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“Political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
— George Orwell, 1946
EVERYTHING MR. EMORY HAS BEEN SAYING ABOUT THE UKRAINE WAR IS ENCAPSULATED IN THIS VIDEO FROM UKRAINE 24
ANOTHER REVEALING VIDEO FROM UKRAINE 24
Mr. Emory has launched a new Patreon site. Visit at: Patreon.com/DaveEmory
FTR#1291 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Lviv, Ukaine, Summer of 2018. Celebration of the 75th anniversary of the 14th Waffen SS Division (Galician). Note the Ukrainian honor guard in the background.
Introduction: Updating the Ukraine war, this broadcast centers largely on the wholesale whitewashing of Ukrainian Nazi fighting formations, the Azov units, in particular.
In turn, this whitewashing is the historical culmination of a long process.
As Mr. Emory has noted in many programs and posts, the Russia-Ukraine war has completed the process of the Nazification of America that he has chronicled for the better part of half a century.
A central role in that process was played by General Franz Halder.
We have taken note of Halder before, discussing the fact that Reinhard Gehlen cleared his formation of a working agreement with the U.S. by conferring with Halder and Admiral Karl von Doenitz, who succeeded Hitler, following his alleged “suicide.”
Perhaps even more important is his decisive post-war work revising the history of the Wehrmacht and World War II, shepherding blatant, readily verifiable lies into accepted historical truth.
In the long, ongoing series of programs about the Ukraine war, Mr. Emory has discussed his belief that the war has functioned in a manner not unlike the Philosopher’s Stone of the medieval alchemists.
That stone was believed to be able to transform lead into gold. The war is transforming individuals and institutions in the West into the same historical revisionist fabric as the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory.
” . . . . After the war, he lived a comfortable life as an author, commentator and ‘historical consultant’ for the U.S. Army Center of Military History (CMH). . . .”
“. . . . Halder’s job was to rehabilitate Nazism for the benefit of his new American patrons. If the Nazis could be ideologically separated from the German people and the German Army, America could use the most useful of Hitler’s soldiers in their war against the Soviet Union without raising suspicion. Halder oversaw a team of 700 former Wehrmacht officers and intentionally set about rewriting history to present the image of a clean Wehrmacht and a German people ignorant of Nazi brutality. His deputy was CIA agent Adolf Heusinger, a Nazi war criminal who was largely responsible for planning the endless massacres of ‘security warfare,’ and was later a commander of both the German Army and NATO. . . .”
” . . . . Halder enjoyed special status, releasing information to only the most privileged journalists and historians. With the legitimacy granted by his title, access to information, and U.S. government backing, Halder’s CMH was considered a gold standard source for academic historians and their information was highly coveted. Halder used this to carefully vet to whom he released information, ensuring he got the maximum impact.”
“From 1955 to 1991 his works were cited at least 700 times in academic publications, especially by professors and researchers in Western military academies. Since Western historians were forced to drink from Halder’s well, they passed down the poison to their students, and from there the lies worked their way into the public consciousness. Eventually, Nazi propaganda was laundered into ‘truth’ through simple repetition and careful control of sources. . . . .”
Next, we detail the ideological identification of the top Ukrainian military commander with Third Reich Ally Stephan Bandera.
The Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Four Star General Valery Zaluzhnyi is not shy about his profound affinity with Bandera: “ . . . . Zaluzhnyi is shown in uniform standing in a military office with several other soldiers in front of a desk adorned with busts of OUN‑B leaders and Nazi-collaborators Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych. Photos of both Shukhevych and Bandera are also prominently hanging on the wall in the background along with the red and black Banderite flag. . . .”
As discussed in our previous article, post-World War II U.S. political culture has been shaped by the Nazi/Pentagon alliance of General Franz Halder and hundreds of his former fellow Wehrmacht officers. That alliance has re-shaped the perception of the Second World War in an unabashedly pro-Nazi fashion.
The whitewashing of Bandera and his OUN/B dates back to the incorporation of that organization’s parent agency, the Reinhard Gehlen “Org” into the U.S. intelligence establishment.
. . . . The CIC had an agent who photographed eleven volumes of the secret files of the OUN/Bandera. These files clearly show how most of its members worked for the Gestapo or SS as policemen, executioners, partisan hunters, and municipal officials. The OUN contribution to the German war effort was significant, including raising volunteers for several SS divisions. It was precisely because of its work with the Nazis that Wisner wanted to hire the OUN for his special forces. . . .
The New York Times has been at the forefront of the whitewashing of the Azov formations and wholesale denial of the Nazification of the Ukrainian national security structure.
Now, “the Gray Lady” has been glorifying the Bratstvo battalion, another of the fascist fighting formations in the Ukrainian order of battle.
Descended from the UNA-UNSO, itself having been led by Yuri Shukhevych, son and collaborator of Roman Shukhevych, the Bratstvo battalion is being hailed as an exemplary commando unit.
(Roman Shukhevych was an OUN/B war criminal who, among other things, led the Lvov pogrom of June 30, 1941 committed by the SS-controlled Einsatzgruppe Nachtigall. He was declared a “Hero of Ukraine” by the political forces behind the Maidan coup.)
Among those joining the normalization of Azov Nazis are: Vogue magazine, MSNBC and the School of Visual Arts (New York).
Former press officer of the Azov Battalion, Dmytro Kozatsky has achieved gravitas in the West at the named institutions.
“ . . . . Protests erupted at DOC NYC’s premiere of the film Freedom on Fire (2022) at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) Theatre in Manhattan, which hosted Kozatsky as a guest speaker. Audience members who raised the accusations during a Q&A were forcibly removed from the event. . . .”
Author Lambert Strether concludes: “ . . . . what stuns me is the ease with which Kozatsky is penetrating our cultural institutions. Booking agents, facilities managers, press agents, board members who organize such things, fashion editors, network anchors: All combining their efforts to service a Nazi professionally, as if it were the most normal thing in the world, which at this point perhaps it is. . . .”
The Nazification of America via the Azov “Philosopher’s Stone” has swept up Congressional representatives from both political parties and academic groups at Stanford University.
Not to be outdone by the above individuals and institutions, the ADL has joined the chorus declaring that the Azovs aren’t Nazis.
Perhaps the whitewashing of the Azov Nazis should not surprise, particularly given that the formations’ atrocities in Ukraine are widely attributed to—drumroll, fanfare—the Russians!
Foremost in the Western falsification of Ukrainian/Azov atrocities is the massacre at Bucha, which helped terminate and marginalize ongoing behind-the-scenes negotiations to end the war.
One of the few Western voices correctly attributing the Bucha massacre is Scott Ritter.
“ . . . . Ukrainian security forces, in particular the “Safari” unit staffed by veterans of the neo-Nazi Azov Regiment, caught up with scores of these refugees while they made their way north and, in the vernacular of the Ukrainians, “cleansed” them, gunning them down on the spot, or binding their hands behind their backs before executing them in the alleyways and streets of Bucha. . . .”
1. As Mr. Emory has noted in many programs and posts, the Russia-Ukraine war has completed the process of the Nazification of America that he has chronicled for the better part of half a century.
A central role in that process was played by General Franz Halder.
We have taken note of Halder before, discussing the fact that Reinhard Gehlen cleared his formation of a working agreement with the U.S. by conferring with Halder and Admiral Karl von Doenitz, who succeeded Hitler, following his alleged “suicide.”
Perhaps even more important is his decisive post-war work revising the history of the Wehrmacht and World War II, shepherding blatant, readily verifiable lies into accepted historical truth.
In the long, ongoing series of programs about the Ukraine war, Mr. Emory has discussed his belief that the war has functioned in a manner not unlike the Philosopher’s Stone of the medieval alchemists.
That stone was believed to be able to transform lead into gold. The war is transforming individuals and institutions in the West into the same historical revisionist fabric as the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory.
” . . . . After the war, he lived a comfortable life as an author, commentator and ‘historical consultant’ for the U.S. Army Center of Military History (CMH). . . .”
“. . . . Halder’s job was to rehabilitate Nazism for the benefit of his new American patrons. If the Nazis could be ideologically separated from the German people and the German Army, America could use the most useful of Hitler’s soldiers in their war against the Soviet Union without raising suspicion. Halder oversaw a team of 700 former Wehrmacht officers and intentionally set about rewriting history to present the image of a clean Wehrmacht and a German people ignorant of Nazi brutality. His deputy was CIA agent Adolf Heusinger, a Nazi war criminal who was largely responsible for planning the endless massacres of ‘security warfare,’ and was later a commander of both the German Army and NATO. . . .”
” . . . . Halder enjoyed special status, releasing information to only the most privileged journalists and historians. With the legitimacy granted by his title, access to information, and U.S. government backing, Halder’s CMH was considered a gold standard source for academic historians and their information was highly coveted. Halder used this to carefully vet to whom he released information, ensuring he got the maximum impact.”
“From 1955 to 1991 his works were cited at least 700 times in academic publications, especially by professors and researchers in Western military academies. Since Western historians were forced to drink from Halder’s well, they passed down the poison to their students, and from there the lies worked their way into the public consciousness. Eventually, Nazi propaganda was laundered into ‘truth’ through simple repetition and careful control of sources. . . . .”
“History isn’t what happened, but the stories of what happened and the lessons these stories include. The very selection of which histories to teach in a society shapes our view of how what is came to be and, in turn, what we understand as possible. This choice of which history to teach can never be ‘neutral’ or ‘objective.’ Those who choose, either following a set agenda or guided by hidden prejudices, serve their interests. Their interests could be to continue this world as it now stands or to make a new world.” – Howard Zinn
In the aftermath of the Second World War, many of the architects of the worst atrocities in history were rescued and protected by American intelligence. The overt role of Nazi scientists such as Werner von Braun (who personally oversaw the torture and murder of slave laborers) in the United States space program and West German industry has been common knowledge for decades.
In recent years the end of the Cold War has brought revelations about the CIA’s “gladiators” such as Yaroslav Stetsko and Licio Gelli influencing the world’s political development by any means necessary. From Germany and Italy to Japan and South Korea, there is now a vast collection of evidence proving the existence of large, well-funded networks of fascist terrorists who did not hesitate to use violence to ensure compliance from the “free” people of the world.
However, what is less well known is that thousands of fascist-leaning and anti-communist academics were also rescued and nurtured by the U.S. to wage an ideological war against Communism. These revisionist historians spent decades laboring in the shadows of the academic press until the fall of the Soviet Union allowed them to return home and finally rewrite history to their liking. After decades of effort, we can now see the results of their work, the seeds planted 70 years ago are finally bearing their poisoned fruit.
Sowing the Seeds
“This struggle requires ruthless and energetic action against Bolshevik agitators, guerrillas, saboteurs, and Jews, and the total elimination of all active or passive resistance” – Franz Halder, Guidelines for the Conduct of the Troops in Russia
One of the first and most important of these historians was not a historian at all.
Franz Halder was a career staff officer, starting with the Reichswehr in World War I. He joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and his close personal friendship with Hitler helped him climb the ranks very quickly. By 1938, he was named Chief of General Staff of the Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH), which made Halder the head of planning for the entire German army and second in command only to the Führer himself. No order could leave OKH headquarters without the approval and signature of Franz Halder. This means that Halder was not only intimately aware of the regime’s crimes, but he planned most of them.
Starting with the invasion of Poland in 1939, Halder personally authorized the liquidation of “undesirables” such as Jews, Poles and Communists. His office was responsible for the infamous Commissar Order and Barbarossa Decree, which allowed Nazi soldiers to execute civilians at will and without repercussions. These orders led to the eventual death of millions in the Soviet Union, both through deportation to camps and through brutal reprisal campaigns in occupied territories.
“Collective drastic action will be taken immediately against communities from which treacherous or insidious attacks against the Wehrmacht are launched, on the orders of an officer with at least the rank of battalion commander upwards, if the circumstances do not permit a speedy apprehension of individual culprits.”- Decree on the jurisdiction of martial law and on special measures of the troops (aka the Barbarossa Decree), May 13, 1941.
Under the euphemism of “security warfare,” the Nazis annihilated entire villages and towns in occupied territory. Depending on the time and place, this was done through methods ranging from gunfire and torches to torture, rape, and pillaging. The result was always the same. Any settlement which may have held alleged partisans was completely depopulated of every man, woman and child.
All in all, a minimum of 20 million Soviet civilians were killed by the Nazis, but some Russian scholars estimate that the true number is at least double that.
Halder was a consummate professional; he poured over documents for weeks, writing and re-writing them to ensure the language was as precise and unambiguous as possible. He was successful, as his orders were heavily used as evidence against the Nazi regime in the Nuremberg trials and even today are specifically cited as the sort of criminal orders that soldiers must refuse.
The Allies considered Halder’s orders so reprehensible that Nazis such as Hermann Hoth and Wilhelm von Leeb were convicted of crimes against humanity simply for transmitting them to their subordinates. Many lower-ranking Nazis were hanged for following Halder’s orders in the Soviet Union. Despite this, Halder suffered no consequences whatsoever for issuing them.
After Halder surrendered to the U.S. Army, the United States refused to try him at Nuremberg. Instead, he faced only a minor trial for “aiding the Nazi regime” in a German court. He denied any knowledge of the crimes that bore his literal signature and was found not guilty. After the war, he lived a comfortable life as an author, commentator and “historical consultant” for the U.S. Army Center of Military History (CMH).
The old fascist was rescued from the gallows to serve as the chief planner for another war. Halder no longer planned vast battles and the extermination of races, but he remained at the forefront of the war against what Halder called “Judeo-Bolshevism,” a term he learned from his beloved Führer.
Halder’s job was to rehabilitate Nazism for the benefit of his new American patrons. If the Nazis could be ideologically separated from the German people and the German Army, America could use the most useful of Hitler’s soldiers in their war against the Soviet Union without raising suspicion. Halder oversaw a team of 700 former Wehrmacht officers and intentionally set about rewriting history to present the image of a clean Wehrmacht and a German people ignorant of Nazi brutality. His deputy was CIA agent Adolf Heusinger, a Nazi war criminal who was largely responsible for planning the endless massacres of “security warfare,” and was later a commander of both the German Army and NATO.
Through manipulation, fabrication and widespread censorship, Halder and Heusinger created a complete narrative of themselves and the Wehrmacht as brilliant, noble, and honorable victims of the madman Hitler rather than the monsters who butchered a continent.
Halder and Heusinger published reams of fantastical lies with the CMH, saying that the Wehrmacht committed no crimes on the Eastern Front. According to Halder and Heusinger, the Nazis set up markets and cultural centers to buy food from local farmers and hold dances and social events for grateful people. Halder and Heusinger only briefly mention problems in the East, saying they were carried out by “Judeo-Bolshevik” NKVD infiltrators instead of the noble Wehrmacht.
None of this could have been farther from the truth. Under unambiguous orders from the OKH, the Wehrmacht was directly responsible for the subjugation and extermination of an entire continent as part of Generalplan Ost. Every bit of Eastern Europe was to be picked clean both by and for the benefit of the Wehrmacht, and the soldiers did their duty.
The primary weapon was starvation. The Wehrmacht sustained itself from the conquered lands, drawing on both resources and labor in massive quantities. Brutal requisition programs for grain and meat killed millions while the rest toiled to feed their Nazi overlords on a daily ration of 420 calories. In the planning phase for Operation Barbarossa, the Nazis concluded that the war was only winnable if the entire Wehrmacht was fed from Soviet land by the third year. By 1944 the Nazis requisitioned more than 5 million tons of grain and 10.6 million tons of other foodstuffs from occupied territory, 80% of which was consumed by the Wehrmacht.
The Nazis needed more than just food to conquer the world. They also needed weapons and equipment. For this, Germany mustered its world-famous industrial might. The infamous concentration camps contained massive factory and labor complexes where millions of slaves were worked to death, building the weapons and equipment the Wehrmacht used to subjugate them. Given the magnitude of the contracts, very few German corporations kept their hands clean, and even the dirtiest kept all their blood money after the war.
The two elements had an almost perfect symbiotic relationship. German capital served the interests of the Army, and the Army served the interests of capital. As the Nazis conquered, they took slaves to build more weapons, which would then be used to conquer and take more slaves. The two-headed monster exploited conquered land with such savage efficiency that Nazi generals and economic planners feared running out of slaves.
“When we shoot the Jews to death, allow the POWs to die, expose considerable portions of the urban population to starvation, and in the upcoming year also lose a part of the rural population to hunger, the question remains to be answered: Who is actually supposed to produce economic value?” – Maj. Gen. Hans Leykauf
Despite the sheer enormity of his crimes, Halder’s laundry was wildly successful; it was not until after the fall of the USSR that any Western historian questioned his lies.
Even well-meaning researchers were ensnared by Halder’s trap. Halder enjoyed special status, releasing information to only the most privileged journalists and historians. With the legitimacy granted by his title, access to information, and U.S. government backing, Halder’s CMH was considered a gold standard source for academic historians and their information was highly coveted. Halder used this to carefully vet to whom he released information, ensuring he got the maximum impact.
From 1955 to 1991 his works were cited at least 700 times in academic publications, especially by professors and researchers in Western military academies. Since Western historians were forced to drink from Halder’s well, they passed down the poison to their students, and from there the lies worked their way into the public consciousness. Eventually, Nazi propaganda was laundered into “truth” through simple repetition and careful control of sources.
Although access to Soviet records has led to increasing resistance to this propaganda, some historians, such as Timothy Snyder of Yale University, still lean heavily on, or recycle Halder’s ideas to support what is known as the “double genocide” theory. Created by Baltic neo-Nazis to hide their involvement in the Holocaust and widespread collaboration with the Nazi regime, this theory languished in the darkness until Snyder brought it into the mainstream with “Bloodlands.” Even 70 years after its publication, Halder’s poison remains a key element in attempts to portray the Red Army as nothing more than savages, and thereby make the Nazis seem tame.
The Army knew that Halder published nothing but apologia, but that was the point. Halder remained with the Army for decades and was frequently rewarded for a job well done. He was even given a medal for Meritorious Civilian Service in 1961, in honor of his tireless service in the cause of genocide denial.
“It is necessary to eliminate the red subhumans, along with their Kremlin dictators. The German people will have to complete the greatest task in their history, and the world will hear that this task will be completed to the end.” – Wehrmacht Messages for the troops, № 112, June 1941
The Fertile Soil
“In the East, I intend to loot and pillage effectively. All that may be suitable for the Germans in the East, should be extracted and brought to Germany immediately.” – Hermann Goering
After decades of struggling in the dark, the fall of the Soviet Union created a golden opportunity for fascist academics. As ex-Soviet professors left, retired, or were fired in the tumultuous 1990s, an entire generation of fascist academics nurtured in the West was standing by to replace them.
Lavishly funded private schools popped up all over the former Warsaw Pact, staffed with fascist professors from Canada, Australia and the U.S. who had spent decades rehabilitating their Nazi collaborationist predecessors.
With almost limitless financial backing from NATO and a dizzying array of affiliated NGOs, the fascists could now rewrite history to their liking and train an entire generation of new soldiers in their ideological war.
As an example of this, we can focus on the life and times of Kyiv independent war correspondent Illia Ponomarenko. Through him, we can see some of the gears in the machine.
Illia was born in the town of Volnovakha, Donetsk Oblast, Russia. Then a part of Ukraine, this town of around 20,000 people sits about 40 miles north of Mariupol and the Sea of Azov.
Founded in 1881 as a station for what was known as “Catherine’s railway,” a major rail project posthumously named after the long-reigning Empress, had been mostly unremarkable since. Illia eventually moved south to attend college in Mariupol, the industrial port city which formed the backbone of the region’s economy.
Mariupol and the surrounding area have often been swept up in the tumultuous history of Ukraine. The region was a major flashpoint in the Russian Civil War and changed hands many times in the fighting between the Red Army, Tsarist forces, Makhno’s bandits, and the Central Powers before it was recaptured by Soviet forces in 1920.
In the following decades, the region saw an explosion in economic development due to its strategic position on the Sea of Azov only a short ferry trip from the USSR’s richest iron mines. Most notable was the now-famous Azovstal steel plant, a crown jewel of Stalin’s first five-year plan. The foundations were laid for the plant in 1930 and, by 1933 Azovstal produced its first ingot of cast iron. Production increased rapidly, and in 1939 the plant set a world record by producing 1,614 tons of pig iron in a single day.
When the Nazis came to enslave Ukraine, Mariupol and Azovstal stood resolute. The plant produced armor for T‑34 tanks until the bitter end with the last workers being evacuated the same day the Nazis captured the city. As they left, the workers destroyed the blast furnaces and power plants to deny them to the enemy. Azovstal fell under the control of Krupp, but repeated sabotage from Soviet partisans kept the factory out of service until 1945.
More than 6,000 Azovstal workers fought against the Nazis as partisans or Red Army soldiers. Several hundred were decorated for valor, with eight of those being awarded Hero of the Soviet Union, the highest possible award for a Red Army soldier. Sadly, hundreds paid the ultimate price in the war against fascism. A monument was erected in their honor outside the plant which has been allowed to crumble by the Maidan regime, no doubt ashamed of what it represents.
Even this great and costly victory only brought a reprieve for Mariupol. The people of Mariupol lived for decades in peace and prosperity, blissfully unaware of what was coming next. In 1991, less than 50 years after the victory of 1945, the monsters returned to once again ravage Ukraine and its people.
In 1990, after a decade of economic sabotage and on the verge of collapse, the Human Development Index of the USSR was the 25th highest in the world, at .920. After the collapse one year later, it would never again be so high.
In 2019, the last year data was published before the war, Russia ranked 52nd. Far from the prosperity promised to them by the West, four years of Maidan rule made the situation even worse in Ukraine, which fell from 83rd in 2014 to 88th, below Sri Lanka, Mexico and Albania. Iran and Cuba, crushed under the siege warfare America euphemistically calls sanctions, still provide a better standard of living for their people.
None of the former Soviet republics has recovered to their 1990 level as of 2022. Even when the USSR was months from dissolution, Soviet citizens enjoyed more prosperity than they have since their “liberation.” Their wealth and security did not vanish into the ether; rather, they were stolen by the very same Western capitalists who looted the country once before.
