All Things Russia & Ukraine

[old salt]

^^^ that's an excellent reference. Thanks for posting it. It makes the point I was striving for --

Military organizations around the world use many different ground vehicles, and distinguishing between them can be difficult. Media sources and casual observers often compound the issue by describing military vehicles incorrectly, which can confuse and mislead.

imo -- that's what the German MOD, as a media source, was doing. They know the terminology & should understand the importance of using it accurately when the subject is contentious.

I'd expect the Gepards to accompany armor & mechanized infantry units to provide air defense against attack helos, low flying drones & strike aircraft which have to fly low to employ non-precision munitions. They would also be effective against dismounted infantry.

[old salt]

Loose lipped spooks, current & former. How is it helpful to reveal this now ?

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/nation ... -rcna26015

[old salt]

As we hear frequently in western media, Putin claims to be fighting Nazis in Ukraine.
Perhaps it's a coincidence, but the Azov Regiment earned their reputation long before this phase of the war. They are now the last holdout defenders of Mariupol who refuse to surrender. The UN was finally able to evacuate some hundreds of civilians on Thur, per a DW video report. With May 9th just days away, maybe Putin will finish off the Azov Regiment defenders, claim to have wiped out the Nazis & declare victory for his parade. He needs something to celebrate.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/pr ... 022-05-05/
Ukrainian officials have warned that Russia might step up its offensive before May 9, when Moscow commemorates the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany in World War Two.

Russia calls its actions a "special military operation" to disarm Ukraine and protect it from fascists.

https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/05/1117382

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/5/6 ... hellscapes
UN readies third evacuation from Mariupol ‘hellscapes’
UN chief Antonio Guterres says nearly 500 people were evacuated on Thursday as Russia tries to crush last pocket of resistance.

A third operation to rescue people from the besieged southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol is expected on Friday....
...fighting has intensified in recent days around the sprawling Azovstal steelworks where Ukrainian soldiers are making their last stand and about 200 civilians are thought to be trapped.

The UN and the Red Cross undertook two evacuations on Thursday, bringing nearly 500 people to safety from Azovstal, Mariupol and surrounding areas, Guterres said on Twitter.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his regular late-night video address that there had been evacuations and “people are on their way to safe territory”. He did not say how many had been rescued.

Ukrainian fighters in the tunnels beneath the steel plant appear to be fighting an increasingly desperate battle against Russian troops, amid speculation Russia wants to declare some kind of battlefield triumph – or announce an escalation of the war – in time for May 9, which marks the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany and is the biggest patriotic holiday on the Russian calendar.

The soldiers will “stand till the end. They only hope for a miracle,” Kateryna Prokopenko said after speaking by phone to her husband, Azov Regiment commander Denys Prokopenko, who is a leader of the steel plant defenders. “They won’t surrender.”

The Russians managed to get inside with the help of an electrician who knew the layout, said Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s internal affairs ministry.

“He showed them the underground tunnels which are leading to the factory,” Gerashchenko said in a video posted late Wednesday. “Yesterday, the Russians started storming these tunnels, using the information they received from the betrayer.”

Moscow has denied its troops were storming the plant, but has issued several ultimatums for the Ukrainians to surrender. It has accused the soldiers of refusing to allow the civilians to leave.

If Russia takes complete control of Mariupol it would establish a land corridor to the Crimean peninsula, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014, and free up troops to fight elsewhere in the Donbas, the eastern industrial region where the Kremlin is now directing its firepower after pulling back from Kyiv, the capital.

Mariupol, which had a population of more than 400,000 before the Russian invasion, has come to symbolise the misery of the war. About a quarter are thought to remain, with the city now in the hands of the administration of the self-styled and Russian-backed Donetsk People’s Republic.

Accurate reporting from Al Jazeera or disinformation ?
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/1 ... v-regiment
Profile: Who are Ukraine’s far-right Azov regiment?
The far-right neo-Nazi group has expanded to become part of Ukraine’s armed forces, a street militia and a political party

1 Mar 2022
As the Russian invasion of Ukraine enters its sixth day, a Ukrainian far-right military regiment is back in the headlines.

