azov getting their hands on US military aid and just not talking about it:
Interesting, one reason some US official have given for not imposing this Azov-specific ban on US military aid is that existing US law already bans US aid from going when the “secretary of State has credible information that such unit has committed a gross violation of human rights.” The problem is that the US Secretary of State has never actually made that determination about Azov:
And that means that when Azov inevitably gets its hands on the US military aid to Ukraine, banned or not, we had better hope the evidence of the inevitable gross violations of human rights that Azov is going to commit with that military aid gets well documented. Yes, Azov was banned from military aid this year. But not in previous years and who knows whether Rep. Khanna and his in congress will succeed again.
So while there’s no shortage of reason to document the human rights abuses by neo-Nazis, we can sadly add this to the list of reasons: so the US Secretary of State can finally label these neo-Nazi organization unworthy of US military aid and specific provisions in annual spending bills won’t be necessary.
Well that didn’t take long: It looks like the same smear machine that targeted former Rep. John Conyer’s over his opposition to arming the neo-Nazi Azov battalion is turning its focus on Rep. Ro Khanna after Khanna ensured that the ban on funds going to arming or training the Azov Battalion remained in place in the congressional spending bill that passed a couple weeks ago. In a particularly disgusting op-ed in The Hill, Kristofer Harrison — a foreign policy adviser to Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign and who also happens to a co-founder of a company that specializes in Russian information warfare, with offices in Washington and Kyiv — declared that Khanna’s characterization of the Azov Battalion as neo-Nazi in nature is ridiculous an all part of a big lie pushed by Putin. As Harrison puts it, Azov keeps getting smeared as a neo-Nazi battalion because it’s one of the most effective defensive units and the entire notion that there are is a significant neo-Nazis presence in Ukraine is all just Russian propaganda and Khanna fell for it:
“It is ridiculous nonsense that Ukraine is beset with a bunch of Nazis. The Russians have been pushing this foolishness for a while. In Russia, if you want to discredit someone, call them a Nazi. Putin is using it to justify his war to his subjects. Russians are not particularly keen on attacking Ukraine. But if it is to free them from the yoke of Nazis, well, that’s different.”
It’s just “ridiculous nonsense that Ukraine is beset with a bunch of Nazis.” So says the guy who runs a consulting firm that specialized in “Russian information warfare”. No, according to Harrison, the Azov Battalion keeps getting smeared with these neo-Nazi allegations because it’s so effective on the battlefield:
And then Harrison goes on to draw parallels between Khanna and former congressman John Conyers, who Harrison also portrays as a Kremlin dupe:
So, along those lines, lets take a look at the analogous article that Harrison wrote about John Conyers and his opposition to providing US support for the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion back in 2015. Harrison pretty much mades the same charges against Conyers back then that he just made against Khanna — that he was falling for Kremlin propaganda about Azov — and casually dismisses the neo-Nazi nature of the Azov (he claims that Azov doesn’t actually use the Nazi Wolsangel symbol and the resemblance is merely a coincidence).
And note the basis for Harrison’s dismissals of the Conyers’s concerns over the neo-Nazi nature of Azov: Harrison talked with Azov’s spokesperson who assure Harrison that there was no truth to the claims that Azov was a neo-Nazi battalion. That was the source Harrison repeatedly cites to refute the assertions of Azov’s neo-Nazi nature: Azov’s spokesperson:
“On June 11th, the House passed Amendment 492 to the National Defense Authorization Act. It was rushed through by Rep. John Conyers (D‑MI), now on his 50th year in Congress. The amendment would prevent the U.S. from aiding Ukraine’s volunteer Azov Battalion based on the Moscow-inspired lie that it is a neo-Nazi organization.”
It’s all a Moscow-inspired lie. The numerous reports of neo-Nazi pledges and ideologies that permeate Azov are all Moscow-inspired lies, according to Kristofer Harrison. And the Nazi Wolfsangel on their uniforms isn’t a Wolfsangel at all. It’s a totally random symbol that coincidentally happens to look like the Wolfsangel:
And we can be sure of all of this because Azov’s spokesman, Roman Zvarych, assured Harrison that there were no Nazis allowed into the unit. And, in fact, they actually committed two members to a psychiatric unit for their extremist beliefs. Yep, Azov is so anti-Nazi that it actually commits real Nazis to mental institutions when identified:
And what about the fact that Azov battalion was founded by Andrey Biletsky, the co-founder and former leader of the neo-Nazi “Social-national Assembly”? How does Harrison explain that one away? Well, according to Harrison, this is all because the point because, according to Roman Zvarych, the Social-national Assembly no longer exists. And when it did exist Biletsky was serving a 2 1/2 year prison sentence. That’s his explanation. An explanation that’s not historically accurate (Biletsky started the Social-national Assembly in 2008 and didn’t go to prison until 2011) and wouldn’t make sense even if it was historically accurate:
And remember all those reports about Mikael Skillt, the Swedish neo-Nazi who joined Azov? Well, according to Zvarych, that’s all a misunderstanding. You see, Skillt used to be neo-Nazi when he was younger, but he’s not one anymore. So all those interviews where Skillt openly shares his white power ideology don’t reflect the real Skillt. See, no Nazis!
And the fact that the journalistic world couldn’t see how all these neo-Nazi against Azov were all just Moscow-inspired lies is just embarrassing and dangerous, the way Harrison sees it:
“This is embarrassing and dangerous.”
And in that narrow sense Harrison is correct. This a all very embarrassing and dangerously. So let’s hope Rep. Ro Khanna is ready for the maelstrom of embarrassing and dangerous pro-neo-Nazi propaganda heading his way thanks to PR mercenaries like Kristofer Harrison.
@Pterrafractyl–
Fundamental to your analysis is Roman Zvarych.
In the early 1980’s, he was the personal secretary to Jaroslav Stetzko, the war-time head of the Ukrainian collaborationist government that implemented Nazi ethnic cleansing/genocide programs in Ukraine!
Zvarych was also: Minister of Justice (the Ukrainian equivalent of Attorney General) in Viktor Yuschenko’s government.
Yuschenko’s wife was the former Ykaterina Chumachenko, UCCA/OUN/B operative and Deputy Director of Public Liaison in Ronald Reagan’s government.
Zvarych (also sometimes transliterated as Svarych) also was Minister of Justice in both Timoshenko governments and is an adviser to Petro Poroshenko.
In short, Zvarych himself is a direct, incarnate link between the Ukrainian fascism of the WWII era and contemporary Ukrainian fascism.
Best,
Dave
US-Funded Neo-Nazis in Ukraine Mentor US White Supremacists
FBI: Azov Battalion Trained Rise Above Movement
By Max Blumenthal
Last month, an unsealed FBI indictment of four American white supremacists from the Rise Above Movement (RAM) declared that the defendants had trained with Ukraine’s Azov Battalion, a neo-Nazi militia officially incorporated into the country’s national guard. The training took place after the white supremacist gang participated in violent riots in Huntington Beach and Berkeley, California and Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.
The indictment stated that the Azov Battalion “is believed to have participated in training and radicalizing United States-based white supremacy organizations.”
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/11/17/blowback-us-funded-ukraine-neo-nazis-mentor-us-white-supremacists/