It is easy to view these numbers as simple abstractions, measures of a vast and almost incomprehensible economic machine but, just as it was in the 1940s, this campaign of systematic pillaging was lethal. Peer-reviewed studies have found a minimum of five million excess deaths from starvation, lack of medical care, drug addiction, and deprivation in Russia alone from 1991 to 2001. When the rest of the former Soviet republics are added, the butcher’s bill easily exceeds that of the Holocaust.
Had this happened anywhere else, or been perpetrated by anyone else, it would have been called what it was: genocide. Growing up amidst the devastation wrought by the unrestrained brutality of the “rules-based international order” only makes Ponomarenko’s future collaboration even more shocking.
Ponomarenko moved to Mariupol to attend college at Mariupol State University in 2010. Despite the innocuous name, this college was founded in 1991 with grants from USAID and George Soros and still today receives considerable funding from the U.S. and EU. The line of the college is unabashedly pro-NATO, its professors tour NATO headquarters, and the university proudly advertises its links to D.C.-based Atlanticist think tanks.
MSU is not unique. Universities like it emerged all over the Eastern Bloc, flush with cash from both Western governments and their proxy think tanks. The Soros-backed Open Society Foundation was a particularly important conduit for this. Not only did Soros create scores of new universities throughout the Eastern Bloc, but even went so far as to produce new textbooks for primary and secondary schools in the region. His schools count presidents, members of parliament and countless lesser bureaucrats among their alumni.
All of this is in the service of his war against Communism, which he has been waging since at least the 1970s with both official and unofficial government support. The irony of the ferocious anti-Communist George Soros being called a Communist by the right is particularly sharp, especially as Soros has personally benefitted enormously from looting the former Soviet Union.
Ponomarenko graduated in 2014, just in time to be swept up by the next storm to hit Ukraine.
The Bloody Harvest
“Apparently some quirk in human nature allows even the most unspeakable acts of evil to become banal within minutes, provided only that they occur far enough away to pose no personal threat.” – Iris Chang
The narrative we are selling regarding the 2014 Maidan coup is simple. We are told that protesters rose with nearly universal support to free themselves of the yoke of the illegitimate, reviled Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, and thereby Russian control. After this, they say, the transition was clean and orderly, the problems in the east emerged only because of Russian infiltration and all true Ukrainians stood behind the new regime. To this day, the Maidan regime vehemently maintains that the conflict in Ukraine is not a civil war, but rather a foreign invasion that has been going on for eight years.
If you listen hard enough, you can almost hear the echoes of Franz Halder and Adolf Heusinger in the approved Maidan narrative, and I do not believe this is accidental. Just as it was then, the fantasy created by NATO propaganda could not be any farther from the truth. The Maidan never had universal support, and the process of bringing the country to heel was a long, bloody affair.
Despite the Ukrainian government’s insistence to the contrary, the conflict is a civil war by any reasonable definition, the separatists were Ukrainian citizens almost without exception and they started fighting to defend a legitimately elected Ukrainian government. Most foreign backing was firmly behind the Maidan, not Yanukovych and the separatists. From the very beginning of the Maidan, groups like Mamuka Mamulashvili’s U.S.-backed Georgian Legion had mercenaries on the ground to escalate a peaceful protest into a bloody coup.
Many of the militiamen were members of the Ukrainian Army, who defected when ordered to shoot their family, friends and fellow Ukrainians in Donbas. NATO analysts estimate that 70% of the Ukrainian Army deserted or defected rather than killing for the Maidan regime and they took their weapons with them, a fact which puts yet another nail in the coffin of the Maidan narrative of foreign infiltrators.
The narrative of a foreign invasion, rather than civil war, is particularly important for the Maidan regime. If we accept that this is a civil war, then we must ask why this so-called “nationalist” government is killing so many Ukrainians in Donbas with its daily shelling of residential areas, schools, hospitals and other civilian targets. It would be impossible to justify calling them nationalists, let alone liberators, with the blood of so many Ukrainians on their hands.
The “Alley of Angels,” a memorial dedicated to children of Donetsk killed by Ukrainian shelling. [Source: twitter.com]
The solution to this contradiction is simple. If you strip the people of Donbas of their identity and history as Ukrainians, it becomes much easier to reconcile their annihilation. In the ideology of “heroes of Ukraine” Yaroslav Stetsko and Stepan Bandera, foundational to the Ukrainian far-right, only a Galician is a true Ukrainian. The bulk of the nation’s people are so-called “Moskals” and “Asiatics” unworthy of living in the Galician Reich.
The fact that Galicia had been a part of Poland or Austria, not Ukraine, for more than a millennium is simply ignored in favor of their addled fantasy about how they, and they alone, are true Ukrainians by virtue of some ancient Viking blood.
Then as now, the ideology makes it easy for Galician fascists to justify killing Ukrainians by the thousands.
When the Maidan protests began in 2014, counter-protests emerged all around the country, with thousands of Ukrainians taking to the streets in support of the democraticallyelected government of Viktor Yanukovych and the Party of Regions. As the Maidan grew increasingly violent under the influence of the far right, the anti-Maidan protesters refused to be intimidated and fought back. Eventually, they coalesced into militias drawn from the wide variety of anti-Maidan activists and resistance became much more organized.
Fearing a counter-revolution, the unelected government of America’s hand-picked Arseniy Yatsenyuk created the Special Tasks Patrol (STP) police which was drawn almost entirely from the neo-Nazis infesting Ukraine and given wide-ranging powers to detain and kill Ukrainians.
The most famous of them was the Azov Battalion. Long before their cynical rebranding in the wake of the 2022 Russian invasion, the Azov Battalion of 2014 was an openly neo-Nazi militia. The soldiers Illia Ponomarenko counts as comrades in arms marched under the same flag their ancestors did in the 1940s.
The echoes of history are easy to hear from Azov. Originally called “Patriot of Ukraine,” the organization was founded in 2005 by Andrei Belitsky as a coalition of several Kharkiv neo-Nazi groups, such as Tryzub (the armed wing of CIA agent and Nazi collaborator Slava Stetsko’s Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists), and the UNA-UNSO (led by the son of CIAcommando and Holocaust perpetrator Roman Shukhevych) and filled with soldiers from Ukraine’s large far-right soccer hooligan gangs.
In their formative years, Patriot of Ukraine worked as enforcers for Mafia kingpin Arsen Avakov, who was elevated to Minister of Internal Affairs after the Maidan. Avakov pulled strings to get lieutenant Belitsky out of prison for beating a rival gangster to death and the talented young Nazi was deputized to bring the separatists to heel.
In Mariupol, the saga finally came full circle and the world got to see first-hand what Halder and Heusinger spent so long planning.
After months of protests, fighting in Mariupol started in May 2014. According to the Ukrainian version of events, on May 3rd Russian infiltrators approached a checkpoint in the city with food for the guards laced with sleeping pills, then took the soldiers and their weapons after they were incapacitated. This fantasy is likely covering up the truth: The soldiers simply surrendered. Separatists set up barricades in the city center and began to occupy city administration buildings. The situation was rapidly spiraling out of the Maidan regime’s control.
Azov was one of the first units sent by the regime to retake Mariupol. Inserted into the city on the 7th of May, Azov started killing almost immediately. Azov dismantled the barricades by force, firing on the crowd of unarmed protesters who opposed them. Azov finished its work by the night of May 8th, and on Victory Day, May 9th, they started the next phase of their mission. While most of Ukraine was commemorating the sacrifice of eight million Ukrainians in the struggle against Azov’s forefathers, the heirs of Stetsko and Bandera marked the occasion in their traditional way, by killing Ukrainians. When the local police defected upon receiving an order to open fire on the crowds, Azov did not hesitate. Victory Day turned into a bloodbath as Azov terrorists opened fire on the crowds.
Local protesters and police defectors occupied the regional police HQ and took the chief of police prisoner in the process. Azov militants attempted to break the siege but, when faced with armed resistance, the “cyborgs” were soundly defeated. They retreated after suffering casualties and were forced to negotiate for the release of the prisoners. Just like before, the bravado and prowess of the fascist thugs evaporated as soon as their victims fought back.
Azov was defeated that day, but they were not destroyed. With backing from the Ukrainian state and the gangsters who were increasingly taking power, Azov returned in June, their forces bolstered by foreign mercenaries and a column of armored vehicles. After they came under drone attack, the separatists were forced to withdraw and DPR forces were driven out of Mariupol, suffering 5 dead and 30 captured. None of them returned alive.
Among the attackers that day were men wearing the insignia of the U.S. Army 1st Aviation Brigade, a unit responsible for training Army soldiers in combined arms operations. Considering their participation, the source of Azov’s sudden proficiency with UAVs becomes very clear.
Azov did not rest on their laurels. Along with the rest of the STP units, Azov quickly got back to their roots as what the people of the region once knew as “punishers,” enforcing order by any means necessary. It is unclear just how many people suffered in the dungeons staffed by STPs and SBU (Ukrainian intelligence), but the campaign was so widespread that even the Maidan regime found dozens of them guilty for crimes such as gang rape (including at least one instance where 8–10 Azov members raped a mentally disabled man until he nearly died), looting, torture, murder, smuggling and extortion. They may have worn the insignia of a military unit, but Azov had changed little from their days as Mafia killers.
All the while, Azov was nurtured by the United States and its NATO allies. Evidence has emerged of CIA training at least from 2015, if not earlier. Arms dealers bragged openly about transferring anti-tank weapons and, by 2017, Azov was posing for pictures with NATO military advisers.
Even as men marching under a swastika once again cut a swathe through his home, Illia Ponomarenko was one of their most steadfast supporters from the very beginning. After COVID forced him to cancel a planned internship in the U.S, Illia went to work for NATO-funded papers such as the Kyiv Post, and later the Kyiv Independent.
His education at the NATO-funded schools served him well, and he has done an exemplary job at continuing the work started by Franz Halder and Adolf Heusinger so many years ago by once again rehabilitating the fascist killers butchering Ukrainians. He now has millions of followers on Twitter, and routinely makes appearances on mainstream Western news, such as the BBC, CNN and Fox News. His years of carrying water for his Nazi friends have finally paid off, Illia went from simply being in the right place at the right time to an integral part in the machine.
What we are seeing today in Ukraine is no accident: It is a plan seven decades in the making. From the very beginning, the United States and NATO have been working to rehabilitate the legacy of fascism so it can be used as a weapon. These networks are not just in Ukraine; they have branches all around the world. Azov militants were even spotted at protests in Hong Kong, the latest front in America’s covert war. Fortunately, Chinese authorities prevented the city from suffering the same fate as Mariupol.
The seeds of this conflict were not planted in 2014, nor in 1991. Rather, they were sewn on June 22, 1941, when Nazi troops first streamed across the border as part of Franz Halder’s Operation Barbarossa. After four long years and tens of millions dead, the United States absorbed the “best and brightest” of the Third Reich and, for 70 years, they carefully tended Halder and Heusinger’s saplings, waiting for the chance to take root.
In 2014, we finally saw the noxious weeds of fascism return to the land they blighted so long ago, watered once more in rivers of Ukrainian blood.
2. Next, we detail the ideological identification of the top Ukrainian military commander with Third Reich Ally Stephan Bandera.
The Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Four Star General Valery Zaluzhnyi is not shy about his profound affinity with Bandera: “ . . . . Zaluzhnyi is shown in uniform standing in a military office with several other soldiers in front of a desk adorned with busts of OUN‑B leaders and Nazi-collaborators Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych. Photos of both Shukhevych and Bandera are also prominently hanging on the wall in the background along with the red and black Banderite flag. . . .”
As discussed in our previous article, post-World War II U.S. political culture has been shaped by the Nazi/Pentagon alliance of General Franz Halder and hundreds of his former fellow Wehrmacht officers. That alliance has re-shaped the perception of the Second World War in an unabashedly pro-Nazi fashion.
The whitewashing of Bandera and his OUN/B dates back to the incorporation of that organization’s parent agency, the Reinhard Gehlen “Org” into the U.S. intelligence establishment.
. . . . The CIC had an agent who photographed eleven volumes of the secret files of the OUN/Bandera. These files clearly show how most of its members worked for the Gestapo or SS as policemen, executioners, partisan hunters, and municipal officials. The OUN contribution to the German war effort was significant, including raising volunteers for several SS divisions. It was precisely because of its work with the Nazis that Wisner wanted to hire the OUN for his special forces. . . .
Since the openly West-backed Maidan Putsch in 2014, January 1st has been proclaimed a national holiday in Ukraine, celebrating the birthday of the genocidal WW2-era West Ukrainian fascist and anti-semite ideologue, terrorist insurgent leader, Nazi collaborator, and Holocaust perpetrator, Stepan Bandera.
For the last eight years it has been marked by horrifying torchlit nighttime parades of the regime’s NeoNazi deathsquads and brownshirts goose-stepping through the streets of the capital, Kiev.
This year the Kiev Putsch regime’s Parliamentary body the Rada, celebrated the fascist holiday with a tweet, now deleted, on Twitter showing the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the 4 star general Valery Zaluzhny, standing smiling smugly, in front of a portrait of Stepan Bandera, accompanied by one of Bandera’s quotes, “The complete and final victory of Ukrainian nationalism will come when the Russian empire ceases to exist.” And then added, “A fight against the Russian empire is currently underway. And the precepts of Stepan Bandera are well known to the commander-in-chief of the armed forces.”
This is hardly the first such revelation. Zaluzhnyi is infamously known as open ideological supporter of Stepan Bandera, now officially glorified by the West-backed Kiev Putsch regime as a hero and “founding father” of the new Ukraine under their rule and vision.
This is almost certainly one of the criteria for which he was chosen to lead the Kiev regime’s military forces.
In 2021, right after becoming the Kiev regime’s Commander-In-Chief, Zaluzhny officially appointed Dmitry Yarosh, the head and founder of the NeoNazi & white supremacist paramilitary group, the Right Sector, as his personal “senior military advisor”.And Zaluzhny obviously loves throwing around pr photo shoots of himself brazenly displaying his Banderite fascist bona fides. Yes –despite the fact that his President, Zelenskiy, has a Jewish daddy.
This year, the Kiev regime’s Commander-in-Chief posted to his own Twitter account a “frontline” photo of him striding in uniform, with assault rifle in hand, prominently displaying a bracelet carved with swastikas.
Lamely the Western MSM echoed every crypto-NeoNazi ever by claiming, “Its not a swastika, its just an ancient Viking symbol”. Seriously?
Yeah, I’m sure the Bandera-worshipping head of the Ukrainian military was wearing swastikas just because he’s secretly a Norse pagan.In another photo from this year, Zaluzhnyi is shown in uniform standing in a military office with several other soldiers in front of a desk adorned with busts of OUN‑B leaders and Nazi-collaborators Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych. Photos of both Shukhevych and Bandera are also prominently hanging on the wall in the background along with the red and black Banderite flag.
A separate photo taken of Zaluzhnyi’s office also has a bust of Bandera displayed prominently for all to see on a table against the wall.
In a recent interview with the Economist, Zaluzhny said flat out-
“We’ve been at war since 2014… And the most important experience we had and the one which we have practiced almost like a religion is that Russians and any other enemies must be killed, just killed, and most importantly, we should not be afraid, not hesitate, to do it. And this is what we are doing.”
Yes they have been indeed killing Russians since 2014.
In a civil conflict in country where 20% of the population is ethnic Russian and a significant proportion of the rest, particularly in the East, are Russian-speaking and regard Russians as a brother people, not as “the enemy”.This is the Banderite fascist Commander-in-Chief of a military armed, trained, given C4ISR, directed and puppeted by NATO and funded to the cost of now hundreds of billions of Western taxpayer dollars in a proxy war on Russia. He’s celebrated in Western media reports, magazine covers, and newspaper front pages as a hero!
How can this be?
The grim reality is that as long as Zaluzhny’s hatred and violence, and that of his NeoNazi hordes, are directed, for the moment, primarily against ethnic Russians, “pro-Russian Eastern Ukrainians” and leftists, then his brand of Banderite fascism is geopolitically useful to the West, and thus “kosher”.
Indeed the US and Canada have a long documented history of supporting Banderite fascists in Ukraine, and their analoques in the Baltics, back to the immediate aftermath of WW2.
Zaluschny…Hey – the bastard may be a fascist, but he’s OUR fascist, god-damn it!
3. The New York Times has been at the forefront of the whitewashing of the Azov formations and wholesale denial of the Nazification of the Ukrainian national security structure.
Now, “the Gray Lady” has been glorifying the Bratstvo battalion, another of the fascist fighting formations in the Ukrainian order of battle.
Descended from the UNA-UNSO, itself having been led by Yuri Shukhevych, son and collaborator of Roman Shukhevych, the Bratstvo battalion is being hailed as an exemplary commando unit.
(Roman Shukhevych was an OUN/B war criminal who, among other things, led the Lvov pogrom of June 30, 1941 committed by the SS-controlled Einsatzgruppe Nachtigall. He was declared a “Hero of Ukraine” by the political forces behind the Maidan coup.)
The New York Times has found another neo-Nazi militia to fawn over in Ukraine. The Bratstvo battalion “gave access to the New York Times to report on two recent riverine operations,” which culminated in a piece (11/21/22) headlined “On the River at Night, Ambushing Russians.”
Since the US-backed Maidan coup in 2014, establishment media have either minimized the far-right ideology that guides many Ukrainian nationalist detachments or ignored it completely.
Anti-war outlets, including FAIR (1/28/22, 3/22/22), have repeatedly highlighted this dynamic—particularly regarding corporate media’s lionization of the Azov battalion, once widely recognized by Western media as a fascist militia, now sold to the public as a reformed far-right group that gallantly defends the sovereignty of a democratic Ukraine (New York Times, 10/4/22; FAIR.org, 10/6/22).
That is when Azov’s political orientation is discussed at all, which has become less and less common since Russia launched its invasion in February.
‘Christian Taliban’
The lesser-known Bratstvo battalion, within which the Times embedded its reporters, is driven by several far-right currents—none of which are mentioned in the article.
Bratstvo was founded as a political organization in 2004 by Dmytro Korchynsky, who previously led the far-right Ukrainian National Assembly–Ukrainian People’s Self-Defense (UNA-UNSO).
Korchynsky, who now fights in Bratstvo’s paramilitary wing, is a Holocaust denier who falsely blamed Jews for the 1932–33 famine in Ukraine, and peddled the lie that “120,000 Jews fought in the Wehrmacht.” He has stated that he sees Bratstvo as a “Christian Taliban” (Intercept, 3/18/15).
In the 1980s, the Times portrayed the religious extremists of the Afghan mujahideen—who were receiving US training and arms—as a heroic bulwark against Soviet expansionism. We all know how that worked out.
In an echo of that propaganda campaign, the Times neglected to tell its readers about the neo-Nazi and theocratic politics of the Bratstvo battalion. Why should anyone care who else Bratstvo members would like to see dead, so long as they’re operating in furtherance of US policymakers’ stated aim of weakening Russia?
Modern-day crusade
The article’s author, Carlotta Gall, recounted Bratstvo’s Russian-fighting exploits in quasi-religious terms. Indeed, the only instances in which the Times even hinted at the unit’s guiding ideology came in the form of mythologizing the unit’s Christian devotion.
Of Bratstvo fighters embarking on a mission, Gall wrote, “They recited a prayer together, then loaded up the narrow rubber dinghies and set out, hunched silent figures in the dark.” Referring to battalion commander Oleksiy Serediuk’s wife, who also fights with the unit, Gall extolled, “She has gained an almost mythical renown for surviving close combat with Russian troops.”
The piece even featured a photograph showing militia members gathered in prayer. Evoking the notion of pious soldiers rather than that of a “Christian Taliban,” the caption read, “Members of the Bratstvo battalion’s special forces unit prayed together before going on a night operation.”
The Times also gave voice to some of the loftier aims of Bratstvo’s crusade, quoting Serediuk’s musing that, “We all dream about going to Chechnya, and the Kremlin, and as far as the Ural Mountains.” Nazi racial ideologues have long been enamored by the prospect of reaching the Urals, which they view as the natural barrier separating European culture from the Asiatic hordes.
While plotting Operation Barbarossa, Hitler identified the Urals as the eastern extent of the Wehrmacht’s planned advance. In 1943, referring to the Nazi scheme that aimed to rid European Russia of Asiatic “untermenschen” so the land could be settled by hundreds of millions of white Europeans, Himmler declared, “We will charge ahead and push our way forward little by little to the Urals.”
‘Mindset of the 13th century’
The only two Bratstvo members named in the piece, meanwhile, are Serediuk and Vitaliy Chorny. While Chorny—who the Times identified as the battalion’s head of intelligence gathering—is quoted, his statements are limited to descriptions of the unit’s fighting strategy. Serediuk’s recorded utterances are similarly lacking in substance.
Far more illuminating is an Al Jazeera article (4/15/15) titled “‘Christian Taliban’s’ Crusade on Ukraine’s Front Lines,” which quotes both Serediuk and Chorny extensively. Serediuk, Al Jazeera reported, “revels in the Christian Taliban label.”: In reference to his decision to leave the Azov battalion, the piece went on to say
Serediuk didn’t leave the Azov because of the neo-Nazi connections, however—extreme-right ideology doesn’t bother him. What does irk him, however, is being around fighters who are not zealous in their religious convictions.
In the same piece, Chorny invoked the violently antisemitic Crusades of the Middle Ages to describe Bratstvo’s ideological foundation:
The enemy—the forces of darkness—they have all the weapons, they have greater numbers, they have money. But our soldiers are the bringers of European traditions and the Christian mindset of the 13th century.
To circumvent the Times’ exultant narrative, one has to do a certain amount of supplementary research and analysis. But even the most basic inquiry—searching “Bratstvo battalion” on Google—reveals the far-right underpinnings of the unit with which the Times embedded its reporters.
The seventh search result is a June 2022 study from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, which reported, “Another such far-right entity is the so-called Brotherhood (Bratstvo) ‘battalion,’ which includes Belarusian, Danish, Irish and Canadian members.”
The ninth result is an article from the Washington Free Beacon (4/6/22), which quoted a far-right Canadian volunteer as saying on Telegram that he was “fighting in the neo-Nazi ‘Bratstvo’ Battalion in Kyiv.”