Russian President Vladimir Putin referenced the presence of such units within the Ukrainian military as one of the reasons for launching his so-called “special military operation … to de-militarise and de-Nazify Ukraine”.

On Monday, Ukraine’s national guard tweeted a video showing Azov fighters coating their bullets in pig fat to be used allegedly against Muslim Chechens – allies of Russia – deployed in their country.

Azov has also been involved in training civilians through military exercises in the run-up to Russia’s invasion.

So what is the Azov regiment?
Azov is a far-right all-volunteer infantry military unit whose members – estimated at 900 – are ultra-nationalists and accused of harbouring neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideology.

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.

As a battalion, the group fought on the front lines against pro-Russian separatists in Donetsk, the eastern region of Ukraine. Just before launching the invasion, Putin recognised the independence of two rebel-held regions from Donbas.

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.”

Who founded Azov?
The unit was led by Andriy Biletsky, who served as the the leader of both the Patriot of Ukraine (founded in 2005) and the SNA (founded in 2008). The SNA is known to have carried out attacks on minority groups in Ukraine.
In 2010, Biletsky said Ukraine’s national purpose was to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen [inferior races]”.
Biletsky was elected to parliament in 2014. He left Azov as elected officials cannot be in the military or police force. He remained an MP until 2019.
The 42-year-old is nicknamed Bely Vozd – or White Ruler – by his supporters. He established the far-right National Corps party in October 2016, whose core base is veterans of Azov.

Before becoming part of Ukraine’s armed forces, who funded Azov?
The unit received backing from Ukraine’s interior minister in 2014, as the government had recognised its own military was too weak to fight off the pro-Russian separatists and relied on paramilitary volunteer forces.

These forces were privately funded by oligarchs – the most known being Igor Kolomoisky, an energy magnate billionaire and then-governor of the Dnipropetrovska region.
In addition to Azov, Kolomoisky funded other volunteer battalions such as the Dnipro 1 and Dnipro 2, Aidar and Donbas units.
Azov received early funding and assistance from another oligarch: Serhiy Taruta, the billionaire governor of Donetsk region.

Neo-Nazi ideology
In 2015, Andriy Diachenko, the spokesperson for the regiment at the time said that 10 to 20 percent of Azov’s recruits were Nazis.
The unit has denied it adheres to Nazi ideology as a whole, but Nazi symbols such as the swastika and SS regalia are rife on the uniforms and bodies of Azov members.
For example, the uniform carries the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel symbol, which resembles a black swastika on a yellow background. The group said it is merely an amalgam of the letters “N” and “I” which represent “national idea”.
Individual members have professed to being neo-Nazis, and hardcore far-right ultra-nationalism is pervasive among members.
In January 2018, Azov rolled out its street patrol unit called National Druzhyna to “restore” order in the capital, Kyiv. Instead, the unit carried out pogroms against the Roma community and attacked members of the LGBTQ community.
“Ukraine is the world’s only nation to have a neo-Nazi formation in its armed forces,” a correspondent for the US-based magazine, the Nation, wrote in 2019.

Human rights violations and war crimes
A 2016 report by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OCHA) has accused the Azov regiment of violating international humanitarian law.
The report detailed incidents over a period from November 2015-February 2016 where Azov had embedded their weapons and forces in used civilian buildings, and displaced residents after looting civilian properties. The report also accused the battalion of raping and torturing detainees in the Donbas region.

What has been the international response to Azov?
In June 2015, both Canada and the United States announced that their own forces will not support or train the Azov regiment, citing its neo-Nazi connections.
The following year, however, the US lifted the ban under pressure from the Pentagon.

In October 2019, 40 members of the US Congress led by Representative Max Rose signed a letter unsuccessfully calling for the US State Department to designate Azov as a “foreign terrorist organisation” (FTO). Last April, Representative Elissa Slotkin repeated the request – which included other white supremacist groups – to the Biden administration.

