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re: PUTIN & TRUMP Hail NAZIS: Both Quoted MEIN KAMPF
The Neo-Nazi Brigade Killing Russian Generals
Inside Azov, the neo-Nazi brigade killing Russian generals and playing a PR game in the Ukraine war
The Telegraph UK 19 MAR 2022
While most of Ukraine’s armed forces have been quietly engaged in the grind of a gruelling tug-of-war with Russia, one battalion has been busy putting out slick videos and images trumpeting its own achievements.
In a photograph released this week, a burly man in dark-blue uniform lies unconscious on the snow-covered ground, his right side caked in blood.
“Azov has eliminated a major general! And by thy sword shalt thou live!” reads the caption.
The unnamed officer was reportedly the fourth Russian general to have been killed in Ukraine. His killers? The extreme right-wing Azov Battalion.
A long-time darling of Kremlin propaganda attempts to smear all Ukrainians as neo-Nazis, the unit has recently been making headlines once again after Moscow claimed that it staged a false flag operation to blow up a theatre full of civilians in the besieged city of Mariupol. The truth was more mundane: yet more Russian shelling.
But Azov has been active in the last month. In particular, its well-oiled PR machine has been producing Ukraine’s arguably best-quality war videos with camera drones perfectly capturing the attacks as they happened in real time. Ukraine’s armed forces have happily used Azov’s videos as visual proof of the country’s counter-attacks on the invading army.
Russian tanks were seen blown up in pieces, spurting plumes of smoke as aerial footage showed the attacks with a video-game-like precision.
Azov rose to prominence at the start of the separatist insurgency in Ukraine in 2014. It never held much sway in Ukraine’s politics but videos of its occasional torch-lit marches have helped to feed the false Kremlin narrative of Ukrainians being neo-Nazis.
Ukraine’s crumbling armed forces were taken by surprise in spring 2014 when Russian-backed separatists began to take over swaths of Ukraine’s industrial heartland in the east.
As Ukraine’s regular troops were woefully unprepared to wage a war, citizens of all stripes took up arms and travelled to the east.
Azov Battalion was one of the several volunteer forces that took the job of fighting the separatists that the army seemingly did not want to do.
Months later, prominent rights advocacies such as Human Rights Watch reported “credible allegations of torture and other egregious abuses” by Azov and other volunteer batallions.
Several members of other volunteer battalions have been tried and convicted of rights abuse during their time in the east but no one from Azov was reportedly convicted.
Azov was founded by Andriy Biletsky, an ultra-nationalist political figure who had had run-ins with the law and had been involved in various groups that toyed with Nazi symbols.
The batallion that attracted football ultras and far-right activists made no secret of its roots by adopting the Nazi Wolfsangel as its emblem, saying that it views it as a stylised version of the letters N and I standing for “national idea.”
The 44-year old activist won a seat in parliament as an independent candidate in the autumn of 2014, clearly capitalising on his battalion’s success in fighting the separatists, but he was not re-elected five years later.
Azov, which takes its name from the Azov Sea, first joined the fight against separatists around the city of Mariupol and has been based there since then.
The battalion has enjoyed patronage of Ukraine’s controversial minister Arsen Avakov and several Ukrainian oligarchs, some of them of Jewish descent, who appear to have put aside their qualms about the group’s ideology for the sake of securing Ukrainian sovereignty in south-eastern Ukraine.
Mr Biletsky, also known as the White Leader, has run a fully fledged social media operation since the start of the conflict in 2014, flooding the internet with images of his troops marching the streets with lit torches.
A native Russian speaker born in the predominantly Russian-speaking city of Kharkiv, Mr Biletsky refused to identify himself as a neo-Nazi instead preferring to call himself a Ukrainian nationalist – but some of his public statements speak for themselves.
In his arguably most quoted interview he spoke about Ukraine’s “historic mission in this century to lead white peoples of the world on their last Crusade against Jew-led Untermensch”.
In recent years Azov has produced perfect content for Russian state television, putting a face to the Kremlin’s claims about the rise of the far-right in Ukraine, where recent presidents and prime ministers have all been regular centrist politicians.
Azov fighters in the east happily rolled back their sleeves to show Nazi tattoos to foreign correspondents while Mr Biletsky’s team were announcing the creation of local militia forces to deal with issues in big cities.
In 2018, the battalion put out a slickly produced video showing hundreds of young men in fatigues marching in formation to a torch-lit fortress in Kyiv.
They swore an oath on camera to “clean” the streets of illegal alcohol, drug dealings and gambling establishments.
Nothing came out of the idea but the image was there, putting Volodymyr Zelensky, a Russian-speaking comedian with Jewish heritage, and his predecessor in a tight spot.
“The far-right in general, and their apparent impunity have significantly damaged Ukraine’s international reputation and left the country vulnerable to hostile narratives exaggerating the role of extremist groups in Ukraine,” Oleskiy Kuzmenko wrote in a piece for the Atlantic Council, adding that its recent ties with white supremacists in the West reinforced the concern.
Bellingcat, an investigative journalist group, as well as Ukrainian media over the years, traced ties between Azov, its political arm National Corps, and American white supremacist groups.
A 2019 report by the New York-based Soufan Centre said more than 17,000 people from 50 countries had travelled to Ukraine since the start of the conflict to join Azov and other battalions to fight pro-Kremlin separatists.
In 2016, Azov sought to distance itself from the National Corps after its first commander left the battalion to pursue politics.
Mr Biletsky, however, still attends Azov events and occasionally uses the Azov troops to put pressure on Ukrainian authorities to ditch the idea of any form of compromise with Russia.
Just a few months after the invasion, Azov veterans marched across central Kyiv to President Zelensky’s office. They were stopped by a police cordon nearby where they set on fire effigies of “traitors”.
The National Corps never ran for national elections but its candidates have shown dismal performance at local elections in a clear sign of just how far Azov’s ideology is from concerns of ordinary Ukrainians who have for years viewed them as a marginal, selfie-happy group.
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