SS memorabilia
In a world where journalists actually practiced what they preached, someone at the paper of record surely would have noticed the Nazi insignia appearing in two photos in the piece. In this world, however, the Times either forgot how to use the zoom function—though the paper made extensive use of this capability when reporting on China’s Communist Party Congress the month before (FAIR.org, 11/11/22)—or they simply did not want to report on this ugly and inconvenient discovery.
One soldier is seen wearing an emblem known as a “Totenkopf” in a photo of Bratstvo’s prayer circle. The Totenkopf, which means “death’s head” in German, was used as an insignia by the Totenkopfverbande—an SS unit that participated in Hitler’s war of annihilation against the Soviet Union, and guarded the concentration camps where Nazi Germany condemned millions of Jewish men, women and children to death.
Individuals donning the Totenkopf also took part in the murder of millions of others in these camps, including Soviet prisoners of war, political dissidents, trade unionists, persons with disabilities, homosexuals and Romani people.
In September, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy posted—and then quietly deleted—a picture on social media of himself with a number of soldiers, one of whom was wearing a Totenkopf patch similar to that seen in the Times’ photo of Bratstvo’s prayer meeting. One can easily find this particular iteration on Amazon or eBay.
Later in the Times article, another photograph of a soldier wearing a slightly different version of the insignia appeared. Here, bathed in the light of an interior room and staring out from the very center of the image, the Totenkopf is even harder to miss. Amazon’s product description for this specific variant reads, “This gorgeous replica piece takes you back to World War II.”
4. Among those joining the normalization of Azov Nazis are: Vogue magazine, MSNBC and the School of Visual Arts (New York).
Former press officer of the Azov Battalion, Dmytro Kozatsky has achieved gravitas in the West at the named institutions.
“ . . . . Protests erupted at DOC NYC’s premiere of the film Freedom on Fire (2022) at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) Theatre in Manhattan, which hosted Kozatsky as a guest speaker. Audience members who raised the accusations during a Q&A were forcibly removed from the event. . . .”
Author Lambert Strether concludes: “ . . . . what stuns me is the ease with which Kozatsky is penetrating our cultural institutions. Booking agents, facilities managers, press agents, board members who organize such things, fashion editors, network anchors: All combining their efforts to service a Nazi professionally, as if it were the most normal thing in the world, which at this point perhaps it is. . . .”
Dmytro Kozatsky was the press officer of Ukraine’s Azov Battalion, which makes him a fascist.
(Colonel Douglas MacGregor: “[T]hese so-called Azov Nazis and their supporters are not only murdering Russians, they’re murdering their own people, and as we saw recently, they actually set out to kill Polish troops that were serving in Ukrainian uniform in Ukraine.” For more on the Azovs, see Appendix A. For more on Kozatsky, see Appendix B).[1] Kozatsky is also a photographer. His most recent project was photographing from inside the Azovstal iron and steel works at Mariupol, with the Azovs, until his capture by Russian forces and ultimate release in a prisoner exchange. He is now touring the United States, apparently to support a movie in which he stars (as himself), and his Azovstal photobook. The main purpose of this post is to show a Nazi insinuating himself — and rather easily — into the upper reaches of our culture industry (fashion, film, books) through such examples as I can glean from Google in its currrent state. The culture industry being primarily PMC and Democrat, the same people defending and applauding Kozatsky are also the ones with “In This House” signs on their lawns, who decry “hate” wherever they feel they encounter it. It’s a funny old world. But let’s look first at Kozatsky’s war.
The seige of Azovstal made Kozatsky’s career as a photographer (and he is a good photographer, much as Leni Riefenstahl was a brilliant cinematographer). Let’s look at three images:
(From Ukrainian Weekly.) The caption sources the photo to “the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine,” suggesting an official connection. This one seems to be of Kozatsky, rather than by him. (The first two photos, not being openly manipulative, are more appealing to me than this one. I mean, a shaft of light striking a performative Jesus? Really? At least it’s an ethos.)
When Russian forces took Azovstal, Kozatsky was captured (along with, according to Russian estimates, 2,439 other prisoners of war). Moon of Alabama discovered this curious incident which took place while Kozatsky was in captivity:
On July 28 the Russians published a video of an interview with Azov nazi soldier Dmytro Kozatsky, call sign Orest, who directly accused Zelenski advisor [Oleksii ] Arestovich of ordering the killing of Russian soldiers who had been taken prisoners.
Kozatsky was running the public relation side for his Azov unit. Even before the war started, Kozatsky says, Arestovich was preparing an information campaign with shock videos that were supposed to show the torture and killing of Russian soldiers taken prisoners. Kozatsky received such an order and passed it on. He later noted that such shock videos were indeed made and published on social media sides.
Negotiations took place between Russia and Ukraine, and of the 2,439 Ukrainian POWs, Russia released 200, one of whom was Kozatsky. From Ukrainska Pravda:
“It is very difficult to negotiate about people who are well known in the media. The fewer people know you, the easier it is to release you [from captivity]. When you are famous, your value increases many times over. The most difficult thing was to talk about the commanders, about Ptashka [renowned female army paramedic – ed.], or about the photographer known as Orest,” another interlocutor in President Zelenskyy’s circle explained.
Clearly, for whatever reason, Kozatsky was a high-value prisoner (and not least because throwing Zekensky advisor Arestovich under the bus — if that’s what really happened — didn’t affect his release in any way). Kozatsky describes his war to EuroNews:
“That’s it. I am thankful to Azovstal for shelter – the place of my death and my life,” Dmytro ‘Orest’ Kozatsky said in his Instagram post, published on Friday.
The Azov regiment fighter[2] made his photography from the sieged Azovstal steel plant available for free, asking for it to be shared as much as possible. Some of these photographs have already gone viral revealing the situation of Azov regiment fighters, notably the injured personnel.
“By the way, while I will be in captivity, I leave you my photos, apply to all the journalist awards and photography competitions for me. If I get something, I will be really pleased to learn about it after I am released. Thank you all for your support. See you”, he wrote.
And now Kozatsky is on tour! First, I’ll look at what happened to Kozatsky in Spain (where they know what fascism is all about, having been ruled by Franco). After that, I’ll work though cases in the United States: Vogue magazine, Ukrainian National Womens League Of America (Philadelphia), the School Of Visual Arts (New York), and (drumroll) MSNBC[3].
Catalonia. Here’s what happened at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. From Hyperallergic:
Several of [Kozatsky’s Azovstal] photos were on display at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) since mid-October, but on November 13, the institution announced it was prematurely ending the show, claiming that it “wasn’t aware of the artist’s ideology.”
“The UPC radically rejects Nazism and regrets the situation created,” the UPC said in a statement.
Earlier that day, pro-Russian Ukrainian journalist Anatoly Shariy had shared multiple screenshots of Kozatsky’s social media posts on Telegram, all of which contained far-right and neo-Nazi hate symbols. A swastika tattoo appears on Kozatsky’s leg, with another drawn in ketchup on a homemade pizza. Meanwhile, a selfie of Kozatsky shows his sweatshirt emblazoned with the numbers 14/88, a combination of two white supremacist symbols, and a Ukrainian coat of arms.
(To be fair, Kozatsky issued a non-apology apology. For more, see Appendix B.)
Vogue Magazine
From Dmytro Kozatsky’s listing as a Vogue photographer:
The Azov regiment fighter made his photography from the sieged Azovstal steel plant available for free, asking for it to be shared as much as possible. Some of these photographs have already gone viral revealing the situation of Azov regiment fighters, notably the injured personnel.
Dmytro and other fighters of Azovstal in Mariupol were defending the city for 82 days with limited supplies of food and water, they also saved more than 1000 civilians (mostly women and children) that found shelter, food and water at the plant and later were evacuated.
“Fighters,” again. Have we learned nothing from Coco Chanel? Apparently ***cough*** Balenciaga ***cough*** not.
Ukrainian National Womens League Of America (Philadelphia)
From the events listing:
UNWLA, Branch 10, is hosting a photo exhibition displaying the reality of war in Ukraine through the eyes of four amazing photographers. Free admission and refreshments. Prints available for purchase.
The exhibit will feature some of the most beautiful and heartfelt works of:
- Dmytro Kozatsky – the photographer who took the most famous photos from Azov.
Entirely unexceptional. Which is the problem. (I also wonder how many other branches of the UNWLA Kozatsky will visit, and whether he will visit Canada as well.
School Of Visual Arts (New York)
Again from HyperAllergic:
Protests erupted at DOC NYC’s premiere of the film Freedom on Fire (2022) at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) Theatre in Manhattan, which hosted Kozatsky as a guest speaker. Audience members who raised the accusations during a Q&A were forcibly removed from the event. One attendee, student and organizer Kayla Popuchet, said she was attacked by fellow audience members, some of whom called her a ‘bitch’ and ‘Kremlin shill.’
“Kremlin shill.” Carrying a “Vote Blue No Matter Who” tote-bag, no doubt. From Popuchet:
So I was just kicked out by @DOCNYCfest for pointing out their “special guest speaker” Dymtro Kozatsky is a Neo-Nazi in the openly Nazi Azov Regiment who participated in the attacks on Donbass civilians. DocNYC tried to hide his affiliations, why? pic.twitter.com/INgzFaLUMa — Kayla (@kaylapop_) November 14, 2022
“I even heard someone call me Russian, which is funny because I am an Afro-Latin American with zero relation to Russia,” Popuchet told Hyperallergic.
Obviously, Popuchet was from an out-group, so anything goes:
As journalist Moss Robeson noted on Twitter, the SVA Theatre removed all mention of Kozatsky’s name from its event description after Shariy’s Telegram messages surfaced earlier that morning. SVA declined Hyperallergic’s multiple requests for comment, and DOC NYC has not yet responded.
Does make you wonder where DSA — and heck, AOC! — was on this, doesn’t it?
MSNBC
From MSNBC itself:
Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States Oksana Markarova, Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Carol Guzy, and Dmytro Kozatsky, a Ukrainian soldier and photographer who was held in the Mariupol steel plant, join Andrea Mitchell to discuss “Relentless Courage: Ukraine and the World at War,” a new book featuring a collection of images capturing Ukrainians’ enduring fight. Ambassador Markarova, who writes in the book about a journalist lost to the war, tells Mitchell: “He was a very beautiful human being, full of light,” and Russia’s targeting of civilians “shows how inhumane this aggressive regime is, and how this war is about the values, democracy.” She adds, “We will not stop until there is accountability.”
* * *
I’m afraid I don’t have an earth-quake of a conclusion here; what stuns me is the ease with which Kozatsky is penetrating our cultural institutions. Booking agents, facilities managers, press agents, board members who organize such things, fashion editors, network anchors: All combining their efforts to service a Nazi professionally, as if it were the most normal thing in the world, which at this point perhaps it is. It would also be nice to know if how many other Ukrainian efforts like this are going on, and if they are… facilitated by anyone “in government.”
NOTES
[1] OK, I said “Nazi” in the headline, and the (more accurate) “fascist” in the text, because “Normalizing Nazis” is euphonious. But I don’t want to get into the fine points, here. One of Terry Pratchett’s more entertaining villains, Mr. Pin, has “Not a Nice Person at All” done in pokerwork on his wallet. “I wonder kind of person would put that on a wallet?” “Somebody who wasn’t a very nice person.” So I will not be debating styles of pokerwork at this time. I could have said “Banderite,” I suppose, but then nobody would know what I meant.
[2] Azov “fighters,” I love it. Seems to be the most frequent euphemism.
[3] Moss Robeson has a vivid but entirely unlinked description of Kozatsky’s appearance at the Taras Shevchenko School of Ukrainian Studies of Greater Washington, in the facilities of Westland Middle School in Bethesda, Maryland (i.e., in the heart of PMC territory, where everybody “works in government,” and the fifth wealthiest city in the United States). Sadly, I can’t source the photo of the event, I can’t find the event on any school calendar or newsletter. That’s a shame, because Irena Chalupa, former editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert blog and DNC oppo researcher (!), is said to have organized and photographed the event. Perhaps readers can do better?
APPENDIX A: The Azovs are Fascists
Before February 2022:
Atlantic Council (2018):
Since the beginning of 2018, C14 and other far-right groups such as the Azov-affiliated National Militia, Right Sector, Karpatska Sich, and others have attacked Roma groups several times, as well as anti-fascist demonstrations, city council meetings, an event hosted by Amnesty International, art exhibitions, LGBT events, and environmental activists. On March 8, violent groups launched attacks against International Women’s Day marchers in cities across Ukraine. In only a few of these cases did police do anything to prevent the attacks, and in some they even arrested peaceful demonstrators rather than the actual perpetrators…
To be clear, far-right parties like Svoboda perform poorly in Ukraine’s polls and elections, and Ukrainians evince no desire to be ruled by them. But this argument is a bit of “red herring.” It’s not extremists’ electoral prospects that should concern Ukraine’s friends, but rather the state’s unwillingness or inability to confront violent groups and end their impunity. Whether this is due to a continuing sense of indebtedness to some of these groups for fighting the Russians or fear they might turn on the state itself, it’s a real problem and we do no service to Ukraine by sweeping it under the rug.
Of course, it’s not a problem any more!
Al Jazeera (2022):
The far-right neo-Nazi group has expanded to become part of Ukraine’s armed forces, a street militia and a political party….
The unit was initially formed as a volunteer group in May 2014 out of the ultra-nationalist Patriot of Ukraine gang, and the neo-Nazi Social National Assembly (SNA) group. Both groups engaged in xenophobic and neo-Nazi ideals and physically assaulted migrants, the Roma community and people opposing their views.A few months after recapturing the strategic port city of Mariupol from the Russian-backed separatists, the unit was officially integrated into the National Guard of Ukraine on November 12, 2014, and exacted high praise from then-President Petro Poroshenko.
“These are our best warriors,” he said at an awards ceremony in 2014. “Our best volunteers.”
Cato (2022):
An especially egregious performance has occurred with respect to the role of the Azov battalion (now the Azov regiment) in Ukraine’s defense effort. The Azov battalion was notorious for years before the Russian invasion as a bastion of extreme nationalists and outright Nazis. That aspect proved to be more than just a source of embarrassment for Ukraine’s supporters when the unit became a crucial player in the battle for the city of Mariupol. The Western (especially US) press sought to portray Ukraine’s resistance to the Russian siege as a heroic effort similar to battle of Stalingrad in World War II.
The prominence of the Azov regiment among the defenders certainly should have complicated that media portrayal. Yet most accounts simply focused on the suffering of Mariupol’s population, the heartless villainy of the Russian aggressors, and the tenacity of the city’s brave defenders. Such accounts typically ignored the presence of Azov fighters among the defenders or failed to disclose their ideological pedigree. A Washington Post story, for example, merely described the Azov regiment as “a nationalist outfit.” Other news accounts referred to the Azov forces in a similar vague manner, occasionally with a perfunctory acknowledgment that the regiment was controversial.
….However, the coverage of the Ukraine war threatens to achieve a new low in media integrity and credibility. When the establishment press whitewashes the behavior of outright neo-Nazis, something is terribly amiss.
CNN (2022):
Azov’s military and political wings formally separated in 2016, when the far-right National Corps party was founded. The Azov battalion had by then been integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard.
An effective fighting force that’s very much involved in the current conflict, the battalion has a history of neo-Nazi leanings, which have not been entirely extinguished by its integration into the Ukrainian military.
In its heyday as an autonomous militia, the Azov Battalion was associated with White supremacists and neo-Nazi ideology and insignia. It was especially active in and around Mariupol in 2014 and 2015. CNN teams in the area at the time reported Azov’s embrace of neo-Nazi emblems and paraphernalia.
After its integration into the Ukrainian National Guard, amid discussions in the US Congress about designating the Azov Movement a foreign terrorist organization, Ukraine’s then minister of internal affairs, Arsen Avakov, defended the unit. “The shameful information campaign about the alleged spread of Nazi ideology (among Azov members) is a deliberate attempt to discredit the ‘Azov’ unit and the National Guard of Ukraine,” he told the online newspaper Ukrayinska Pravda in 2019.
The battalion still operates as a relatively autonomous entity. It has been prominent in defending Mariupol in recent weeks, and its resistance has been widely praised by members of the government.
Fair (2022):
The outsized influence of neo-Nazi groups in Ukrainian society (Human Rights Watch, 6/14/18)—including the the Azov Regiment, the explicitly neo-Nazi branch of Ukraine’s National Guard—is another fact that has been dismissed as disinformation. Western outlets once understood far-right extremism as a festering issue (Haaretz, 12/27/18) that Ukraine’s government “underplayed” (BBC, 12/13/14).
The Financial Times (3/29/22) and London Times (3/30/22) attempted to rehabilitate the Azov regiment’s reputation, using the disinformation label to downplay the influence of extremism in the national guard unit. Quoting Azov’s founder Andriy Biletsky as well as an unnamed Azov commander, the Financial Times cast Azov’s members as “patriots” who “shrug off the neo-Nazi label as ‘Russian propaganda.’” Alex Kovzhun, a “consultant” who helped draft the political program of the National Corps, Azov’s political wing, added a lighthearted human interest perspective, saying Azov was “made up of historians, football hooligans and men with military experience.”
That the Financial Times would take Biletsky at his word on the issue of Azov’s Nazi-free character, a man who once declared that the National Corps would “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade…against Semite-led Untermenschen [subhumans]” (Guardian, 3/13/18), is a prime example of how Western media have engaged in information war at the expense of their most basic journalistic duties and ethics.
APPENDIX B: Kozatsky is a Fascist
In addition to the Nazi paraphernalia described by Shariy above, we have Twitter likes:
On Twitter, the Azov press spokesperson [Kozatsky] has “liked” many horrendous posts, including an image of a symbol associated with the Nazi SS which largely administered the Holocaust. The Totenkopf was captioned: “Your face when you read news about gypsies.” That year, in 2018, the U.S. Helsinki Commission warned, “attacks on Roma in Ukraine have escalated dramatically.” Earlier that spring, Kozatsky liked an image of the KKK and another tweet that said “Heil Hitler!” on the Nazi dictator’s birthday. In January 2019, Kozatsky liked an image of Amon Göth, an Austrian Nazi who commanded the Plaszow concentration camp and was portrayed in Schindler’s List as the main antagonist of the film. In March 2020, not long after the first confirmed case of Covid-19 in his country, Kozatsky liked an image of Ukrainian graffiti that said “Death to Yids” with an SS symbol. Two days before he surrendered in Mariupol, someone on Twitter mocked Kozatsky for his ankle tattoos: “I’m not a nazi.” He responded, “I want to disappoint you and tell you that the swastika is not only Nazi. Here is your homework, young investigator…” There are plenty of more examples of him being a Nazi on the internet.
As seen above, Dmytro Kozatsky obviously gets a big kick out of the neo-Nazi code 1488, and he appears to be fond of the white supremacist Ukrainian brands SvaStone and “White Print.” According to Reporting Radicalism, a website created by the US-funded Freedom House in Ukraine, “The brand name SvaStone alludes to the swastika. Its logo is a stylized swastika… The logo and name are exclusively used as a brand that targets far-right consumers.” White Print is more obscure and overtly neo-Nazi. This Azov-associated brand, which apparently operates exclusively on the Russian social media network VK, made Kozatsky’s 1488 tshirt, and perhaps another featuring a sun cross swastika. Kozatsky expressed interest in another one of their shirts glorifying the “Galicia Division” — the Ukrainian Waffen-SS unit — in addition to the shirt he already has emblazoned with the Nazi formation’s Ukrainian emblem.
Not a nice person at all.
5. The Nazification of America via the Azov “Philosopher’s Stone” has swept up Congressional representatives from both political parties and academic groups at Stanford University.
After meeting with at least 50 members of Congress, soldiers of the neo-Nazi Azov Regiment toured the US to auction off swastika-inspired patches and lobby for an end to restrictions on US arms and training.
This article was originally published by Moss Robeson’s Ukes, Kooks and Spooks blog and lightly edited by The Grayzone.
Read part one of Robeson’s series on Azov’s US tour here.
This September, a delegation of the Ukrainian neo-Nazi-led Azov movement arrived in the United States, at a time when myth making about the far-right network’s “depoliticization” had reached a fever pitch. By this time, the New York Times had ceased referring to Azov as “openly neo-Nazi,” and was referring to the ultra-nationalist organization as “celebrated.”
Since news broke of Azov’s US tour, more information has come to light about the ultra-nationalist organization’s outreach in the country, including efforts by Azov to reverse Congress’ ban on supplying it with arms and training.
The Azov delegation included three veterans of the regiment formerly holed up in the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol. They were led by Giorgi Kuparashvili, the only fighter not taken prisoner by the Russians.
According to Kuparashvili, a cofounder and instructor of the Azov Regiment, his delegation met over fifty members of Congress, far more than anyone has realized. Among those who showed up to greet Azov on Capitol Hill was Rep. Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who spent the Trump era leading Russiagate theatrics and clamored for shipments of offensive US weapons to Ukraine.
The trio was accompanied by two spouses and a mother of POWs captured at Azovstal. This included Kateryna Prokopenko, the wife of the far-right commander of the Azov Regiment, Denys Prokopenko, who was freed in a prisoner exchange and declared a Hero of Ukraine during her visit to the United States. The delegation’s other Azov wife was Yulia Fedosyuk, the leader of “Silver of the Rose,” an anti-feminist, anti-gay group linked to the Azov movement, according to journalist Oleksiy Kuzmenko.
Earlier this year, Prokopenko and Fedosyuk met with Pope Francis. While in the United States, they spoke at a small rally in front of the White House, appeared for an interview on the pro-Trump channel Newsmax, and took meetings with numerous members of Congress. Newsmax separately interviewed two of the Azov veterans, including Kuparashvili.
On Saturday, September 24, half of the delegation including Kuparashvili appeared before a sizable audience at a Ukrainian church in Detroit. The Ukrainian-American Crisis Response Committee of Michigan (UACRCM), a lobbying outfit formed earlier this year, live-streamed the event, which was organized by US partners of the Azov movement’s charity wing.