Transnational support for Azov has been wide, and Ukraine has emerged as a new hub for the far right across the world. Men from across three continents have been documented to join the Azov training units in order to seek combat experience and engage in similar ideology.

The oscillation of Facebook
In 2016, Facebook first designated the Azov regiment a “dangerous organisation”.
Under the company’s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, Azov was banned from its platforms in 2019. The group was placed under Facebook’s Tier 1 designation, which includes groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and ISIL (ISIS). Users engaging in praise, support or representation of Tier 1 groups are also banned.

However, on February 24, the day Russia launched its invasion, Facebook reversed its ban, saying it would allow praise for Azov.
“For the time being, we are making a narrow exception for praise of the Azov regiment strictly in the context of defending Ukraine, or in their role as part of the Ukraine national guard,” a spokesperson from Facebook’s parent company, Meta, told Business Insider.
“But we are continuing to ban all hate speech, hate symbolism, praise of violence, generic praise, support, or representation of the Azov regiment, and any other content that violates our community standards,” it added.
The reversal of policy will be an immense headache for Facebook moderators, the Intercept, a US-based website, said.
“While Facebook users may now praise any future battlefield action by Azov soldiers against Russia, the new policy notes that ‘any praise of violence’ committed by the group is still forbidden; it’s unclear what sort of nonviolent warfare the company anticipates,” the Intercept wrote.

[MDlaxfan76]

Yes, Russian disinformation.
(You raised this prior to the war as well, I seem to recall...or was that someone else?)

When they were integrated into the Ukrainian army in 2014 and thereon, there was a significant effort to remove the worst ideologues. That was a multi-year effort and was reportedly successful, though like our own army there remain some with such beliefs.

But sure, Putin will pretend he's had a victory over fascists.

And a murderer of thousands of civilians who were certainly not fascists. War criminal.

[dislaxxic]

Bragging About US Intelligence Assistance Increases the Value and Solidarity of NATO Membership

I think those complaining are ignoring a number of obvious benefits of declassifying this information. First, releasing this information promises to exacerbate three problems that have already badly harmed Russia’s war effort: Putin’s isolation and with it, bad decision-making on his part, poor command structure within the Russian military, and snowballing paranoia in the Russian security community and with it a collapse of morale.

But Russia is likely not the only audience for these leaks. Existing and aspiring NATO members, including the voters within those countries, likely are also the intended audience.

Trump spent four years degrading the value of NATO and doing everything he could to sow distrust in the alliance. America’s past mistakes, most notably in Afghanistan, have made NATO membership more controversial in Europe. Because the Iraq War catastrophe was public while other American intelligence successes were private, it became routine to assume American intelligence wasn’t all that reliable. Russia has done everything it could to exacerbate such controversies, including with information operations targeting anti-imperialist and anti-war activists. Germany was a particular focus for such efforts on Russia’s part.

As a result, when Russia started this invasion, Putin believed, with good reason, that the alliance would crumble. Biden’s Administration did remarkable work, along with key allies, in defying those expectations. But the solidarity of NATO will come under increasing stress as inflation soars, refugees exacerbate housing shortages, and the media attention on Ukraine wanes.

Meanwhile, Finland and Sweden are about to start the process of quickly joining NATO. Russia is already making incursions on countries that border Ukraine. But until such time as Finland and Sweden formally join NATO, they will be in a vulnerable position, lacking the guarantee of NATO membership while having provided Russia a reason to want to strike.

What is being portrayed as dick-wagging offers a number of advantages in this climate. Without exposing sources and methods, it demonstrates that American sources and methods that come with NATO membership are excellent — far better than what Russia could offer (say) Hungary or Moldova, or even Saudi Arabia, right now. By emphasizing the way that the US has offered intelligence but not taken over targeting decisions, the US makes it clear that one can remain sovereign even while benefitting from the advantages NATO offers. The stories make it clear that the superior intelligence accessible with NATO membership can help a vastly overmatched country defend itself against an invader.

This may feel like dick-wagging. But it also makes a tremendous case for the value of alliance with the United States, particularly (for the Finnish and Swedish public) within the framework of NATO.