Among the more prominent Ukrainian nationalists present for the event was Borys Potapenko, a member of the UACRCM and an international coordinator of the Stepan Bandera-founded Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN‑B), which collaborated with Nazi Germany throughout much of World War Two. Potapenko is also among the leaders of the far-right “Capitulation Resistance Movement” in Ukraine, which allied with Azov’s National Corps against Volodymyr Zelensky in 2019–22. (More about this coming soon on the “Bandera Lobby Blog”…)
Giorgi Kuparashvili spoke to the audience in English, focusing largely on the Azov delegation’s success in Washington. “We went to the Senators, Congressmen, from both parties. Honestly, the majority we met, there were like over fifty of them, and head of their fractions [Democrats and Republicans], they all gave 100% support. They started to work right from their office in front of us, picked up the phone, and started calling to different organizations which can influence — right now, we’re having problems with the Geneva Conventions. Geneva Conventions is not working, not for Russia…”
Later, Kuparashvili indicated that the delegation had more on its political agenda than detailing Russian war crimes, criticizing the International Red Cross, and securing the release of Azov POWs. He predicted that this year, Congress will lift its ban on the U.S. supplying arms and training to the Azov Regiment.
The Azov delegation’s audience at their first stop in New Jersey largely consisted of children
In his closing remarks, Giorgi Kuparashvili appeared to take aim at his least two favorite members of Congress: Ro Khanna, a liberal Democrat from Silicon Valley, thanks to whom Congress curtailed U.S. support for the Azov Regiment in 2018, and Max Rose, a former Congressman and right-wing Democrat from Staten Island, who called on the State Department to label the Azov Regiment a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” in 2020.
“From year ’14, ’15, ’16, until today,” claimed Kuparashvili, “there is a bill which, I don’t remember the name, but the Congressman who lobbied, I don’t know how… He left Congress a couple years ago, he initiated to put the Azov as a restriction in a bill. This week, we talked to all the Congressmen and Senators, everybody understands, because when you bring the bill to Congress, they have to read it. Unfortunately, nobody read it, so they approved it again.”
“Now we told them, ‘are you supporting this?’ And everybody knows it’s just a mistake in it. As the Congressmen and Senators says, this bill goes until 2025. They’re not going to wait until 2025, and gonna make the correction on this year, to remove it from there… We’re dealing with the situation and fixing it, and majority of the job is already done, and Congress and Senate, both parties are supporting this.”
Before Kuparashvili’s closing remarks, his hosts held an auction on behalf of the Azov charity project, ultimately raising $33,416. The auction ended with bidding on three Azov Regiment patches featuring stylized wolfsangel swastikas.
Before the bidding commenced, Kuparashvili insisted that things were not as they appear. “If you know, there is a symbol,” he said, tapping the patch on his left arm, “which I’m gonna explain now, because they call us Nazis, all this crap.” At that point he mockingly put his hand over his mouth, and said, “sorry my language — ha!”
“This is actually two letters, two Latin letters, N and I. The N stands for National; I, it’s Idea. National Idea. National Idea. For regiment, it’s our slogan. National Idea. Every country, it doesn’t matter, it’s U.S., Ukraine, whatever. When the country was in problem, center of gravity always became the nationalists. The National Idea. All the nation gathers around the nationalists, and around the National Idea. For us, National Idea is Ukraine. If they don’t like what is Ukraine, and what it’s National Idea, hell with them…” Kuparahsvili, touching on the totalitarian Ukrainian Nationalist concept of “Natiocracy,” all but admitted Azov’s affinity for white nationalists in the West.
According to Kuparashvili, before, only Azov members could wear their swastika patches, but he bestowed permission on the audience to place their bids, because “now, all of you are Azov.” There was another disclaimer that Kuparashvili shared only after the winners emerged. “It’s a responsibility,” he said.
“We’re just handing over it,” Kuparashvili told the audience about the Azov Regiment patches. “We’re giving to those our responsibility. We have the soldiers where they go through the basic training, go through all the trainings, and difficulties. If they don’t deserve, you can’t graduate… But if you deserve it, with this comes a responsibility… Your National Idea is Ukraine. You gotta fight for it. Not just put it in a room or a shelf somewhere, but you gotta fight for it. Fight for your National Idea…” The winners each saluted Kuparashvili in the Azov fashion.
Two days later, the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago hosted another Azov charity auction, co-sponsored by the Banderite-led Illinois Division of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America. Its most influential member, Pavlo Bandriwsky, an OUN‑B leader in Chicago known as “the Strategist”, took pictures with the Azov veterans. This event featured a battle flag of the Azov Regiment that was apparently auctioned off with the promise that every surviving member will sign it after the war is won. The Consul Generals of Germany and Poland also spoke at the event.
On Saturday, October 1, after returning to Washington, the full delegation, except for Kateryna Prokopenko, who left to be reunited with her husband in Turkey, made an appearance at Stanford University. Yulia Fedosyuk concluded her remarks, “Glory to the Azov Regiment.” At some point, Stanford professor Michael McFaul, the dangerously foolish former US Ambassador to Russia (2012–14), stopped by to offer words of support for Ukraine, if not the Azov Regiment itself.
Earlier this year, Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) published a detailed report on the “Azov Movement… a far-right nationalist network.” Michael McFaul directs the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, of which the CISAC is part. He apparently took no issue with the neo-Nazi symbol projected behind him.
This might not have been the Azov delegation’s last stop in the United States, but it would be rather fitting. Stanford University is in the Congressional district adjacent to Ro Khanna, whose restrictions on US support for the Azov Regiment should be lifted this year, according to one of the event’s speakers. But these days, even Khanna might not object.
6. Not to be outdone by the above individuals and institutions, the ADL has joined the chorus declaring that the Azovs aren’t Nazis.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has emailed The Grayzone a defense of the Azov Battalion and refused to condemn the Pentagon for honoring a veteran of the group who sports Nazi-inspired tattoos.
A November 9 email from the Anti-Defamation League to The Grayzone provided a twisted defense of Ukraine’s Azov Battalion. Despite its self-proclaimed “anti-hate” mission, the ADL insisted in the email it “does not” consider Azov as the “far right group it once was.”
The Azov Battalion is a neo-Nazi unit formally integrated into the US government-backed Ukrainian military. Founded by Andriy Biletsky, who has infamously vowed to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade…against Semite-led untermenschen,” Azov was once widely condemned by Western corporate media and the human rights industry for its association with Nazism. Then came the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
In the months that immediately followed, Azov led the Ukrainian military’s defense of Mariupol, the group’s longtime stronghold. As the militia assumed a frontline role in the war against Russia, Western media led a campaign to rebrand Azov as misunderstood freedom fighters while accusing its critics of echoing Kremlin talking points. The New York Times has even referred to the unit as the “celebrated Azov Battalion.”
Like the Washington Post and other mainstream outlets, the ADL ignored Azov’s atrocities this April in Mariupol, where locals accused the group of using civilians as human shields and executing those who attempted to flee. One video out of Mariupol showed Azov fighters proudly declaring the Nazi collaborator and mass murderer of Jews, Stepan Bandera, to be their “father.”
The Azov Battalion has long served as a magnet for the international white nationalist movement, attracting recruits from the terrorist Atomwaffen Division to a US Army Specialist arrested on charges of distributing bomb-making instructions.
Back in March 2022, just a month before the battle of Mariupol, the ADL itself issued a report acknowledging that white nationalists see Azov “as a pathway to the creation of a National Socialist state in Ukraine.”
Eight months later, however, the ADL has changed its tune, asserting to this outlet that Azov has rooted the fascists from its ranks. So did Azov change its Nazi ways, or did the ADL simply shift its messaging to conform to the imperatives of a Biden administration still intent on sending billions in military aid to Ukraine?
The ADL responds to Grayzone report with defense of Azov
The ADL’s defense of the Azov Battalion was triggered by an incident this September, when this journalist filed a “hate incident” report through the ADL’s website which detailed the contents of a Grayzone exposé on a Pentagon-sponsored sports competition. Held at Disney World, the weeklong competition hosted and honored Ihor Halushka, a Ukrainian Azov veteran branded with a Nazi Sonnenrad tattoo — a hate symbol, according to none other than the ADL.
The Grayzone provided a brief summary of these facts and events to the ADL, furnished supporting photographs, and included a link to the entire report. Asked what the ADL could do to help, this reporter requested they condemn the Pentagon for hosting a neo-Nazi. Upon filing the report, I was immediately given an automated case number and put on the organization’s mass mailing list.
Some 60 days later, the ADL responded, apologizing for the delay yet refraining from acknowledging any of The Grayzone’s reporting. Instead, the ADL offered a two paragraph defense of the Azov Battalion. There was, of course, no condemnation of the Warrior Games’ hosting of Halushka, and the event has not been included in the ADL’s public directory of hate incidents.
“When it was created in 2014, the Azov Brigade was a private military group fighting the then annexation of Crimea,” the ADL wrote to The Grayzone. “During this period, it was a group that had a clear far-right influence. In late 2014, the group was brought in as a part of the Ukrainian National Guard and renamed the Azov Regiment. When this happened, the Ukrainian government investigated the group and claims to have expelled it of these far-right members. It was also during this time that its founder Andriy Biletsky left AZOV and has since worked in the greater Azov movement, including founding a far-right political party, the National Corps. In essence, there was a split between the military unit AZOV and the political goals of its founding members. Of course, this is not to say that they have successfully removed all far-right elements from their ranks, but our Center on Extremism also does not see Azov Regime as the far-right group it once was.”
The ADL’s stunning defense of Azov as a largely depoliticized fighting unit is undermined most strongly by the ADL’s own research material.
The ADL harshly condemned Azov before it legitimized it
In 2019, the organization published a report on “The Internalization of White Supremacy,” which name-dropped Azov 18 times and branded it “a far-right group and militia,” “the far-right organization and militia,” and “a Ukrainian extremist group and militia.”
The report also stated that Azov “has ties to neo-Nazis in Ukraine,” “has reached out to like-minded American extremists,” and “reportedly has connections to Atomwaffen (AWD), an American neo-Nazi group allegedly tied to five murders.”
Later that year, the ADL noted that an neo-Nazi US Army Specialist that pled guilty to unlawfully distributing bomb-making instructions had “expressed desire to find more ‘radicals’ and travel to Ukraine to fight with paramilitary group the Azov Battalion.”
A more recent ADL report paints Azov in a similarly unflattering light. This March, seven days after Russia launched its military operation in Ukraine, the ADL ran a blog post entitled, “White Supremacists, Other Extremists Respond to Russian Invasion of Ukraine.” The article referred to Azov as “the Ukrainian national guard unit with explicit neo-Nazi ties,” and noted that white supremacists “see Azov as a pathway to the creation of a National Socialist state in Ukraine.”
In November, however, the ADL declared that it “does not see Azov Regiment as the far-right group it once was.” To justify its sudden turnabout, the supposed anti-extremism organization pointed to a supposed split between the radical rightist Andriy Biletsky and the Azov rank-and-file.
Biletsky and Azov’s “split” amounts to a literal office divider
In its email to The Grayzone, the ADL claimed that “the military unit AZOV and the political goals of its founding members” were “split” in 2014, insisting that Biletsky “left Azov and has since worked in the great Azov movement, including founding a far-right political party, the National Corps.”
The ADL noted no such “split” in 2019 when they characterized the National Corps simply as the “political wing of Azov.”
In fact, the close association of Azov with the National Corps was widely acknowledged in both media outlets and think tanks funded by the United States government.
“Azov’s Kyiv recruitment center and military academy share a location with the offices of the National Corps,” a researcher for the US government-sponsored Bellingcat outlet explained in the NATO-affiliated Atlantic Council in 2020. The researcher added that Azov “routinely hosts Biletsky (and other former commanders) at its bases and welcomes his participation in ceremonies, greeting him as a leader.”
In fact, on October 26, 2022 – a mere two weeks before the ADL asserted a “split” between the Azov Battalion and the “political goals” of its founder – Biletsky delivered a speech at a ceremony in Kiev celebrating the renaming of a street after Azov in commemoration of their fight in Mariupol this April.
Azov Battalion founder Andriy Biletsky honoring the “heroes of Azov” on October 26, 2022
“There is a ton of liberal white washing when it comes to fascists in Ukraine”
While the ADL claimed to The Grayzone that Ukraine’s government presided over a purge of neo-Nazis from Azov’s ranks, the media appearances of Azov members this year tell a decidedly different story.
As The Grayzone reported, Italian authorities issued a warrant this November for the arrest of Anton Radomsky, an Azov fighter, for planning to attack a shopping mall near Naples.
Also in November, an Azov photographer’s public relations tour of the Eastern United States was interrupted by protests after his history of posting Nazi imagery on social media came to light.
And contrary to the ADL’s spin, interviews with foreign fighters embedded with Azov paint a picture of a fighting group that is still honeycombed with hardcore neo-Nazis.
“Azov Battalion still has a lot of its neo-Nazi presence,” an American named Justin, who fought with Azov in Mariupol, claimed in an interview published on October 8. According to the former volunteer, his battalion commander was a “fucking Nazi” who kept a photograph of Adolf Hitler as his desktop background on his computer. The American explained that he and his fellow soldiers would greet each other with sieg heil salutes.
An equally revealing interview which appeared on November 12 featured comments from an American volunteer for the Azov Battalion named Kent “Boneface” McLellan.
“Boneface” boasts a lengthy arrest record in the US, including an incident in which he was filmed by an undercover government informant participating in paramilitary training with the American Front neo-Nazi organization. According to prosecutors, the group was planning “to kill Jews, immigrants and other minorities.”
In the November interview, Boneface admitted to taking photographs of Ukrainian fighters “posing with the corpses of a lynched pregnant woman and a man they said was her husband” for a video entitled “Kikes get the rope.” He also claimed to have appeared in a video depicting a botched crucifixion.
But Boneface’s comments on the prevalence of neo-Nazis within the ranks of Azov offer the clearest refutation of the ADL’s assertion that the battalion is “no longer the far-right group it once was.”
“There is a ton of liberal white washing when it comes to Fascists in Ukraine,” McLellan said, rattling off popular talking points: “Nazis don’t exist”; “Azov battalion and Azov regiment are different”; “They took all the Nazis out of Azov.”
“I speak out against the white washing of Nationalists by the media,” he added. “I use Twitter to mainly troll the (western) left, as they believe Ukraine[‘s] military isn’t full of nationalist ideals.”
Is the ADL as credulous as the rest of Ukraine flag-waving liberal America when it asserts that Azov has been de-radicalized? Or are they just trolling us too?
7. Perhaps the whitewashing of the Azov Nazis should not surprise, particularly given that the formations’ atrocities in Ukraine are widely attributed to—drumroll, fanfare—the Russians!
Foremost in the Western falsification of Ukrainian/Azov atrocities is the massacre at Bucha, which helped terminate and marginalize ongoing behind-the-scenes negotiations to end the war.
One of the few Western voices correctly attributing the Bucha massacre is Scott Ritter.
“ . . . . Ukrainian security forces, in particular the “Safari” unit staffed by veterans of the neo-Nazi Azov Regiment, caught up with scores of these refugees while they made their way north and, in the vernacular of the Ukrainians, “cleansed” them, gunning them down on the spot, or binding their hands behind their backs before executing them in the alleyways and streets of Bucha. . . .”
The Ukrainian narrative constructed by the west is built on a bodyguard of lies. And there is no lie greater than that which blames Russia for the deaths of hundreds of Ukrainian civilians in Bucha who were slaughtered by Ukrainian security forces.
Sometime during the period between 1–3 April 2022, Ukrainian security forces entered the northern Kiev suburb of Bucha. Russian forces who had occupied the town had evacuated on March 30, part of a general realignment of forces announced by the Russian Ministry of Defense on March 25. Bucha had been on the frontlines and was the scene of heavy fighting between the Russians and Ukrainians; hundreds of civilians caught up in this fighting were killed and wounded.
Russian troops were civil to the Ukrainian civilians who remained in Bucha, handing out humanitarian supplies to those in need and bartering dry goods with local vendors for fresh eggs and dairy products. When the Russians withdrew, pro-Russian civilians were encouraged to depart with them. This underscored the Russian understanding of the potential for Ukrainian reprisals against any civilian deemed to have been “cooperating/collaborating” with their forces during the period in which Russian troops occupied Bucha.
Many Ukrainians who had interacted with the Russian troops did not leave, assuming that their normal interactions with Russian soldiers, including limited commerce and the acceptance of humanitarian supplies in order to survive, did not constitute treason against the Ukrainian state.
They were wrong.
Shortly after Russian troops departed Bucha, Ukrainian security forces made their way into the town. Announcements were made on social media and public broadcasting warning the citizens of Bucha about “cleansing” operations targeting collaborators. In light of these announcements, many of the Ukrainians who had remained in Bucha became concerned about their fate, and began to flee toward Russian lines. They wore the white arm band, indicating that they were not a threat to the Russian troops. Many also brought with them Russian-provided rations to sustain them on their journey.
But it was too late.
Ukrainian security forces, in particular the “Safari” unit staffed by veterans of the neo-Nazi Azov Regiment, caught up with scores of these refugees while they made their way north and, in the vernacular of the Ukrainians, “cleansed” them, gunning them down on the spot, or binding their hands behind their backs before executing them in the alleyways and streets of Bucha.
The evidence of this crime was overwhelming. But the “collective West,” led by a coterie of erstwhile journalists whose function had transformed from reporters of fact-based truth to stenographers of fictional propaganda, was engaged in a larger information operation, designed to shift public opinion away from the need to seek a negotiated settlement to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, toward the sustainment of a long-term war of attrition designed to weaken Russia in the long term.
To accomplish this task, the “collective West” needed to construct an unambiguous “good versus evil” narrative which portrayed the Ukrainians as the brave defenders of democratic values such as freedom and liberty, and the Russians as rapacious thugs marauding across the Ukrainian landscape, brutalizing an innocent civilian population. This kind of unambiguous differentiation of roles was necessary in order to gain popular support for what was to come—a multi-billion-dollar infusion of financial and military aid designed to transform the Russian-Ukraine conflict into a de facto existential struggle between “good” (NATO) and “evil” (Russia).
It worked.
Bucha became the symbol around which the citizens of the “collective West” rallied, supporting not only the intervention of their leaders to undermine a viable diplomatic off-ramp from the conflict being negotiated in Istanbul between Russian and Ukrainian authorities, but also blinding them to the devastating economic consequences of the failed effort to deter and defeat Russia through sanctions. Instead of demanding that their respective leaders work to restore a semblance of economic stability at home, the citizens of the “collective West” applauded while their governments transferred tens of billions of dollars of their hard-earned treasure to sustain a government which more closely mirrored the fictional Russian thug manufactured in the imaginations of western mainstream media.
Seven months later, the “collective West” finds itself at a new inflection point. After building up over the course of the summer months a reserve corps of fresh forces trained and equipped to NATO standards, Ukraine, with the assistance of NATO intelligence, communications, logistics, and operational planning support, carried out a much-ballyhooed offensive in the direction of Kharkov and Kherson.
By sacrificing this new NATO army (tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers were killed and wounded, and hundreds of tanks and armored vehicles lost), Ukraine was able to achieve impressive territorial gains without inflicting any meaningful damage to the Russian military. This pyrrhic “victory” led to Ukraine destroying its strategic reserve without accomplishing any meaningful military objectives. Moreover, the Russian response—consolidation of defense lines, partial mobilization of 300,000 troops, and the initiation of a strategic air campaign designed to paralyze Ukraine—has radically shifted the narrative away from “Ukraine is winning, a Russian collapse is imminent” to “a Russian victory is a defeat for NATO.”
Russia is winning.
NATO is being defeated on the battlefields of Ukraine.
Rather than accept this new reality and seek a negotiated settlement to the conflict, the “collective West” once again turns to its time-tested playbook of generating a false “good versus evil” narrative capable of motivating nations who have long ago emptied their arsenals and treasuries in support of Ukraine, and who are currently staring economic and social disaster in the face as winter approaches and the reality of the consequences of sanctioning Russian energy hits home, to once again invest good money after bad and double down on the losing bet that was, is, and forever will be Ukraine.
One of the main problems facing the so-called “journalists” who populate the western mainstream media is that even fiction writers as capable as themselves could not craft a believable narrative based upon the emerging reality that Ukraine is the living manifestation of the sickening ideology of Stepan Bandera, whose murderous ethos has infected every aspect of Ukraine’s government, military, and security services.
The other problem was that the Ukrainians were, simply put, liars.
Exhibit number one: Ukraine’s former ombudswoman for human rights, Lyudmyla Denisova.
In the aftermath of the “Bucha massacre” narrative manufactured by Ukraine and disseminated by their compliant co-conspirators in the mainstream western media, Denisova sought to sustain the moral outrage the original stories generated by releasing even more tales from the dark side. Typical of her modus operendi was the story she told to BBC, and which was picked up, unquestioningly, by other western news outlets, including Newsweek and the Washington Post, about alleged sexual violent crimes committed by Russian soldiers in Ukraine.
“About 25 girls and women aged 14–24 were systematically raped during the occupation in the basement of one house in Bucha,” Denisova told the BBC. “Nine of them are pregnant. Russian soldiers told them they would rape them to the point where they wouldn’t want sexual contact with any man, to prevent them from having Ukrainian children.”
None of this was true, and the problem with telling a lie of such magnitude is eventually someone—even a thoroughly compromised western “journalist”—is going to want to speak directly with the victims.
There were none.
Denisova afterwards explained the reason behind her lies. “I talked about terrible things,” she told a Ukrainian newspaper, “in order to somehow push them [the west] to make the decisions that Ukraine and the Ukrainian people need.” In one particular case, Denisova noted that the Italians were “against the provision of weapons to us,” but after hearing her speak, decided “they will support Ukraine, including by the provision of weapons.”
In the aftermath of the Ukrainian reconquest of Kharkov, the Ukrainian authorities tried to create a “new Bucha” narrative, this time around the existence of mass graves in the vicinity of Izium. But this storyline soon fell apart amid growing direct evidence of Ukrainian atrocities against anyone deemed to be a “collaborator.”
Flushed with victory, the Ukrainian supporters of Stepan Bandera openly bragged about their crimes. One Ukrainian volunteer detachment commander, a member of the “Right Sector” political party, admitted his crimes to a Ukrainian journalist, who expressed no emotion upon learning about the deaths of so many of her fellow citizens. “We haven’t got time to put them in jail,” the Right Sector thug said, noting that those accused of collaborating with the Russians “just disappear…Ukraine will have to conduct a census,” he bragged, “because so many people have disappeared.”
Videos of freshly dug graves filled with the bodies of freshly executed men and women, all in civilian clothing, their hands bound behind their backs, backed up the commander’s words.
Unable to craft a narrative capable of overcoming this brutish reality, the mainstream media resorted to the age-old trick of breathing fresh life into an old story—they repackaged the lie of the original Russian sin—the alleged “massacre” of Bucha.
On October 16, CBS’s flagship news program, “60 Minutes,” broadcast a story entitled “The Lost Souls of Bucha.” Scott Pelley, the correspondent given the task of resurrecting this story, narrated a script designed to pull at the heartstrings of anyone listening.
“The town of Bucha,” he intoned, “lived in relative obscurity on the international stage until early spring when Russian occupying forces retreated from the town and left behind devastation and death that shocked the entire world. Over 27 days, Russian troops killed more than 400 civilians in the Kiev suburb. Some of the victims were discovered bound and tortured. Many were left to rot in the place where they were killed.”
Pelley had visited Bucha shortly after it was recaptured by Ukrainian security forces, and played a major role in parroting the Ukrainian narrative of “Russia bad” when it came to attributing the cause of death to hundreds of Ukrainian civilians whose bodies littered the landscape. According to “60 Minutes,” Pelley “saw the devastation firsthand and witnessed a mass grave dug behind a church in the town center,” and “vowed to return to learn more about the people who were killed and buried in that mass grave.”
Pelley’s story did just that.
There is no doubting that there were victims whose bodies were buried in Bucha.
But they weren’t killed by Russians.
They were murdered by Ukrainians.
Hopefully, this time the western audience has wised up about the truth of what is going on inside Ukraine today:
The reality of a Ukrainian government which has wrapped itself in the red and black banner of the Right Sector, replicating the murderous history of Stepan Bandera and his followers in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in every village, town, and city recaptured from the Russians.
The reality of Ukrainian paratroopers who sing the praises of Stepan Bandera upon completing their training.
The reality of Swastikas openly painted on the tanks and armored vehicles of the “Kraken Battalion” and other neo-Nazi military formations within the Ukrainian military.
The reality of the criminal nature of the Ukrainian government.
“60 Minutes” and the western media can revisit the Bucha tragedy all they want; nothing they report will change the fact that the bodies seen lying in the street were killed by the Bandera-worshipping murderers of the “Safari” battalion, on the orders of Ukrainian government officials. Nothing can change the fact that these same Ukrainian officials, from President Zelensky on down, deliberately lied about Bucha for the sole purpose of generating western outrage sufficient to fuel the Ukrainian economy and military with tens of billions of dollars’ worth of aid.
And nothing can change the reality that all this investment has been in a losing cause.
Russia is winning.
Russia will win.
And repeating the lies of Bucha will not change that reality.
Uncle Sam and Il Duce
The official celebration of fascist groups operating in Ukraine by the US political establishment is nothing new. We’ve seen this movie before. There was the open welcome given to fascist Georgian warlord Mamuka Mamulashvili. Or the members from Azov and Right Sector on the Ukrainian military athletic team invited to participate in the Warrior Games at Disney World. But it was still rather remarkable to see the kind of open embrace of someone who is effective a Ukrainian fascist super fan that just happened a couple weeks ago at a rally attended by a number of high US and EU officials, including the head of USAID Samantha Power. It was a high-level celebration of US Ukrainian Activists, an NGO founded in 2014 by Nadiya Shaporynska. As we’re going to see, Shaporynska is so close to Ukraine’s fascist militias that she declared her group “the DC branch of Right Sector” back in 2015. And while Right Sector founder Dmytro Yarosh is indeed one of the recipients of Shaporynska’s deep praise, he’s not the only one. For example, she’s also a big fan of both Mamuka Mamulashvili and former commander of the Donbass Battalion Semen Semenchenko (aka Semyon Semchenko). Recall how Semenchenko had a role in lobbying the US government over the conflict in Ukraine and was responsible for giving US Senators faked photos that purportedly showed the Russian military invading Ukraine. The photos were debunked. Also recall that intriguing story from December of 2018 surrounding Semenchenko, then a Ukrainian MP, who was part of a group of Ukrainians and one Georgian who were detained in Georgia for illegal posession and procurement of arms, ammunition and explosives. Six Ukrainians and the Georgian were detained. Semenchenko, however, had the benefit of diplomatic immunity and was allowed to leave.
And that brings us to the second and third articles below. Because it turns out Semenchenko has stood as among Ukraine’s fascist militia commanders for one notable reason: he’s facing state charges. Yes, back in March 2021, a private military outfit founded by Semenchenko, DBC Corp, was raided by the SBU over charges of operating an illegal private mercenary force. DBC Corp was also charged with attempting to illegally procure weapons from Russia. But these weapons weren’t intended for use in the fight in the Donbas. No, they were intended for use in the Middle East. Yep, it turns out DBC Corp was training forces in Kyiv for using in conflict zones in the Middle East. And in a very interesting twist, Semenchenko’s partner in this operation claims that Semenchenko told him the company was going to get these Middle East contracts from the US State Department. Those contracts never materialized. But the question of whether or not they were ever on the table are a lot harder to dismiss when we see this celebration of the “US Ukrainian Activists”, led by an open Semenchenko admirer.
Oh, and then in May of 2021, Semenchenko was charged with terrorism over a June 2019 attack on the 112 News channel headquarters with a rocket propelled anti-tank grenade launcher. It’s unclear why it took nearly 2 years of charges to be brought, which suggest the charges likely wouldn’t have been brought had DBC Corp not been facing legal pressure of its own. Facing 7 to 12 years, Semenchenko was released in June of 2022 under house arrest after Kyrylo Budanov, of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, appealed to the courts for his release so he can be used in the defense of Ukraine.
That’s all part and the context of the DC “US Ukrainian Activists” rally attended by Samantha Power and a number of other US and EU officials. It was rally to celebrate a Ukrainian diaspora lobbying infrastructure that can’t really be separated from the same Ukrainian fascist networks that have been on the ascendance in Ukrainian since 2014. Fascists networks that have been largely allowed to operate with impunity. Or near impunity in the case of Semen Semenchenko.
Ok, first, here’s a look at this Feb 25, 2023, rally, where Ukrainian fascist super fan Nadiya Shaporynska got an official embrace from both the US and the EU:
“Power’s USAID promoted the event with a media advisory that redirected visitors to the rally’s principal organizer, an NGO called US Ukrainian Activists. This was one of two Ukrainian diaspora groups that organized the rally, and both have openly supported far-right elements in Ukraine since the US-backed Maidan coup in 2014.”
It was pretty notable that the head of USAID, Samantha Powers, spoke at this event, although not as notable as the fact that Powers was joined on stage at the event by a throng of US and EU officials. This was a big deal:
And at the center of this big deal was the celebration of the “US Ukrainian Activists” NGO, founded in 2014 by Nadiya Shaporynska. So what kind of ‘activism’ is this NGO involved with? Fundraising for Ukraine’s Nazi battalions, is seems. Yes, it turns out Shaporynska is quite a far of groups like Right Sector and Azov. In fact, back in 2015, Shaporynska led a group that declared themselves to be the “Washington DC Right Sector Branch” and that they “support” Yarosh. This is casual cheerleading:
But this wasn’t just a celebration of Shaporynska’s group. Paul Grod, the president of the Ukrainian World Congress (UWC), was also on stage. As we’ve seen, the UWC is effectively the modern day umbrella group under which the descendants of the WWII-era groups like the OUN‑B are now organized. This event was a effectively a DC celebration of fascist-oriented Ukrainian diaspora organizations:
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Also note how Shaporynska’s enthusiasm for Ukrainian fascists isn’t limited to Right Sector or Azov. She’s a booster for the Aidar Battalion and former Donbas Battalion commander Semen Semenchenko (sometimes spelled Semchenko). As we’re seen, Semenchenko isn’t just the former commander of the Ukrainian militia. He’s an open fascist.
First, Recall how Semenchenko justified civilian casualties back in 2014 when he was leading the Donbas volunteer battalion, claiming that unarmed people in the crowds were paid to be there as cover for the separatists and calling them “pigs”. Also recall how Semenchenko had a role in lobbying the US government over the conflict in Ukraine and was responsible for giving US Senators faked photos that purportedly showed the Russian military invading Ukraine. The photos were debunked. Finally, recall that intriguing story from December of 2018 surrounding Semenchenko, then a Ukrainian MP, who was part of a group of Ukrainians and one Georgian who were detained in Georgia for illegal possesion and precurement of arms, ammunition and explosives. Six Ukrainians and the Georgian were detained. Semenchenko, however, had the benefit of diplomatic immunity and was allowed to leave. That’s the kind of figure championed by Shaporynska.
And then there’s Georgian Legion leader Mamuka Mamulashvili. Yes, Shaporynska is a Mamulashvili fan too. Of course, so are a number of US lawmakers who have welcome Mamulashvili during multiple trips to the US. This is as good time to recall the deep ties between the Georgian fascist movement behind the Georgian Legion and the UNA-UNSO, the descendant of the WWII-era Ukrainian National Army (UNA) that was founded in 1990 as an offshoot of the newly formed Ukrainian National Assembly (also the UNA). The UNA-UNSO was led by Yuri Shukhevych (son of Roman Shukhevych) for the first 23 years of its existence, until 2014 when its members went on to form groups like Azov and Right Sector. But before that happened, the UNA-UNSO members played a key role in fighting alongside Georgian nationalists during the 2008 Georgian civil war. It was there where the ties between Ukrainian and Georgian fascists were solidified, culminating in the apparent role played by Georgians in fomenting the sniper attacks during the Maidan protests. Nadiya Shaporynska is a fascist super fan. A fascist super fan with no shortage of fans of her own in DC:
It’s also worth recalling at this point how American fugitive neo-Nazi Craig Lang first joined Right Sector before moving on to join the Georgian Legion. Mamulashvili described Lang as “a very good specialist”.
But it’s that apparent role that former MP Semen Semenchenko played in attempting to illegally procure weapons from Georgia that brings us to the following pair of stories from back in 2021 about some legal troubles Semenchenko ran into. The kind of legal troubles he didn’t have diplomatic immunity to escape: In March of 2021, the Ukrainian SBU raided a training camp operated by a private military contractor, the DBC Corp. That company appears to have been set up by Semenchenko to operate as basically a mercenary outfit on behalf of Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky. But DBC Corps’ mercenary services weren’t just intended of Ukraine. It as going to offer military logistical services to places in the Middle East like Syria or Afghanistan. And according to Semenchenko’s partner in the project, Yevhen Shevchenko, jSemenchenko claimed the company was going to get contracts from the US State Department. Now, those contracts never materialized, but you have to wonder if that was a real possibility.
Interestingly, relating back to the story of Semenchenko being involved with the illegal procurement of arms from Georgia, it sounds like one of the crimes the SBU was charging DBC Corp with was the illegal procurement of weapons from Russia. So weapons were being illegally procured from Russia for eventual use in the Middle East. That was the apparent crime committed by DBC Corp. And yet, as the following article notes, perhaps the most surprising part of this whole story is that charges were brought at all. Mercenary forces have been running rampant in Ukrainian for years:
“The SBU says Semenchenko and Shevchenko are “possible organizers and coordinators of an illegal scheme to smuggle military and double-use hardware from Russia to be sold to Ukrainian defense production enterprises at inflated prices.””
It was March of 2021, roughly seven years after the Maidan revolution and less than a year before the outbreak of war between Russia and Ukraine, when Semen (Semyon) Semenchenko was charged with organizing an illegal mercenary scheme. A particularly bizarre mercenary scheme given the context of the situation in Ukraine at that time. The kind of scheme that lends weight to the long-standing concerns about the flood of weapons flowing into Ukraine end up all over the world: Semenchenko was charged with leading a private mercenary firm, DBC Corp., that at was procuring weapons from Russia for use by the DBC mercenary forces in the Middle East. It’s not exactly the kind of mercenary scandal one expects, all things considered:
But then we get this this fascinating detail: According to Semenchenko’s partner in crime, Yevhen Shevchenko, the company was going to render security services in Syria and Afghanistan under contracts from the U.S. State Department. Those contracts never materialized. But considering the fascist sympathies recently put on display in DC, it’s hard to dismiss the possibility that at least some sort of exploration of such a contract did actually take place. This is also a good time to recall how Andrii Artemenko — himself having close ties to Right Sector — had a company that provided military logistics services to Middle Eastern conflict zones from 2007–2013. In other words, Semenchenko mercenary contractor scheme wasn’t as outlandish as it might initially seem:
And then we get to the truly revealing part of this 2021 article: the biggest surprise in this story is the fact that the SBU cracked down on Semenchenko at all, along with the failed attempts by the Ukrainian parliament to legalize and regulate private militias. As the article notes, these groups had been operating in open defiance of the state with impunity for years. Including the apparent use of DBC mercenaries to prevent the head of and State Property Fund from entering the state-run Centrenergo’s offices to block a management reshuffle in early 2020 that would have removed officials loyal to Ihor Kolomoisky. This kind of above-the-law lawlessness has been rampant for a while now:
And that rampant above-the-law lawlessness brings us to this follow up story about the legal perils Semenchenko was facing back in 2021 that went beyond just setting up an illegal mercenary operation. Less than two months after the SBU bust of DBC Corp, Semenchenko was charged with terrorism. But not over the mercenary scheme. No, it turns out Semenchenko allegedly deployed an anti-tank grenade launcher against the 112 Ukraine TV channel back in June of 2019. The channel was owned by ‘pro-Kremlin’ lawmaker Taras Kozak and was subsequently shut down by Ukrainian authorities in February of 2021. So it was almost two years after that attack that Semenchenko was finally charged with terrorism. Who knows why it took nearly two years for Semenchenko to finally get charged in that attack, although the fact that the government eventually shut the station down for ‘pro-Russian propaganda’ is a clue. Regardless, the fact that Semenchenko was allowed to carry out that attack without any legal response for nearly two years is some pretty significant context in terms of getting an idea of how Semenchenko thought he could get away with setting up a mercenary outfit providing services to conflict zones in the Middle East using weapons illegally procured from Russia. Semenchenko was allowed to operate with impunity, until he wasn’t. What changed? It’s a mystery, because it’s not like Ukraine’s official attitude towards these fascist militias changed. So what is it that brought these very belated charges of terrorism?
“According to the SBU, Semenchenko assigned two members of his illegal paramilitary force to fire grenades at the 112 Ukraine TV channel back in June 2019.”
This is the dark reality of how private mercenary forces have been operating with near impunity for years now in Ukraine. Again, the big news here isn’t that Semenchenko launched a terror attack against a news outlet. The big news is that he was charged with the attack at all, almost two years after the attack. Better late than never, apparently:
So what kind of jail time was Semenchenko ultimately facing? Well, he was released under house arrest in June of 2022 after the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine Kyrylo Budanov asked for his release on personal duty, arguing that “his organizational skills will benefit the country and defense”. Yep. So get ready for more stories about Semen Semenchenko’s fascist antics. And, maybe, just maybe, the very belated legal repercussions from those fascist antics that somehow dissolve away. We’ve seen this movie before. It’s the only movie in the theater.
How long before we see NATO troops operating on the Ukrainian front lines? That was just one of the many grim questions raised in a fascination Washington Post piece on Monday about the hollowing out of Ukraine’s armed forces of almost all experienced soldiers thanks to the horrific casualty rates Ukraine has been suffering over the last year. In other words, forget a lack of ammunition and weapons. Ukraine lacks troops. At least troops that won’t flee after being sent to the front lines with almost no training. It’s like the flip side of a report we got back in May about troops feeling abandoned and unprepared.
And as the Ukrainian sources in the article warns the US audiences, if Ukraine doesn’t get capable troops soon, the much anticipated Spring counteroffensive may not be feasible. Very soon. US officials are expecting that counteroffensive to start as soon as late April/early May.
What exactly are the Ukrainians asking for? Well, one Ukrainian who spoke non-anonymously to reporters was a battalion commander in the 46th Air Assault Brigade, who was identified only by his call sign, Kupol. According to this lieutenant colonel, “We need NATO instructors in all our training centers, and our instructors need to be sent over there into the trenches. Because they failed in their task.” Yes, Kupol is calling for replacing Ukraine’s instructors with NATO instructors and sending the Ukrainian instructors to the trenches. That’s not quite a call for NATO troops operating alongside Ukraine on the front lines, but it is a call for sending a large number of NATO troops to Ukraine.
Is that a possibility? Well, here’s where the implications of this piece become rather dire: it really does appear that Ukraine has lost almost all of the troops the US and other allies have been training over the past 9 years. So at the same time the West has been making all of these pledges to ramp up the levels of hardware and ammunition to Ukraine, it doesn’t appear that Ukraine has the manpower remaining to use that hardware and ammunition even if it arrives. And when we have calls for dramatically increasing the levels of NATO training so Ukraine can even be capable of operating the Western-provided military hardware in anticipation of a counteroffensive that is expected to be launched in a couple of months or less, that’s a recipe for fueling the unofficial arming of Ukraine with ‘ex-NATO’ ‘volunteers’. That’s a big part of the context of this article: it feels like a prelude to a call for a literal army of ‘ex-NATO volunteers’:
“Kupol said he was speaking out in hopes of securing better training for Ukrainian forces from Washington and that he hopes Ukrainian troops being held back for a coming counteroffensive will have more success than the inexperienced soldiers now manning the front under his command.”
Ukrainian Lieutenant Colonel Kupol is speaking out in the hopes of securing better training for Ukrainian troops from DC. That’s the stated rationale behind this report that is directly contradicting the ‘Ukraine has Russia on the ropes!’ narrative that has been dominant in the Western press for months now. And a rather plausible rationale, given the horrific casualties Ukraine has been facing. Numbers that are an official horrific secret. But secret or not, what Ukraine can’t keep secret is the fact that those casualties have hollowed out the number of experienced soldiers to such an extent over the last year that Ukraine may not have the manpower needed for a much-hyped Spring counteroffensive. Forget ammunition and hardware shortages. Ukraine needs people. But not just anyone with a pulse. Ukraine needs trained soldiers. Soon:
And note how a number of other anonymous Ukrainian officials are chiming in to concur on that bleak assessment. We’re seeing a quiet public relations operation at work here, delivering a message that is in stark contrast to the ongoing official optimism:
And as Kupol warns, Ukraine needs NATO instructors at ALL of its training centers. The Ukrainian instructors can be sent to the trenches:
Finally, note the timing at working here: U.S. officials said they expect Ukraine’s offensive to start in late April or early May. That’s about enough time for a miracle, but not much else:
Yes, the start of Ukraine’s counteroffensive is less than 2 months away in the minds of US officials. A counteroffensive that’s seen as crucial for avoiding an even more protracted and drawn out war of attrition. How far will the US and other NATO allies go to ensure that offensive becomes a reality? We’ll find out. Possibly in the form of reports about a flood of ‘ex-NATO volunteers’ flooding into Ukraine. Or rather, a larger flood. There’s already plenty of flooding.
The mainstreaming and normalization of Right Sector as just another Ukrainian military unit didn’t start with the launch of the Russian ‘special military operation’ last year. But as we’re going to see in the following Independent pieces, both by reporter Kim Sengupta, the mainstreaming of Right Sector was accelerated dramatically shortly before the outbreak of war and is more or less complete a year later. And as we’re also going to see, that mainstreaming process was very much a deliberative effort on the part of the Ukrainian government, seemingly in anticipation of giving Right Sector an even larger role in the fighting.
The two article both revolve around the same figure: Right Sector commander Dmytro ‘Da Vinci’ Kotsyubaylo. We’ve heard references to ‘Da Vinci’ before. Recall how Kotsyubaylo was awarded the “Hero of Ukraine” commendation in December of 2021. This was a month after the November 2021 appointment of Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh as an advisor to the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
As we’re going to see, Da Vinci died earlier this month. But not before conducting interviews where he insisted that Right Sector had not only purged itself of any Nazis or fascists, but that the groups was being so strenuous in its selection process that all racists of any stripe are rejected. Taken a face value, one would have to assume that Right Sector is some sort of ‘woke battalion’ now. And anyone who suggests otherwise is just repeating Russian propaganda.
That’s the spin at work, and that spin appears to be more or less the accepted narrative about Right Sector now. And it also appears that the awarding of ‘Da Vinci’ with the Hero of Ukraine medal — a month after Dmytro Yarosh was appointed as an advisor to the head of Ukraine’s armed forced — was part of a government effort to support that spin. Right Sector is just another military unit now, formerly led by Da Vinci the non-extremist war hero.
Now, as we’re going to see, the articles do acknowledge that Right Sector did indeed start off filled with Nazis and fascists. But, we are told, those Nazi and fascists were all kicked out or left by the end of 2014 (just ignore all the reports about international fascists like Craig Lang joining the group in subsequent years).
So where did the ex-Right Sector Nazis and fascists go? This is where the story gets darkly amusing: we are told that many of the more hardcore fascists joined the Azov Battalion, which doesn’t take pains to hide its far right ideology. Examples of Azov not hiding that ideology include the Nazi patches (the Totenkopf, Sonnenrad, and Wolfsangel) that the group doesn’t bother to hide. Keep in mind that the article making these points was published on Feb 10, 2022, less than two weeks before the launch of the Russia invasion. In other words, the full scale whitewashing of Azov and its Nazi symbols hadn’t yet kicked yet.
Ok, first, here’s the Independent piece from a few weeks ago about the death of ‘Da Vinci’, who was definitely not the leader of a far right battalion. And anyone suggesting otherwise is just spreading Russian propaganda:
“Dmytro Kotsyubaylo, a leader of a group that Moscow has accused of having neo-Nazi and fascist links, died during shelling near the Donbas city, which has been the focus of a sustained Russian offensive for months.”
Dmytro Kotsyubaylo, aka ‘Da Vinci’, wasn’t a leader of a group with neo-Nazi and fascist links. No, no, he was the leader of a group that Moscow has accused of having neo-Nazi and fascist links. There’s nothing to worry about, you see. It’s all just Russian propaganda.