..

[old salt]

Yes, Russian disinformation.
(You raised this prior to the war as well, I seem to recall...or was that someone else?)

When they were integrated into the Ukrainian army in 2014 and thereon, there was a significant effort to remove the worst ideologues. That was a multi-year effort and was reportedly successful, though like our own army there remain some with such beliefs.

But sure, Putin will pretend he's had a victory over fascists.

And a murderer of thousands of civilians who were certainly not fascists. War criminal.

It will still be fertile ground for Putin. There is still significant skepticism in Europe about the Azov Regiment.
Their brand is significantly damaged. They'd be wise to stop displaying the Wolfsangel symbol & change their heraldry.
It's like displaying the Confederate flag in a serving state national guard units patch, naming forts & streets & erecting statues of Confederates.
It would be like having a KKK Regiment in a state's National Guard Unit

https://www.google.com/search?q=wolfsan ... nt=gws-wiz

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2022/04/ukra ... tern-media
Whitewashing Nazis Doesn’t Help Ukraine

The same Western media that once documented and decried Ukraine’s far right is now playing it down and even rehabilitating its leaders — including actual Nazis. Such apologetics aren’t doing any favors for Ukrainians or their fight against Russia’s aggression.

Since Russian president Vladimir Putin launched an invasion of neighboring Ukraine a month ago, something curious has happened with Western media coverage of the country’s far right. Amid the global wave of indignation at Russia’s war of aggression, which Moscow has justified on the pretext of “denazification,” the Western press — fixated for the last five years on the prospect of fascism and the far right at home — have begun playing the issue down.

The Ukrainian far right, we’re now told, is negligible, no different or more influential than its counterparts in the West and irrelevant thanks to its lack of electoral success. Any claim to the contrary is mere Putinite propaganda. How could it not be, when the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is himself Jewish? As for the movement’s most famous name — the neo-Nazi Azov Regiment that was officially incorporated into Ukraine’s National Guard in 2014 — well, Azov, we’re told, is not really even far right anymore.

With the Kremlin doing its best to paint the entire population of Ukraine as fascists while reducing schools and hospitals to rubble, you can see why this line of argument might be tempting. But the emerging narrative is baseless — a betrayal of journalism’s truth-telling mission, and one that risks silencing debate about a dangerous and violent movement whose existence is highly relevant to questions of Western policy toward the war. There are better ways to support Ukrainians as they fight to restore their country’s independence and safety than pretending their local far right isn’t a danger — or even rehabilitating actual Nazis.

Whitewashing Azov
The most audacious part of this campaign of counterpropaganda is a push to whitewash the Azov Regiment, for many years virtually synonymous with Ukraine’s entire far right. Now, we’re being told, it is nothing of the sort.

After Azov was brought into the National Guard, German broadcaster Deutsche Welle tells us, “There was a separation of the movement and the regiment, which still uses right-wing symbols, but can no longer be classified as a right-wing extremist body.” A BBC segment informs us it’s “not the same force as it was in 2014,” as a talking head affirms that its “radical core was drowned out by the mass of newcomers,” while its white supremacist founder, Andriy Biletsky, left in 2016 to start a political party, the National Corps. With an “evolving membership” and with the group’s social media showing no outward signs of extremism, the BBC concludes there’s nothing to see here.

These aren’t isolated examples. The London Times recently hung out with Azov and found “an elite battalion challenging its far-right reputation.” (“I ask you not to confuse patriotism with Nazism,” they quoted a commander, as other members asked for more Western arms.) “It is certain that Azov has depoliticized itself,” an expert assured the Financial Times. In an oddly equivocal piece that would never pass muster in reporting on a domestic hate group, CNN gives Azov a lengthy statement claiming it has “nothing to do with [Biletsky’s] political activities and the National Corps party,” while experts insist there are “presumably” far-right elements in all militaries and that the proportion of extremists in its ranks is probably smaller now.

All of this is, to put it mildly, dubious.