And as this report points out, Kotsyubaylo was presented with the Order of the Golden Star as well as the title “Hero of Ukraine” last year by Volodymyr Zelensky just last year. How could the leader of a group with Nazi fascist ties be awarded the title “Hero of Ukraine”?
That’s the spin we’re seeing these days when it comes to reporting on Right Sector. The group is simply comprised of patriotic nationalists who are the victims of a Russian smear campaign, hence all the ‘controversy’ around the group:
As ‘Da Vinci’ described to the Independent in a report last year, strenuous efforts had been made to keep out Nazis, fascists, or any sort of racists. Taken at face value, we would have to assume Right Sector is like Ukraine’s ‘woke battalion’. Or, in the case of ‘Da Vinci’ personally, he makes the case that someone who admires a creative genius like Da Vinci simply couldn’t hold racist view. The spin is dizzying:
Finally, we get to this point where Kotsyubaylo and his partner Alina Mykhailova — who is a deputy city councilor in Kyiv — lament how they would likely never be able to live normal lives and will instead always be targeted by hostile propaganda campaigns. It’s worth noting at this point that the two apparent met while they were both members of Right Sector. It’s going to be interesting to see where Mykhailova’s political career goes now given Da Vinci’s hero status that is now solidified with a glorious battlefield death:
And now here’s a look at the Feb 10, 2022, report by this same reporter on his trip to Ukraine, less than two weeks before the launch of the Russian ‘special military operation.’ A piece that adds some important context to the current eulogizing of ‘Da Vinci’ following his death: the awarding of that “Hero of Ukraine” medal to Da Vinci by president Volodymyr Zelensky was part of a broader official embrace of Right Sector by the Ukrainian government and military.
Now, as the article admits, Right Sector did indeed have Nazis and fascists early on in its existence, but we are told those extremists were all expelled or left. So where did they go? Well, according to the article, some of the more “hardline” former Right Sector members ended up with Azov Battalion, which, as the article also notes, “does little to hide its far-right credentials.”. In fact, at a training exercise of citizen volunteers in Kyiv, Azov’s members wore uniforms with Nazi symbols like the Totenkopf, the Sonnenrad, and the Wolfsangel. Again, keep in mind this article was published two weeks before the launch of the Russian invasion, so the international whitewashing of Azov wasn’t quite in full effect by that point and symbols like the Totenkopf, Sonnenrad, and Wolfsangel were still recognized as Nazi symbols.
So as we read about the elevation of a Right Sector commander to “Hero of Ukraine” status, it’s important to keep in mind that ‘Da Vinci’s’ wartime celebrity status was part of a Right Sector whitewashing campaign designed to turn Right Sector into a perfectly respectable wing of the Ukrainian military. And that was all in motion even before the start of the 2022 war:
“The young commander of the Pravy Sektor (Right Sector) unit points out that strenuous efforts have been made to keep out those who hold Nazi, fascist or racist views, and that this would remain the case if another conflict were to erupt and there was an urgent need for recruits.”
Don’t worry about Nazis in Right Sector now, or in the future should a broader conflict break out. That was Da Vinci’s message to the world in early February of 2022, less than two weeks before the formal outbreak of the ‘Special military operation’.
And then we get to this very interesting admission in the piece: yes, Right Sector has indeed faced fierce criticism inside Ukraine over its “hardline nationalist” membership and was once regarded with wariness and hostility by the Ukrainian military and political hierarchy. But that’s all changed, and it was the awarding of the title “Hero of Ukraine” to ‘Da Vinci’ that formalized that official embrace of Right Sector. That’s part of the context of all of the celebrating around ‘Da Vinci’ as a Right Sector leader: making ‘Da Vinci’ the international face of Right Sector as part of a broader whitewashing campaign for the group:
And then we get to this other intriguing piece of info: Right Sector appears to have received both training and missiles from Britain. Right Sector has a lot of powerful friends:
So given the narrative we’re now getting about how Right Sector used to have Nazis, at first, but then got rid of them all, that raises the obvious question as to where those Nazi went. Behold the answer: the Azov Battalion, “which does little to hide its far-right credentials”, and uses overt Nazi symbols like the Totenkopf, Sonnenrad, and Wolfsangel. Keep in mind this report was two weeks before the start of the current war so the international whitewashing of Azov hadn’t fully kicked in to high gear quite yet:
Finally, it’s also worth noting the sentiments shared by ‘Da Vinci’ and his partner Alina when posed the question of when they could envision themselves sharing a meal with a separatist couple. Their pessimistic answers are a reminder that part of what is fueling this entire conflict is the fact that the people of the separatist republics are seen by Ukraine’s leadership as superfluous people with no future with a reintegrated Ukraine. It’s also a reminder that Ukraine’s western allies who are fully on board with the recapture of all of Ukraine’s lost territory have no plans for these people either:
“Too much has happened; there is too much bitterness. There are painful memories which are just too fresh. And, from what we are seeing now, with the Russians at our border, I don’t think there will be any time to heal.”
Those are some ominous words from Alina in retrospect. Words spoken before the current conflict even started. What sort of possible civil resolution is there for this conflict? How could the people of the Donbas ever meaningfully get reintegrated into a country that bitterly hates them at this point? It’s hard to see a solution. Or at least a solution that doesn’t rely on groups like Right Sector wiping that population out entirely. But don’t call any of this extremism. That would just be Russian propaganda.
Stories about the woes facing the international volunteers flooding into Ukraine are nothing new at this point. There was, for example, that stunning two-part report out of the Kyiv Independent last year about a Polish mobster — Piotr Kapuscinski, aka Sasha Kuchynsky — who was given a position leading troops in the International Legion. And as soldiers told reporters, he ruled like a mad tyrant threatened soldiers if they didn’t carry out his criminal orders like looting a local mall and appeared to be trafficking in weapons. But that wasn’t the worst part of the investigation. The worst part was the fact that Kapuscinski was receiving high-level protection from within Ukraine’s military hierarchy. It’s was a grim reminder that corrupt Ukrainian authorities are likely the beneficiaries of many of the unaddressed issues we are reading about.
And that brings us to the following recent New York Times piece about another source of systemic corruption and criminality international volunteers are facing: the corruption and criminality brought by the volunteers themselves. Yes, as we should expect, it turns out a large number of volunteers are themselves sources for trouble and corruption. Surprise! In many cases, corruption involving the fundraising they themselves are conducting ostensibly on behalf of Ukraine’s armed forces.
For example, one of the best known Americans fighting in Ukraine is James Vasquez, who claimed in fundraising to be a formed US Army Staff sergeant with experience fighting in Kuwait in 1991 and Iraq after 9/11. It turns out Vasquez never actually served in those countries and left the military a private first class. It sounds like Vasquez had been fighting with ‘Da Vinci’s Wolves’, the Right Sector unit that appears to be playing a leading role in normalizing Right Sector as a ‘non-extremist’ battalion. And as Vasquez has bragged in the fundraising videos and tweets, he has easy access to weapons, including brand new American rifles, and that he should not have to worry about international rules of war while in Ukraine. It also turns out Vasquez was fighting in Ukraine without a military contract, something that apparently only became an issue after the New York Times published this report.
And then there’s Ryan Routh, a former construction worker from North Carolina who is leading a project that aims to smuggle in fighters from Pakistan and Iran. Yep. Routh is apparently seeking recruits from among the Afghan soldiers who fled the Taliban. Routh claims dozens have expressed interest.
Now, maybe it really is the case that Routh is in contact with dozens of Afghan soldiers living in Pakistan or Iran who are willing to fight and die for Ukraine. But it’s also worth keeping in mind that Routh’s scheme sounds like a great cover for some sort of jihadist pipeline. At the same time, it’s not at all clear how one could possibly frame this conflict in a manner that take on ‘holy war’ dimensions.
So we have to ask: are we on the verge of seeing a jihadist dimension grafted onto the conflict in Ukraine? Jihadist mercenaries perhaps? Is it possible that this conflict could attract genuine jihadist willing to blow themselves up for the cause? This is a good time to recall how the Kerch Bridge attack appears to have been a suicide truck bombing.
These are just two of the examples of the kinds of problems the international volunteers have been bringing with them to Ukraine. And yet, it’s not at all clear that Ukraine’s military is taking any real steps to address this. Instead, it sounds like the prevention of Russian infiltrators is the only real are of focus. In other words, we shouldn’t expect these issues to get better. Quite the contrary. The festering continues with no end in sight:
” One retired Marine lieutenant colonel from Virginia is the focus of a U.S. federal investigation into the potentially illegal export of military technology. A former Army soldier arrived in Ukraine only to turn traitor and defect to Russia. A Connecticut man who lied about his military service has posted live updates from the battlefield — including his exact location — and boasted about his easy access to American weapons. A former construction worker is hatching a plan to use fake passports to smuggle in fighters from Pakistan and Iran..”
The illegal exportation of US military technology and the illegal importation of fighters from Pakistan and Iran. These are just some of the examples of the kind of ‘assistance’ these foreign ‘volunteers’ are providing to Ukraine. And over a year into the conflict, it doesn’t sound like Ukraine has gotten a handle on the vetting process. Instead, it appears that Ukraine has really just one goal in the vetting process: keeping Russian infiltrators out:
In the case of James Vasquez — characterized as one of the best-known Americans on the battlefield — we find Vasquez bragging about how he had access to American rifles that were “brand-new, out of the box and we have plenty.” He also tweeted that he should not have to worry about international rules of war while in Ukraine. And which unit was Vasquez working with? A group simply labeled ‘Da Vinci’s Wolves’, which as we saw, is simply the rebranding of Right Sector. So Vasquez was bragging about all the brand new American rifles he could use without having to worry about international rules of war while he was serving with Right Sector:
Regarding the Polish fugitive — mobster Piotr Kapuscinski aka Sasha Kuchynsky — who was given a position leading troops in the International Legion, recall how Kapuscinski didn’t just threaten soldiers. He threatened soldiers if they didn’t carry out his criminal orders like looting a local mall and appeared to be trafficking in weapons and was receiving high-level protection from within Ukraine’s military hierarchy. It’s a reminder that corrupt Ukrainian authorities are likely the beneficiaries of many of the unaddressed issues we are reading about:
Now, regarding Grady Williams, the 65-year-old with a 2019 methamphetamine conviction who ended up raising money for volunteers from Georgia, that sure sounds like a reference to the “NAFO” meme-centric online fundraising operation that was raising money for the Georgian Legion. It would be interesting to learn the identity of the new group Williams ended up joining:
Finally, we get to the plans by Ryan Routh, a former construction worker from North Carolina with plans to smuggle soldiers in from Pakistan and Iran. Soldiers who, according to Routh, fled the Taliban so, at least in theory, they hopefully aren’t jihadist. In theory. But that’s hard to say when we’re dealing with a near complete lack of vetting. Don’t forget that the Taliban are fighting ISIS too. So are we looking at the cover story for the infiltration of jihadists into Ukraine? The opportunity appears to be there:
It raises another grim question as to which volunteer unit will these fighters smuggled in from Pakistan and Iran ultimately end up joining. Will smuggled fighters with false passports be allowed in the International Legion? If not, will Right Sector take them? Azov?
There’s also the question of general motivation. Are these former Afghan soldiers somehow inspired by the calls to ‘defend democracy’? Or is this more of a mercenary situation? Either way, it’s the start of something new. The next phase in an international conflict increasingly shaped by the random international independent actors flowing into it. Or maybe independent actors. We don’t actually known how independent they are or really what their ultimate agendas are, which is another part of this conflict. It turns out the path to WWIII has a major DIY element.
Following up on that disturbing NY Times report describing the plans by a US volunteer in Ukraine to import dozens of former soldiers from Afghanistan to fight in Ukraine — suggesting a potential new jihadist phase of the war — here’s a Covert Action Magazine piece describing exactly that kind of scenario already unfolding. Yes, it turns out a number of Chechen fighters in Syria have plans to relocate to Ukraine and an all-Chechen brigade already appears to be in the works in a deal with the Ukrainian government. And while these Chechen fighters are presumably going to be inspired, in large part, by a desire to fight Chechnya’s long-standing foe, there’s also the reality that a number of these fighters were members of ISIS or other al Qaeda offshoots during their time in Syria. In other words, the neo-Nazi nexus that is Ukraine is poised to be a neo-Nazi jihadist nexus:
“Asia Times reported that “the influx of Chechen fighters to Ukraine will likely encourage other regional jihadist groups in Syria to follow suit” in traveling to fight the Russians in Ukraine.”
An influx of Chechen fighters from Syria that portends an even larger flow of jihadists into Ukraine. That’s the warning the Asia Times reported a few weeks ago. While the Chechen have an obvious history that drives their animosity toward Russia, it’s the fact that these fighters are affiliates of ISIS and other al Qaeda offshoots that makes this such a potentially ominous new phase of the war. Ukraine was already a global nexus of neo-Nazis are other far right groups. But there’s no reason that nexus couldn’t become something even worse:
It’s also worth noting that the 2005 book Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam contains some vital history for understanding the relationship between the ruling Shia theocracy in Iran and the broader Sunni Muslim Brotherhood network. It turns out the Iranian revolutionaries were part of a Shia branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, a fact that looms large in relation to Far Mansoor’s groundbreaking research showing how the CIA secretly assisted in the Iranian theocratic revolution as part of an attempt to thwart a socialist revolution. That’s all part of the context of the flow of jihadists into Ukraine: there is a LONG history of the US secretly using jihadist groups as proxy fighters, damn the consequences:
But it’s not just the implicit danger of jihadist flowing into Ukraine and getting their hands on all of that weaponry — including Stinger missiles — that we have to worry about. It’s also the fact that these jihadists are going to be fighting alongside a growing international network of Nazis and other far right extremists. Or, in the case of the Sheikh Mansur Battalion, right under Right Sector’s command. What kind of future disasters can we expect to emerge from this kind of networking?
And then there’s the reality that a number of the extremist groups operating in Ukraine like the Georgian Legion already have a track record of ISIS-style brutality and a history of recruiting members from groups like Atomwaffen. What kind of awfulness is going to emerge from having members of Atomwaffen fighting alongside actual ISIS members? It’s like a recipe for terror synergy:
How long before we learn about some sort of Atomwaffen/ISIS collaborative terror plot? It seems like it’s just as matter of time with the way things are progressing. How many of the thousands of Stinger missiles shipped to Ukraine will end up in the hands of these groups? Time will tell, presumably in the form of terrorism. These are our priorities. And have been for decades. Hence all the predictable terrorism.
It appears the Myrotvorets intimidation campaign found a new target. A target the Canadian government appears more than happy to see targeted:
The Kyiv Post just published a piece branding Canadian journalist David Pugliese as an “undesirable person”. Or rather, the piece conveyed the message from an unnamed Ukrainian official who told the post that Pugliese is “UNDESIRABLE PERSON” (in all caps) for Ukraine. It’s bad, but worse is that at an anonymous “senior Canadian government official” is endorsing that attack on Pugliese. So this is like a death threat against a journalist jointly issued by the governments of Canada and Ukraine.
So what was Pugliese’s grand journalistic sin? Exactly what we should expect: reporting on Ukrainian Nazis. As such, the gist of the attack on Pugliese appears to be that he is promoting ‘Russian propaganda’, as evidenced by the fact that the Russian embassy in Ukraine would tweet out Pugliese’s reports. Yep.
But it appears that it was a particular line of reporting that really raised the hackles of Canadian officials: the reports on Chrystia Freeland’s Nazi collaborating grandfather. As we saw, when Freeland was appointed Foreign Minister in January of 2017, it wasn’t long before journalists started looking into this family history. A family history that was suddenly pretty relevant given Freeland’s intense anti-Russia stances. Consortium News first reported on it in February of 2017, with Pugliese writing about it the following month in the Ottowa Citizen.
According to this unnamed former senior Canadian official, in his many years “of having watched how Pugliese works – Pugliese has all the marks of a ‘grey zone’ media operator,” who could be “incentivized and tasked to carry messages and to focus on issues as per Kremlin direction.” As the Canadian official put it, “it was not what the deceased grandfather may have done, three quarters of a century before, but rather the timing of the article.” In other words, journalists who won’t toe the official line and ignore uncomfortable facts in their reporting are Russian propagandists. That’s the message being sent right now. Well, that and the message that journalists who don’t toe the line will be put on a Ukrainian government hit list.
Amusing, the article also cites unnamed experts who note that Russian propaganda traditionally uses truthful information, but present it out of context. That’s apparently the new line of defense we can expect to see: yeah, this all may be true, but we should ignore it because the context is all wrong!
But that reporting on Freeland’s grandfather was just one of the acts of Russian propaganda according to this report. In another example, the article refers to a September 2019 report by Pugliese about the anger generated in Ukraine’s Jewish community after Canada’s ambassador to Ukraine attended the commemoration for a monument honoring the members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in the town of Sambir at the edge of a cemetery containing the graves of more than 1,200 Jews murdered by these groups. So what was the alleged problem with this article? Well, for starters, this Kyiv Post piece doesn’t even name the Ukrainian Jewish Committee but instead just refers to it as a “civil society organization”. Nor does the piece mention what the Ukrainian Jewish Committee was actually upset about. Instead, it merely cites the fact that the Ukrainian Jewish Committee has as one of its leaders Oleksandr Feldman, formerly a member of the Party of Regions and now part of the Opposition Platform — For Life party. That, alone, appears to be the basis for dismissing the Ukrainian Jewish Committee as a Kremlin front group. Keep in mind that the Ukrainian Jewish Committee’s director-general is none other than Eduard Dolinsky, who is quoted in that 2019 piece noting that “all Jews of Sambir were murdered by Nazis and their collaborators from OUN and UPA.” So Dolinsky’s Ukrainian Jewish Committee is now apparently a source of Russian propaganda that we can all ignore based solely on the present of a former Party of Regions member. It’s a sadly perfect example of the incredibly divisive forces at work that have been driving Ukraine’s civil war since 2014:
Finally, it’s worth noting one of the other absurd arguments being used to smear Pugliese as a Russian propagandist: Pugliese’s twitter account was created in 2010 but only started mentioning “Ukrainian Nazis” in the year and a half preceding the Russian invasion. In other words, Pugliese didn’t start tweeting about Ukrainian Nazis until 2020, and somehow that pegs him as some sort of Kremlin assets. Beyond the baseline stupidity of this argument, note that it’s coming amidst a slew of accusations that include Pugliese’s 2017 and 2019 articles about Ukrainian Nazis. Like so much bad propaganda, even if you accept the asserted ‘facts’, it still doesn’t make sense. But like so much bad propaganda with state authority backing it, it doesn’t have to make sense. It just needs to convey the message. A message to journalists: toe the line or you’ll get added to the “UNDESIRABLE PERSONS” list:
“Referring to Pugliese as an “activist,” a Ukrainian official told the Kyiv Post that he “is known to Ukraine because of his public anti-Ukrainian rhetoric,” which “coincides with Russian propagandist narratives,” adding that Ukraine would consider him to be, writing in all capital letters, “an undesirable person.””
An “undesirable person”. That’s the label given to Canadian journalist David Pugliese by the Ukrainian government. It sure sounds like Pugliese is getting the ‘myrotvorets’ treatment. The ‘it sure would be a shame if something bad happened to this bad person’ mafia-style treatment.
But as we can see, it’s not the a Ukrainian government intimidation campaign. Canadian officials are endorsing this intimidation campaign. Or at least in this case it’s an anonymous “former senior Canadian government official” who appears to be fully on board with this:
And note how they aren’t even refuting the truthfulness of Pugliese’s reporting on Freeland’s Nazi collaborating grandfather. No, it’s the timing of the reporting that they are citing as evidence of malicious intent. So following this ‘logic’, had Pugliese reported on Freeland’s grandfather before she was appointed as Foreign Minister it would have been perfectly fine. It was only reporting on it after it became relevant that the reporting was a problem:
Recall how we were initially told that the April 2018 expulsion of those four Russian diplomats was in response to alleged Russian poisoning of the Skripals. It was only later that Justin Trudeau admitted that the real reason for their expulsion was their promotion of the undeniable reality of the role Freeland’s grandfather played as virulent a Nazi propagandist. So when we read about Trudeau’s admission that the it was in response to Russia’s promotion of Freeland’s family history, it’s important to keep in mind that this was a grudging admission.
But also note the absurdity of the argument that the timing of Pugliese’s report on Freeland’s grandfather, arguing that the timing was suspicious because it came within days of Freeland announcing Canada’s support of Ukraine. It’s an accusation that ignores the more salient event that had just happened: Freeland’s elevation to becoming Canada’s Foreign Minister in the first place in January of 2017, which had already prompted coverage of her grandfather’s Nazi past in outlet like Consortium News. In other words, when Pugliese wrote that March 2017 article about Freeland’s grandfather, he was writing about the background of someone who was, at that point, still a relatively new government official. Of course that was newsworthy.
But beyond that, note how this March 2017 article by Pugliese undercuts the other argument we’re hearing against Pugliese: that he only suddenly started tweeting and posting about Ukrainian Nazis in the year and a half before the Russian invasion, despite having a Twitter account first set up in 2010. As we can see, whether or not he was tweeting about Ukrainian Nazis, he was writing about them at least as far back as 2017:
And when we see a 2020 open letter from the Ukrainian Canadian Congress ‘expressing concern’ about Pugliese’s reporting, it’s worth recalling that March 2022 National Post piece where the Ukrainian Canadian Congress was defending Freeland against charges that she was promoting Ukrainian extremist groups when she was photographed marching at a pro-Ukraine rally helping to hold up a red and black scarf — the colors of the UPA and currently the colors of Right sector — bearing the “Slava Ukraini” slogan. As we saw, it was the Ukrainian Canadian Congress defending Freeland and denouncing and criticism as Russia propaganda. Because of course. The Ukrainian Canadian Congress is — like the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America — just another OUN front group:
Now, regarding the unnamed “civil society organization in Ukraine” that was upset by the unnamed “actions of Canadian officials”, it’s worth noting what this group was and what they were angry about: It was the Ukrainian Jewish Committee — which has Eduard Dolinsky as its director-general — expressing anger over Canada’s Ambassador to Ukraine Roman Waschuk speaking at an Aug 21, 2019, ceremony unveiling a monument in Sambir, Ukraine, to honour members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). As Dolinsky informed journalists at the time, “all Jews of Sambir were murdered by Nazis and their collaborators from OUN and UPA.”. But apparent the Ukrainian Jewish Committee can’t be trusted and can just be dismissed as a Russian propaganda outfit. Why? Because its leadership includes Oleksandr Feldman, formerly a member of the Party of Regions and now part of the Opposition Platform — For Life party. It’s a stunning example of the underlying dynamic that drive Ukraine’s civil war in the first place: the political class that represented much of Eastern and South Ukraine — those associated with Yanukovych’s old Party of Regions bloc — are now casually labeled traitors who can just be dismissed. And here we see that dynamic at work casually dismissing the Ukraine Jewish Committee as some sort of subversive entity simply because it has a ties to someone who was a member of the Party of Regions. And yet this yit piece article doesn’t actually name the group. It’s a truly demented dynamic at work:
It’s official: the Ukrainian Jewish Committee is a Kremlin front group. That’s according to the Ukrainian government. With the apparent agreement of the Canadian government. So you can just go ahead and dismiss everything they say. You don’t have to dismiss everything they say, of course, but it would be wise to do so. You don’t want to end up on the “UNDESIRABLE PERSONS” list, do you?
Talk of ‘decolonizing’ Russia isn’t new. We’ve heard chatter like that for years. Chatter that’s grown into a chorus over the last year.
But as we’re going to see in the following BNE Intellinews report by Leonid Ragozin, the ‘decolonizing’ Russia agenad has taken on a perhaps surprising new flavor: it appears that Russian fascists intent on purging Russian of ethnic minorities are at the core of Ukrainian-Polish-backed battalion at the same time there’s a growing Western-back movement to ‘decolonize’ Russia by breaking the country up into ethnic statelets and liberating Russia’s minority populations from Moscow’s iron fist. Yep. This is a good time to keep in mind that things don’t have to make sense when we’re talking about fascist movement and the cynical exploitation of fascist movements.
Much like the Azov movement, this ‘Russian liberation’ movement has both a military and political dimensions. On the military side, we find the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC), led by the unit’s commander, Denis “White Rex” Nikitin and filled with far right figures who have chosen to fight for Ukraine because they regard Vladimir Putin’s regime as neo-Bolshevik and Russophobic. RVC has reportedly been involved with some cross-border raids of Russian villages. Following one raid, Nikitin even posted a photo mocking the wounding of a Muslim boy during the raid with the motto “Russia will be Aryan or lifeless”. As we should expect, Nikitin is reportedly close to the Azov movement. The RVC has its own political wing, the Civic Council, based in Poland.
And while Ukraine’s GRU has attempted to distance itself from the RVC, the reality is that its a part of the International Legion. In fact, a GRU spokesman once called the RVC’s members, “one of those forces that will be shaping the future configuration of post-Putin Russia”.
Competing with the RVC is another group that emerged in the last year also with extensive GRU back: the Freedom for Russia Legion, which was initially being promoted by GRU officer and government spokesperson Oleksiy Arestovych. Former Russian Duma MP Ilya Ponomarev eventually took over the role as the public face for the group. Recall how Ponomarev was the figure who took the lead in celebrating and taking credit for the assassination of Daria Dugina.
Unlike the RVC, which is an overtly Russophile group intent on purging Russia of minorities, the Freedom for Russian Legion frames itself as a champion of Russian minorities. So much so that the group envisions breaking Russia up into dozens of ethnic statelets. As Ponomarev put it in a tweet, “There will be a junta – either Prigozhin’s or ours. Make you choices, Russians”.
So we have two competing Russian ‘liberation’ groups with the direct packing of Ukraine’s GRU. But it’s not just Ukraine and Poland backing these groups. In fact, Ponomarev was a featured speaker at an event in February, the Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum. The forum, focused on a broad array of Russian liberation groups, was hosted inside the EU parliament building in Brussels at the invitation of the far right European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) party. Yep, this ‘Russian liberation’ movement has the official backing of the EU’s far right parties. Because of course. But also note the lack of outcry from the rest of the EU’s political establishment.
And as Ragonzin points out, while average Russians may not be deeply invested in the outcome of the conflict in Ukraine, they are overwhelmingly very wary of any sort of destabilization of Russia or the possible outbreak of a civil war. In other words, you almost couldn’t come up with a mor effective means of rallying the Russian populace behind the Kremlin than the creation of of Western-backed Russian destabilization movement. Again, we shouldn’t expect the cynical exploitation of fascist movements to necessarily make sense:
“The Ukrainian government distanced itself from the Russian Volunteer Corps, but not quite. A spokesman for Ukraine’s military intelligence (GUR), Andrey Yusov, called its members “one of those forces that will be shaping the future configuration of post-Putin Russia”. The Deep State, a Ukrainian war monitoring group, jokingly dubbed RVC “the little white men” in a reference to Putin’s “little green men” who occupied Crimea in 2014.”
The “little white men” that will be “one of those forces that will be shaping the future configuration of post-Putin Russia.” That’s the GRU’s characterization of the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC), which is extra notable given that the RVC is part of the GRU-led International Legion, whose chief’s office is famously decorated with the map of a broken up Russia. They aren’t being very subtle:
And then there’s the political wing of the RVC, the Civic Council, which has a former co-ordinator for Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny as its chief recruiter, it wasn’t that long ago that the West view Navalny as a potential ‘great uniter’ of the Russian people. Specifically, the West saw Navalny as someone who could unite Russia’s middle class with far right nationalists. And here we find that the Civil Council’s website lists the Polish foreign ministry and Warsaw mayor’s office, as well as British and Czech embassies in Poland, among its official partners. In other words, when we find the West now backing Russian over fascists as the leaders of a Russian liberation movement, that’s not really new. What’s new is the idea of using these Russian fascists as the military cudgel in an agenda that brands itself as a Russian minority liberationist movement:
And that brings us to the other ‘Russian liberation’ project backed by the West: the Freedom for Russia Legion being developed in Ukraine and Poland, with GRU officer and government spokesman Oleksiy Arestovych acting as one of its chief initial promoters. This is a good time to recall the incident last year when Arestovych posted on social media the photo of a defiled female body with a bloody swastika carved onto her stomach. The social media post claimed the body had been discovered in a region recently evacuated by Russian forces but it turns out the image was recorded by Patrick Lancaster, a Donetsk-based US journalist, who had filmed the corpse of a woman tortured and murdered by members of the Ukrainian Azov Battalion in a Mariupol school basement they had converted into a base. So this Freedom for Russia Legion started off with high-level political support inside the Ukrainian government. But it sounds like former Russian Duma MP Ilya Ponomarev took over Arestovych the role of publicly leading the project. Recall how Ponomarev was the figure who took the lead in celebrating and taking credit for the assassination of Daria Dugina. That’s a big part of the context here: the public leader for this group is also the public leader for carrying targeted political assassination campaigns inside Russia. So when he makes assertions like “There will be a junta – either Prigozhin’s or ours. Make you choices, Russians,” these aren’t empty remarks. Ponomarev really is serious about politically destabilizing Russia through political violence. He’s not hiding this:
But, of course, this Russian destabilization movement isn’t simply a pet project of the Ukrainian and Polish governments. Last February, Ponomarev was featured at the Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum at the invitation of the far right European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) caucus. And Pnomarev’s group wasn’t the only Russia-focused ‘liberationist’ movement. That was the norm for this gathering. A gathering dedicated to the dream of breaking Russia up into dozens of statelets that took place in the EU parliament. Again, it isn’t subtle:
Nor is the RVC subtle about its ideology: its a battalion of fascists who want a racially pure Russia cleansed of minorities and immigrants. Or as RVC commander Denis “White Rex” Nikitin put it “Russia will be Aryan or lifeless”. And, of course, we find Nikitin is close to Azov. It’s an ironic part of the context here: at the same time the EU is backing a movement that is ostensibly focused on ‘liberating’ ethnic minorities from Moscow’s yolk and breaking Russia up into dozens of ethnosectarian statelets, Ukraine and Poland are simultaneously backing a group filled by Russophile fascists who want to purge Russian of its perceived Untermensch. Pick a lane:
And that brings us to the utter madness of this whole agenda: if there’s one thing that can rally the Russian populace around the state, it’s preventing the breakup of Russia by outside powers. Winning the war in Ukraine isn’t a top priority for average Russian. Avoiding some sort of civil war that destroys the country, on the other hand, is very much a priority. And yet we have a Russian ‘liberation’ movement comprised of open fascists and Nazis operating with the backing of not just the EU but also American think-tanks like the Jamestown and Heritage Foundations. It’s like the worst messaging the West could have possibly mustered:
It’s a strategy that makes so little sense we almost have to ask: is regime change actually the goal here? Because this is such a ham-fisted attempt at persuasion you have to wonder if persuasion is even the goal here. And yet it’s not at all hard to imagine that the West is indeed keenly interested in seeing either a far right coup in Moscow or, even better, the breakup of the country following a civil war. So we have a Western-backed ‘decolonisation’ agenda of destabilization and civil war that already has a public face, but it’s the kind of public face that doesn’t appear to have any feasible chance of success. Which is a reminder that any actual destabilization/civil war agenda targeting Russia might require groups like RVC or the Freedom for Russia Legion to act as a public face to take credit for the destabilizing dirty work done by a far more diverse cast of characters.
Are Ukraine’s “bloodlines” being adequately preserved for the future of the nation? That’s the deeply disturbing question raised in the following New York Times touting a Ukrainian government program designed to do exactly that by offering soldiers the option to have their sperm frozen in case they are killed in combat. On one level, it’s a perfectly reasonable program for families facing the very real prospect that one half of the couple is about to go off and die. But as we’re going to see, the program isn’t just about giving individual families the opportunity to ‘live on’ even after the husband has been killed in combat. It’s also being framed as a means of preserving “Ukrainian bloodlines” in the face of Russian attempts to erase Ukrainians as an independent people. As one soldier puts it, his interest in freezing his sperm was also “about not decreasing the number of our patriots, people who will later defend, develop and build our country.” Or as Oksana Dmytriieva, a deputy Health Minister and the Ukrainian lawmaker who wrote the bill that would provide state funding for the program, put it, “this is a continuation of our gene pool.” So as we should have probably expected, the longer this war is going and the bloodier and deadlier it gets, the more interest there’s going to be on how to rebuild the nation. Including the nation’s genetics:
“For many Ukrainians, the idea of saving soldiers’ sperm is at once personal and patriotic. It helps men who want to ensure something of themselves remains if they die, and it brings comfort to their partners. In a country now famous for its spirit of resistance, it is also one more way of fighting back. It leaves open the possibility, at least, of preserving Ukrainian bloodlines even as the Kremlin insists that Ukrainian statehood — and by extension Ukrainians as a separate people — is a fiction.”
The program of freezing sperm isn’t simply a courtesy to soldiers and their families. No. it’s a program that leaves open the possibility of preserving Ukrainian bloodlines. Bloodlines that are apparently distinct from Russian bloodlines. It’s not quite ’14 Words’, but it feels awfully close. Also note that the Ukrainian MP who wrote the bill that would have the state pay for the freezing of soldiers’ sperm, is also a deputy minister of health. This program designed to preserver the genetics of ‘true Ukrainian patriots’ has high level government support;
And note how experts warn that Ukraine can’t realistically make up for the atrocious population loss by freezing sperm. But according to one historian, rebuilding Ukraine’s population wasn’t really the point. The point was symbolic defiance in the face of Russian threats against national survival. At least that’s the spin. The kind of spin that equates the nation of Ukraine with particular genetic “bloodlines”:
The message from the Ukrainian government is clear: Ukraine’s national identity is frozen in those sperm samples.
And that brings us to the following report on present day Ukraine. Specifically, the record numbers of orphans that existed inside Ukraine before the war broke out last year. Numbers that have only exploded since:
“Officials estimate there were more than 105,000 children across 700 orphanages, boarding schools and other institutions in Ukraine when the war there started – that’s more than 1% of the nation’s underage population and Europe’s highest rate of youth institutionalization.”
Yes, there were over 105,000 orphans when the war started. What are the number of orphans at this point? We don’t know, other than the fact that the number is undoubtedly much much higher and will continue climbing until the war is over. The slaughter has no end in sight. The kind of slaughter that is presumably only going to create more angst about lost “Ukrainian bloodlines”. It’s a reminder that part of protecting Ukraine for future generations includes preventing the nation from descending into an ethnonationalist cesspool as this conflict plays out. Ideally by ending the war as soon as possible. For the future. Today’s orphans would probably appreciate this too.
How many new recruits will Azov need for the upcoming Ukrainian counter-offensive? That’s the depressingly official question Ukraine’s military appears to be asking now that the Azov brigade has been tapped as one of the six “offensive brigades” that will be leading that counteroffensive. We are told the unit is hoping to recruit 6,500 new fighters in anticipation of that fighting.
So do we need to be concerned about one of Ukraine’s Nazi battalions getting a new infusion of recruits in anticipation of playing a leading role in the upcoming push to recapture territory? Not according to the follow Washington Post report that makes the now-tired case that Azov’s extremist ideology is a thing of the past now that the unit is formally part of Ukraine’s military. That’s the case not just made by unit leaders. Michael Colborne — an extremism researcher for the intelligence-connected Bellingcat who wrote a book about Azov — has joined the ‘Azov is no longer extremist’ choir. Sort of. The way Colborne now describes it, Azov’s extremist elements have already been diluted with all the new recruits and will be diluted even more with this new round of recruitment. Yes, the solution to Azov’s Nazi problem is to grow the unit so large the Nazis become outnumbered by non-extremists patriots who were merely drawn to the unit for its fighting prowess. Colborne ominously added, “in Ukraine, the term nationalist or patriot describes a heck of a lot of people right now.”
Keep in mind that, despite his Bellingcat status, Colborne has an excellent track record over the past decade of highlighting Azov’s extremism. For example, in July of 2019, Colborne authored a piece in Balkan Insight describing how the Azov movement hosts an annual ‘Paneuropa’ conference focused on building ties with far right groups across Europe. Then, in September of 2019, Colborne had a tweet thread about the Nazi salutes at a neo-Nazi concert taking place not far from the Maidan Square in Kiev. That tweet thread is no longer available since it appears that ALL of Colborne’s pre-May 2022 tweets have been deleted. But it’s still available on the internet archive. And in January of 2022, Colborne was quoted in an article with the following warning about the potential opportunity a war in Ukraine presents to the far right:
So a month before the outbreak of this conflict, Colborne was openly warning that Azov was going to turn it into the ‘wind in its sails that it needs to grow its ranks and influence.’ And here we are, a little over a year later. That’s some powerful wind.
We also got a rather confusing update on the US’s policy on arming and training Azov. According to an anonymous State Department spokesperson, the US ban on arming and training Azov is at this point of no practical effect because the “Azov Battalion” — a nonstate “militia group” — has not existed in more than five years. Azov now “is a different unit” according to this spokesperson. So it sounds like the US is not only open to arming and training Azov at this point but has been so for over five years now. Surprise.
Oh, and we got a potential preview on one of the tactics Azov might use to recapture territory: Maj. Bohdan “Tavr” Krotevych — in unit’s interim commander — cited the First Russian-Chechen War, when Chechen forces captured small Russian towns to use as leverage to recover Russian-held areas. Krotevych suggested Ukraine may do the same. Recall the apparent cross-border attacks on Russian towns carried out by the “Russian Volunteer Corp” of Russian neo-Nazis fighting for Ukraine. Are we going to see US-trained-and-armed Azov units make similar cross-border attacks? We’ll see. For now, it’s time to recruit. Recruit and whitewash:
“The Ukrainian government has designated Azov, which recently absorbed other elements of the country’s National Guard, as one of six “offensive brigades” that will help spearhead Ukraine’s attempt to recapture Russian-occupied areas.”
Azov has been designated to be part of the tip of the spear in Ukraine’s expected counter-offensive later this year, one of six brigades. It’s official. And that means the unit has big recruitment goals too. And while Azov has its reputation as a bastion of far right ideologies, that reputation is now burnished with the “heroes of our time” acclaim the unit received in response to its ultimately doomed hold out in Mariupol:
And that drive to fill Azov with new recruits in anticipation of an upcoming counter-offensive brings us to the apparent reappraisal of Azov’s extremist orientation by Bellingcat research Michael Colborne. First Colborne describes Azov as having ‘shifted focus’ from ideology to military effectiveness. But then he suggests that the far right elements inside Azov are getting “diluted” with all the new recruits and that process is only going to continue as Ukrainians rally around a shared existential threat. Colborne then tries to draw an equivocation between Azov’s fascism and the patriotic nationalism that has swept the country, adding, “In Ukraine, the term nationalist or patriot describes a heck of a lot of people right now”:
Now, when we see the move by Meta back in January to remove Azov from the list of dangerous individuals and organizations, recall how this isn’t the first time Meta lift restrictions specifically for Azov. It was late February of 2022, days after the start of the conflict, when Meta lifted a ban on posts praising Azov on the battlefield. Removing Azov was the list of dangerous groups is just the next step in that whitewashing process:
And then there’s the utterly confusing messaging coming out of the US of government on whether or not the US is arming and training Azov: an anonymous State Department spokesperson asserted that the prohibitions on the arming of Azov had not practical effect because the Azov Battalion hasn’t existed in more than five years and is now a different unit. That sure sounds like an admission that, yes, the US is arming and training Azov:
And that apparent arming and training of Azov by the US brings us to the rather ominous putative plan for recapturing territory: Azov’s commanding officer cited examples from the Chechen war of capturing small Russian towns for use as leverage. This is a good time recall the apparent cross-border attacks on Russian towns carried out by the “Russian Volunteer Corp” of Russian neo-Nazis fighting for Ukraine. Might we see something similar from the US-armed-and-trained Azov? It sounds possible at this point:
“Our Azovstal experience tells us that there are no situations with no way out”
It’s an interesting sentiment given that Azov did ultimately lose Mariupol. But that standoff did yield big gains. For Azov at least in terms of public relations. It raises the question of what sort of additional glory will the unit earn in the upcoming counter-offensive.
But let’s also keep in mind that we’re talking about a unit with a track record of committing civilian atrocities. And if this planned counter-offensive goes well for Ukraine it’s inevitably going to include the capture of territory filled with civilian separatists. What sort of battlefield ‘glory’ will the unit earn while recapturing and occupying separatist towns? We’ll see. Maybe Azov will achieve grand battlefield victories or maybe it’s going to be more atrocities. But at this point it’s pretty clear Azov has already won the battle for hearts and minds. Just as Michael Colborne warned shortly before Azov won him over.
Who attacked the Kremlin? Not Ukraine, that’s for sure. Maybe it was Russia? At least that’s the response we’re getting from Kiev following a pair of drone attacks that resulted in now-viral videos showing explosions on the dome of the Kremlin.
Interestingly, Russian dissident-in-exile Ilya Ponomarev gave a different interpretation of the attacks and suggested they were the actions of a Russian partisan group. Recall how Ponomarev was the figure who took the lead in celebrating and taking credit for the assassination of Daria Dugina. Also recall how Ponomarev has been warning that Russia is facing a coup one way or another. It will either be a coup led by Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin or a coup led by him.
So we have Kiev issue blanket denials while Ponomarev seemed confident it was a partisan group behind this. But as we’re going to see, there’s another major piece of context here: the April 6 “cash prize” of $549,000 offered by Ukraine oligarch Volodymyr Yatsenko to anyone who manages to “land” a drone inside Moscow’s Red Square during the upcoming May 9 Victory Day parade celebrating the Soviet Union’s defeat over Nazi Germany.
Yep, a planned attack on the celebration of the defeat of Nazi Germany. But the symbolism behind this attack is even worse when you consider that Yatsenko happens to be a close ally of Ihor Kolomoisky, the infamous patron of not just President Zelensky but also the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. That’s the guy arranging for drone attacks a day celebrating the defeat of Nazi Germany.
Yatsenko even hinted during his April 6 “cash prize” announcement that his own weapons company was already “warming up” for its own planned May 9 attack on Red Square. So we have to ask: did the Kremlin just get attack as part of a “warm up” for a Victory Day attack? We don’t know, but that seems like a much more plausible scenario than the idea that Russia attacked itself:
“Ukraine denied involvement in the alleged strike. “As President Zelensky has stated numerous times before, Ukraine uses all means at its disposal to free its own territory, not to attack others,” the Ukrainian presidential spokesman, Sergiy Nykyforov, told CNN on Wednesday.”
“It wasn’t us!” That was Kiev’s response to the Kremlin drone attack. But Kiev isn’t just denying responsibility. It’s also asserting this is part of a Russian plot to “escalate the mood” in Russian in the lead up to Russia’s May 9 holiday celebrating the Soviet Union’s victory or Nazi Germany:
But then we have somewhat differing claims from Russian dissident-in-exile Ilya Ponomarev, who suggests this isn’t a Kremlin false flag, but rather the actions of a Russian partisan group. Recall how Ponomarev was the figure who took the lead in celebrating and taking credit for the assassination of Daria Dugina. Also recall how Ponomarev has been warning that Russia is facing a coup one way or another. It will either be a coup led by Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin or a coup led by him. Ponomarev sure seemed confident it was one of those partisan groups behind this:
All in all, it’s not exactly a compelling denial coming from Kiev. Although, as the following Grayzone article describes, there really might be an exceptionally high interest from numerous parties, not just Kiev military units, in striking Moscow with drones right now. That’s thanks to the $549,000 cash prize offer issued on Ukrainian television on April 6 by oligarch Volodymyr Yatsenko to any national weapons producer that manages to land a drone inside Red Square during the May 9 Victory Day parade. Yatsenko even hinted that his own weapons company was “warming up” for the event. Was this latest drone attack part of that “warm up”? And if so, what does that tell us to expect on May 9:
“On April 23, a Ukrainian drone laden with 30 Canadian-made C4 explosive blocks crashed near Rudnevo Industrial Park in Moscow. Ukraine-based operators deployed the 37 LB arsenal in a failed bid to assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was scheduled to visit Rudnevo that day.”