“The Azov Regiment maintains close ties to the National Corps,” says the University of Ottowa’s Ivan Katchanovski. “This is a rebranded Patriot of Ukraine and a civilian wing of the Azov Regiment. Therefore, the Azov Regiment can be best described as far-right-led or far-right-linked.”

“I believe they’re absolutely part of the same movement, and I have been presenting evidence thereof,” says Oleksiy Kuzmenko, an investigative reporter published by influential open-source intelligence outlet Bellingcat and George Washington University’s Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies.

There are better ways to support Ukrainians than pretending their local far right isn’t a danger.
The National Corps is still connected to the regiment, paying tribute to its soldiers, raising awareness about Azov members being prosecuted — or, in their eyes, persecuted — by the government, and promoting a defense conference in Mariupol last May that featured Azov’s current commander Denis Prokopenko, as well as government officials and veterans of the war. The latter group included a member of the National Corps’s High Council.

That conference also involved National Corps founder and leader Biletsky, who once wrote that Ukraine’s “historic mission” was to “lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival” against “the Semite-led Untermenschen” and who continues to have ties to the Azov Regiment. Whether he’s celebrating the anniversary of Azov’s founding — noting in 2019 that he would “forever remain in the ranks of the large Azov family, which over the last five years has formed around the regiment” — or attending events with Prokopenko to commemorate recent casualties, it’s a stretch to say Biletsky is no longer involved.

In fact, he’s not just involved but instrumental. In a 2019 interview with UMN (Ukrainian Media Network), the Azov Regiment’s chief of staff responded to a question about why Azov was so well supplied and looked better than other parts of the National Guard:

We have a leader, Andriy Biletsky, an independent MP in the Verkhovna Rada [Ukrainian parliament]. On top of being an MP, he is always visiting us at the shooting range encampment, for example. Taxpayers haven’t contributed a dime to its improvement, development, and functioning. Andriy Biletsky looks for sponsors, businessmen that can contribute to what we have now, for instance, good clothes, procuring, good shooting ranges, etc. . . . A lot of volunteer battalions stopped existing in the same way as we do, and we remained in this sphere, because Andriy, unlike others, isn’t preoccupied with his own business but is always visiting, always helping us.

Here’s Biletsky at the Azov Regiment’s fourth anniversary celebration, standing with Prokopenko in front of Azov’s modified Wolfsangel, the ancient medieval rune famously adopted as a symbol by the Nazi SS. Azov insists with an implied wink that that the figure is merely a combination of the letters “N” and “I,” for “the idea of the nation.”

If the Azov Regiment is unconnected to the wider Azov movement or the far right as a whole, then why, just last year, was the “Youth Corps” of its political arm trained on one of the regiment’s bases, with Prokopenko there to give a kickoff speech? What then explains this National Corps–produced video from 2019, in which Prokopenko sits down with Ihor Mykhailenko, former Azov commander and now head of the Azov movement’s National Militia paramilitary, and Maksym Zhorin, another former commander and Hitler admirer who now heads the central office of the National Corps?

Prokopenko himself has a suspect background, one somewhat shrouded in mystery thanks to the fact that, as Spain’s El Mundo put it, information about him seems to have been scrubbed from the Ukrainian internet. What is known is that Prokopenko has been with Azov since its earliest days, making it harder to argue its current iteration is a radical break from its origins.

Prokopenko was one of the leaders of the Dynamo Kiev ultras, one particular faction of the violent and virulently racist soccer hooligans who made up some of the earliest recruits of Azov and other anti-Russian paramilitaries. Only a few weeks ago, one of these “ultra” groups, the White Boys Club (WBC), paid tribute to Prokopenko, “the legendary commander of the ‘A’ regiment that also represents our platform,” in their words.