Yes, less than two weeks before the drone attack at the Kremlin, there was a drones attack in Moscow using multiple c4-laden drones on a site Putin was expected to visit that day. But in this case there were no denials from Kiev. On the contrary, we find Yuriy Romanenko, co-founder of a think tank with close ties to Kiev’s intelligence services, went so far as crediting the SBU with orchestrating the assassination attempt. What a difference two weeks makes:
And with Ukraine’s creation of its “Army of Drones”, more such attacks are presumably on the way. But it’s not just Kiev that, until very recently, was behind these drone attacks. International fundraising for this “Army of Drones” is being led by groups like “NAFO” and the Ukrainian World Congress. Recall how “NAFO” appears to primarily exist for the purpose of fundraising for the Georgian Legion. But also recall how this “drone army” doesn’t just rely on NAFO’s fundraising. This drone army also depends on SpaceX’s Starlink satellite cluster, resulting in the declaration by SpaceX by in February that Starlink cannot be used for strikes inside Russian territory following reports that drones with embedded Starlink-terminals allowing for strikes deep inside Russia were now being constructed. That’s something that should kept in mind when interpreting Kiev’s denials over the most recent attacks: we don’t know yet if these drones were using Starlink for these attacks:
But when we’re talking about drones, it’s important to keep in mind that we don’t know who is necessarily operating them and they may not be government-operated. Private drones can participate in this conflict too. And that brings us to the cash prize offered by Ukrainian oligarch Volodymyr Yatsenko on April 6 offering a $549,000 cash prize to anyone who manages to land a drone inside Moscow’s Red Square on May 9 during the Victory day celebration. Yatsenko even hinted that his own weapons company was “warming up” for the event. So we have to ask: was this latest drone attack part of that “warm up”?
And then we get to the, now predictable, extra bad context in this story: Yatsenko just happens to be a close ally of Ihor Kolomoisky, the infamous patron of not just President Zelensky but also the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. That’s the guy arranging for drone attacks on May 9, a day celebrating the defeat of Nazi Germany:
Yatsenko may be facing a schedule anti-corruption prosecution later this year, but he’s clearly got plenty of cash to throw around. How serious is this investigation? Time will tell. But it’s hard to imagine that being portrayed as the mastermind of a Victory Day drone attack on Moscow will hurt his legal standing.
It was never likely that the ending of the conflict in Ukraine was going to be a clean simple negotiated settlement. It was always going to be a nightmarish mess to resolve. Just how big a nightmare remains to be seen. But as the Politico article below hints, we might be getting some clarity on the nature of that messy resolution sooner rather than later. That’s because it increasingly looks like Ukraine simply will not be capable of launching a successful counter-offensive later this year. And without that successful counter-offensive, war planners in DC simply do not see a viable path forward.
All of this is reportedly part of a debate that has been swirling inside DC for weeks. A debate that, intriguingly, spilled out into the public as a direct consequence of the Jack Teixeira leaks and the bizarre manner in which they were pushed into the mainstream by a ‘pro-Russian Blogger’. It’s part of the strange context of that leak story: those leaks effectively mainstreamed an unspeakable truth inside DC corridors about the feasibility of a victory for Ukraine.
But as we’re also going to see, while the intra-DC debate over whether or not to double-down on the US’s backing for Ukraine or push for a negotiated settlement is indeed intense, that debate is juxtaposed with the clear lack of debate inside Kiev due to the fact that any sort of peace settlement is utterly unthinkable for the Zelenskiy government. Unthinkable precisely because of the Ukrainian far right’s permanent threat that any peace settlement will result in the nationalist overthrow of the government. It points towards one of the major complications in any peace negotiations: the intense cries of “betrayal!” that will predictably come from the Ukrainian far right and the obvious risks of a far right coup.
But, of course, it’s not just the Ukrainian far right fighting in Ukraine. It’s a global extremist diaspora operating there. A diaspora that’s going to be finding new homes, or returning home, should the conflict finally come to an end. It’s another one of the peace-related headaches created by this conflict: the beginning of the end of war in Ukraine could end up being the beginning of a new phase of far right terror across the West. And as the recent arrest of two heavily armed French neo-Nazis who returned from Ukraine underscores, this isn’t just a hypothetical concern. The blowback is already happening. And that’s all part of why the debate in DC over whether or not to continue the war in Ukraine is, in part, a debate over whether to deal with that inevitable blowback now, or double down on the conflict and experience much more blowback later:
“Publicly, President Joe Biden’s team has offered unwavering support for Ukraine, pledging to load it up with weapons and economic aid for “as long as it takes.” But, if the impending fighting season yields limited gains, administration officials have expressed privately they fear being faced with a two-headed monster attacking it from the hawkish and dovish ends of the spectrum.”
It’s quite a bind: Does the US continue to support Ukraine in what has been assessed to be an unwinnable conflict? Or does the US cut its losses, and Ukraine’s losses, and push for a negotiated settlement?. That’s the internal debate Politico reported on a couple of weeks ago. But as the article notes, this internal debate was effectively pushed into the mainstream via the leaks by Jack Teixeira and the bizarre manner in which they were pushed into the mainstream by a ‘pro-Russian Blogger’. It’s part of the strange context of that leak story: those leaks effectively mainstreamed an unspeakable truth inside DC corridors about the feasibility of a victory for Ukraine:
So are we seeing the early signs of a shift towards negotiations? Perhaps just a ceasefire? Not exactly. As the article also notes, even talk of a “ceasefire” poses a major political dilemma. In particular, a political dilemma for Kiev:
So what kind of response can we expect inside Ukraine if the US begins pushing for a ceasefire? Well, to get a hint, here’s an article from Feb 10, 2022 — two weeks before the outbreak of the conflict — that should provide all the warnings we need: as Ukrainian ‘nationalist’ groups were warning at the time, any hint negotiations with Russia is going to mark the beginning of the end of the government in Ukraine. That was the warning issued by Yuri Hudymenko, the leader of the Democratic Ax political party, who didn’t mince words when he stated that “If anybody from the Ukrainian government tries to sign such a document, a million people will take to the streets and that government will cease being the government.” Democratic Ax was notably accused by President Zelenskiy in the fall of 2021 of planning an armed protest on Kyiv’s Independence Square as part of a coup plot. Recall that remarkable story from November 2021 — as the crisis with Russia was building on Ukraine’s borders — when Zelenskiy claimed that Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov was planning some sort of Russian-backed coup. It was a story that never really made sense in terms of the motives of accused (Akhmetov doesn’t appear to be a Russian stooge) so it’s worth noting that Democratic Ax — a virulent Ukrainian nationalist group — was also issue threats against Kiev during this time. Threats against any negotiations. And that was the stance of Ukraine’s far right before the war:
““We’ll deal with Russia one way or another later,” Mr. Hudymenko said. With a flair for the dramatic, he added: “If anybody from the Ukrainian government tries to sign such a document, a million people will take to the streets and that government will cease being the government.””
A million activists are going to take to the streets and topple the government. it’s obviously not an idle threat in contemporary post-Maidan Ukraine. And as experts were observing and warning last year, the Ukrainian government wasn’t simply acquiescing to these threats. It was even urging the nationalist parties to arm themselves more heavily in anticipation of a Russian invasion. It was like a double-edged sword a government would have to be suicidal to deploy:
Adding to Democratic Ax’s threats is the fact that President Zelenskiy was already forced to take threats from this group seriously during the fall of 2021 and all the coup plot rumors swirling around Kiev. It’s a reminder that the blocking of any peace negotiations over Ukraine’s civil war by groups like Democratic Ax is one of the central dynamics in the lead up to the full blown invasion:
So what kind of threats against the Ukrainian government can we expect should peace negotiations become a reality? Beyond that, what happens if, as part of that peace settlement, Ukraine is no longer welcoming Nazis from around the world to come and train and fight but instead asks them to leave? The threats raised by the systematic arming and training of extremists in this conflict aren’t necessarily going to decline with the ending of the war.
Quite the opposite. Because as the following Grayzone piece reminds us, all of those foreign fighters have home countries they came from. Which means the end of the war could mark the beginning of a global flood of armed and trained extremists looking for new battlefields to fight in...or new battlefields to create:
“The total number of homegrown and foreign fascist fighters in Ukraine is not known, but is likely to be vast. When the US pulls out of the proxy war, they would have every reason to flee. They will bring with them battlefield experience, and in many cases elite Western military training. High-end weapons and ammunition will be available in abundance on the black market, due to the massive wellspring of arms shipments to Kiev over the course of the conflict.”
Are we about to see doubling-down on the conflict in Ukraine? Or the push for a negotiated settlement? Either way, the Western-backed international far right forces currently fighting in Ukraine are inevitably going to become key elements in how events play out. We’re either going to see even more weapons and training going towards these groups. Or, should settlements get put on the table, the scattering of these forces across the globe. Maybe they’ll head to a new war zone. Or, like the pair of recently-arrested French neo-Nazis, maybe they’ll return home. But wherever they go, they won’t be leaving Ukraine empty-handed. Weapons will be smuggled. And that training will be with them for the rest of their lives:
And as the article reminds us, these French neo-Nazis are the first instance of foreign extremist fighters returning from Ukraine with potential terror plots on their minds. We already saw this with the Order of Hagal group in Italy that was reportedly in close communication with groups like Azov and Right Sector. How many more stories of this nature are we going to see? The answer, in part, presumably depends on whether or not we see a push towards negotiations or a deepening of the conflict in Ukraine:
And what about the extremist fights who traveled to Ukraine and would rather not leave? Especially those who might face war crimes prosecutions? Well, it’s worth noting the experience the US had with the Mujahideen who fought in Bosnia but were eventually forced to leave as part of the Dayton Agreement: that was seen as a deeply betrayal by al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and a reason for a deepening jihad against the US. What kind of sense of betrayal are the foreign fighters in Ukraine going to be left with should they eventually be forced to leave the country as part of a peace settlement?
Keep in mind there’s another possible way Ukraine and the West might collectively deal with the extremist diaspora currently living in Ukraine after a settlement is reached: just welcome them to stay and live in Ukraine forever. Time will tell how this ultimately gets resolved. But the arming and training of extremists is a bomb that can’t really be defused. It’s more a “should we lengthen the fuse in exchange for a bigger bomb?” kind of tradeoff.
Should US journalists supportive of US military conflicts overseas be deemed the legitimate targets of assassination by the opposing governments? And is it ok of those journalists are attacked on US soil by bombing, for example, a public cafe where they happen to be gathering? Those are just some of the profoundly disturbing questions raised by the assassination attempt last week in Moscow targeting Russian author Zakhar Prilepin. While Prilepin survived, his driver was killed in the car bombing attack. It was the latest in a string of attacks targeting prominent Russian civilians that includes the car bombing of Daria Dugina back in August and the bombing of a cafe in St Petersburg targeting blogger Vladlen Tatarsky. And based on the response by the Ukrainian media, there’s going to be a lot more assassination attempts on the way. That’s at least what we can infer from the decision by the 1 + 1 Media Group to post to Telegram celebrating the car bombing of Prilepin and conducting a poll on who to target next with a list of candidate target. Yep, Ukrain is now conducting polls on who to target for assassination.
Interestingly, the conglomerate that owns 1 + 1 Media Group is also the parent company of TSN, the TV News program that put out the $500k reward for any drone terror attacks on Red Square during Moscow’s annual May 9 Victory Day celebration. Remote assassinations are becoming part of the corporate agenda.
And while 1 + 1 Media Group isn’t technically the Ukrainian government, it might as well be given that its own by Ihor Kolomoisky. As we’ve seen, not only is Kolomoisky the initial chief patron of the Azov Battalion, but he went on to become the key benefactors for Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s presidential campaign. It’s as if NPR was conducting polls of US citizens of who the US should assassinate next.
It’s also noteworthy that the May 6 bombing of Prilepin coincided with the arrest of 11 individuals inside Ukraine on the charges of being Russian propagandists. So this assassination campaign appears to be part of a broader intimidation and silencing campaign targeting civilians inside and outside Ukraine. Given that one of the arrested included US citizen Gonzalo Lira, it raises the question of what the US’s response is to this turn of events. Well, according Secretary of State Antony Blinken when asked about the US view on attacks inside Russian territory, “These are decisions for Ukraine to make about how it’s going to defend itself.” That sure sounds like an endorsement. And an invitation for more targeted civilian attacks outside Ukraine’s borders.
But perhaps the most remarkable endorsement of the assassination attempt on Prilepin cam from Christo Grozev, the lead Russia investigator at the US government-funded outlet Bellingcat, an entity with close ties to the western intelligence. As Grozev puts it, the bombing of a public event at a cafe in St. Petersburg on the grounds that the target was a “propagandist.” Again, it’s hard to think of an entity that more closely fits the definition of propagandistic than Bellingcat. Sure, much of what they report is factually accurate given that they are focused on “open source” analysis. But even open source analysis involves a great deal of subjectivity and there’s no denying the subjective spin found in virtually all of Bellingcat’s coverage of the conflict in Ukraine. Spin that became much more aggressive following the Feb 2022 outbreak of the war. For example, take Bellingcat researcher Michael Colborne, who produced some fabulous coverage of Azov neo-Nazi character prior to 2022 but radically changed his coverage after the invasion. Wouldn’t Colborne be considered a “propagandist” based on these simple facts? Does Grozev’s assassination green light cover fellow Bellingcat researchers too? Presumably not, and yet it’s hard to see how he didn’t just endorse the assassination attempts on his own peers. It’s just an incredible development that exposes the depth of the intellectual rot that has inflicted so much of the coverage of this conflict. Deadly rot that is promising to make the media’s own coverage and analysis of conflicts part of the battlefield:
“It’s open season on Russian intellectuals supportive of the government’s war effort, according to Ukrainian news agency UNIAN. Following a car bomb intended to kill Russian novelist Zakhar Prilepin in the Nizhny Novgorod region of Russia, the outlet polled its audience on Telegram, providing a list of names of prominent Russians that could be assassinated. ”
It’s open season on Russian intellectuals who support the war. And open season any random civilians who might be in their general presence when the bombs go off. And now we have the UNIAN Ukrainian media outlet issuing Telegram polls asking which Russian civilian should be assassinated next, with a list of candidate target. It’s still open season:
Adding to the dark nature of this campaign is the fact that UNIAN is owned by Ihor Kolomoisky’s 1+1 Media Group. In addition to being the chief initial sponsor for the Azov Battalion, Kolomoisky went on to become to the primary backer of Volodymyr Zelensky’s presidential campaign. So the entity conducting these assassination polls has ties to both the Ukrainian government and the neo-Nazi paramilitary units most inclined to carry out terror campaigns targeting civilians:
Adding to the ‘official’ nature of this campaign is the fact that the attack on Prilepin coincided with raids on 11 war commentators insider Ukraine. in other words, expect further moves to ‘control the message’. So far it’s voices inside Ukraine and Russia that are deemed to be legitimate targets. Will this silencing remain contained to Russia and Ukraine? Time will tell:
And what about allied governments? Is there any comment on this new tactic of targeting Russian civilians inside Russia? Well, according to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, “These are decisions for Ukraine to make about how it’s going to defend itself.” That sounds like an endorsement:
Finally, we get to this absolutely remarkable endorsement of the targeting of Russian intellectuals from Christo Grozev of the intelligence-connected Bellingcat, who justified the bombing on the grounds that the target was a “propagandist”. It’s kind of hard to think of a more dangerous move by a Bellingcat investigator — someone who working for an outlet that basically operates as the leading unofficial propagandist for Western intelligence services — than endorsing the assassination of those deemed to be “propagandists”. And yet here we are, with Bellingcat doing exactly that. It’s the kind of inflammatory endorsement that just invites an escalation of this kind of “hybrid warfare”:
How long will it be before a Bellingcat analyst gets targeted in response to this endorsement? And what will the West’s response be? Hey, that’s not fair, only Russian intellectuals can be targeted for assassination for propaganda? Keep in mind that, as technology advances it’s only going to get easier and easier to carry our remote assassinations. These new “hybrid warfare” norms being established in this conflict are going to be playing out for years to come. Time will tell, but this is apparently the norm now. Civilian “propagandists” living in their own countries are legitimate targets for assassination. So says the prevailing propaganda.
As the world’s attention continues to be drawn away from Ukraine while the Middle East boils over over the past month, it’s worth noting who got featured in a Ukrainian government-produced video published last month on the United24 Ukrainian government-run platform. It was a video featuring the ‘rebuilt’ Azov Brigade. Yes, following the near annihilation of Azov and subsequent surrender in Mariupol, a large number of Azov fighters have subsequently been released in prisoner exchanges and it appears they are back in the fight. And the Ukrainian government isn’t missing this opportunity to produce Azov-centric propaganda.
As we’re going to see, the ‘rebuilding’ of Azov is being done with core of the unit’s veterans. In other words, it’s being rebuilt with a core of the same battle-hardened far right extremists. One of the unit commanders featured in
a recent United24 video is a major who goes by the call sign Lemko and is the 1st Special Purposes Battalion commander. It turns out Lemko is an overt Nazi who was openly warning back in 2014 that there could be a ‘split’ over political ideology among Ukraine’s fighting forces in the future and that the EU’s multiculturalism posed just as big a threat Ukraine as Russia. That’s the guy now featured in a Ukrainian government propaganda video celebrating the return of Azov to the front lines. Surprise!
Also, it appears that the reincorporation of Azov’s top commanders, including unit commander Denys Prokopenko, who were released by Turkey back in August is a direct violation of the prisoner swap agreement. But it’s happening anyway. It’s not great for future prisoner swaps.
So with the Azov Brigade’s capture leadership now released and back in Ukraine, it sounds like we should expect a lot more government produced videos featuring the heroics of Nazis. And, presumably, a lot more articles in the Western press blindly propelling that propaganda along:
“The men can be seen fighting from their trenches in the Serebryansky forest in a video recently published by United24, a Ukrainian government-run platform.”
A Ukrainian government produced video featuring a rebuilt Azov Brigade fighting in the trenches. It’s an example of the kind of symbolic important Azov has acquired over the past decade in Ukraine.
And then there’s the dismissal of Azov’s extremism. In this case, it’s a link to a June 2023 euronews.com piece by Alexander Ritzmann. Recall how Ritzmann was part of a CNN piece published in March 2022 arguing that the contemporary Azov regiment was completely divorced from the ideology its founders. Azov’s international image rehabilitation continues:
So we have to ask: is the ‘rebuilt’ Azov going to be built without the far right ideology that previously defined it? Of course not. As we can see, one of the featured veterans who returned after being released by Russia was the 1st Special Purposes Battalion commander who goes by the call sign Lemko. As we’re going to see below, Lemko was an open Nazi when he joined Azov back in 2014. And here he is, the 1st Special Purposes Battalion commander getting featured in a government produced video:
Now let’s take a closer look at the ideology motivating Lemko. Because he’s clearly very motivated. The guy was captured, released, and appears to have immediately returned to the front. What drives someone who arrived in Ukraine in 2014 from Canada to be this committed to Ukraine’s fight? Well, for starters, when he arrived in 2014 he already announced that he had no plans on ever returning to Canada, presumably, in part, because Lemko believes the decadent West poses just as big a threat to Ukraine as Russia. Or as Lemko put it, “I lived in western Europe for 11 years, so I know...Ukraine has two enemies – Russia and the EU.”:
““A split is a definite possibility,” Lemko said of fears that the various units fighting the rebels today will one day clash over political differences, and over who exactly controls these increasingly large and well-armed paramilitary battalions.”
“A split is a definite possibility,” according to Lemko, back in July of 2014 as the civil war in Ukraine was still developing. A “split” over political differences between the pro- and anti-EU elements of Ukraine. Which is basically a threat. The threat of a far right-led coup that implicitly exists to this day and is arguably more threatening than ever.
And as we can see, Lemko didn’t hide his ideology back in 2014. He’s an open Nazi who pals around with fellow Nazis. And with no plans on ever returning to Canada:
And in case it’s not clear that the ‘rebuilt’ Azov is going to be maintaining its ideology, here’s a report from back in August describing the return of the Azov Brigade to the front. This is following the July release of five Azov commanders where allowed to return home from Turkey following a prisoner exchange agreement. And as we can see, all of the Azov commanders are being allowed to returned to the front, including the unit commander Denys Prokopenko. This is a good time to recall how Prokopenko’s wife, Kateryna Prokopenko, was part of a delegation of Azov representatives who toured in United States and met with Congress last year. It’s not hard to see why Ukraine would like to see him back leading Azov. Prokopenko is kind of an international celebrity:
“National Guard Commander Oleksandr Pivnenko subsequently said that Azov’s commanders, including its leader Denys Prokopenko, could return to the front.”
And that more or less answers our questions regarding whether or not the ‘rebuilt’ Azov was somehow going to be different from the Azov of old. It’s the same leadership. Leadership that shouldn’t be allowed back to the front or even back in Ukraine based on the terms of that prisoner swap agreement. As the following article points out, when these five commanders were sent to Turkey as part of a prisoner swap agreement, they were released on the condition that they would be held until the end of the full-scale invasion and would not be allowed to rejoin Ukraine’s armed forces. In other words, the reformation of Azov’s leadership was done in direct violation of the prisoner swap agreement:
“Later, five commanders from the battle were exchanged for 55 Russian service members, on condition that they would be sent to exile in Turkey until the end of the full-scale invasion, and not be allowed to rejoin Ukraine’s combat forces.”
They weren’t supposed to be released until the end of the war and they definitely weren’t supposed to be allowed to rejoin Ukraine’s combat forces. Those were the terms of the agreement. Already discarded terms. It doesn’t bode well for the prospects of future prisoner swaps.
So with the Azov Brigade reportedly back on the front lines, and therefore back in a position where its members could be made into POWs, it’s going to be grimly interesting to see what Russia’s stance is towards taking prisoners at this point, at least when its facing off against the ‘rebuilt’ Azov.
But also keep in mind that when we’re learning about Azov being put back on the front lines fighting to recapture lost territory, we’re talking about the units most capable of dehumanizing atrocities fighting in what are now arguably ‘enemy’ territories of occupied formerly Ukrainian cities. It’s a recipe for civilian brutalities. In other words, expect more Ukrainian government videos featuring Azov, but don’t be too surprised to learn about followup videos released by various human rights groups showing the kinds of atrocities that helped fuel this conflict in the first place.