The White Boys Club faction of Ukraine’s soccer “ultras” pays tribute to Azov commander Denis Prokopenko, who it says “also represents our platform.” (Instagram)
According to Reporting Radicalism, an initiative of the US government–funded Freedom House, the group’s emblem uses a picture of Prince Svyatoslav of Kiev, hailed by the modern far right for his tenth-century defeat of the Khazar Empire, whose royalty had converted to Judaism in the preceding centuries. The WBC claim, with a wink, that their name is merely a reference to their team’s colors, but here you can see them wearing Klan-like hoods and brandishing swastikas in front of a sign reading “100% White!”

As even equivocating write-ups on Azov acknowledge, it’s hard to play down the regiment’s neo-Nazi tendencies when it continues to flaunt far-right symbols and carried out a pogrom against local Roma as late as 2018. But perhaps it’s better to take it from the horse’s mouth. Here’s notorious Russian neo-Nazi and soccer hooligan Denis Kapustin (aka Denis Nikitin) — founder of neo-Nazi sportswear brand White Rex, promoter of Azov, and currently under a Europe-wide travel ban — complaining in vulgar terms about the Western media’s sudden about-face on the Ukrainian far right:

It’s funny to observe how liberal trash, grant-eaters, faggots, and warriors for perverts’ rights are pretending that those who oppose the Russian army aren’t those same “neonazis, homophobes and fascists,” that they were hating, were scared of, and were “canceling.” . . . Before February 24 you were corrupting the Ukrainian society with the LGBT-perversion propaganda, were calling on the government to put us in prisons and to ban any nationalist formations, but now you are knitting socks for the Ukrainian army, taking photos with the rifles at the checkpoints, and liking the photos. You think you’ll get points? You think we forgot your bullying?

If some in the Western press seem to want to believe there’s no significant far right problem in Ukraine, the neo-Nazis themselves harbor no such illusions.

Nothing to Worry About (as of 2022)
This whitewashing of Azov is part of a wider trend of playing down the influence of the entire Ukrainian far right. Even the Anti-Defamation League is now assuring people that the far right is “a very marginal group with no political influence and who don’t attack Jews or Jewish institutions in Ukraine.”

This attempt to suddenly cast concerns about Ukraine’s far right as some kind of fringe, Putinist propaganda sits awkwardly with years of mainstream press reporting and establishment warnings about its threat.

A 2019 report from the Soufan Center, a nonprofit founded by former FBI special agent Ali Soufan that focuses on terrorism and foreign policy, declared Ukraine was “emerging as a hub in the broader network of transnational white supremacy extremism,” with the civil war raging in the east since 2014 attracting thousands of such extremists from across the globe to use the country “as a battlefield laboratory.” Like 1980s Afghanistan for jihadists, the report stated, “so too are parts of Ukraine becoming a safe haven for an array of white supremacy extremist groups to congregate, train, and radicalize,” whose goals are to “return to their countries of origin (or third-party countries) to wreak havoc and use acts of violence as a means of recruiting new members to their cause.”

The following year, Soufan cowrote an op-ed for the New York Times with Representative Max Rose (D-NY), warning that “white supremacists today are organizing in a similar fashion to jihadist terrorist organizations, like Al Qaeda, in the 1980s and 1990s,” and “using the conflict in Ukraine as a laboratory and training ground.” The two pointed to a 2018 FBI affidavit that called the Azov Regiment a “paramilitary unit” known for its “association with neo-Nazi ideology” and complained that even then, they were being accused of being part of a Kremlin campaign for raising these points.

A 2020 report from West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) states that while not on the level of jihadi networks in Syria and Iraq, Ukraine is “the favored destination of many American and European white supremacists,” who have “established a web of informal links with similarly minded groups in Europe.” A separate CTC report the following year found that “some of those who met either on the battlefield or in training or at one of the functions that have grown out of the original far-right extremist mobilization effort in the Ukraine war have since created networks of peers” and sometimes “gained crucial know-how, whether military or ideological.”

The most audacious part of this counterpropaganda is a push to whitewash the Azov Regiment.
Human rights organizations have likewise highlighted the threat of Ukraine’s far right. Freedom House warned in 2018 that “far-right political forces present a real threat to the democratic development of Ukrainian society” and that since the 2014 revolution and the civil war in the Donbas, “extreme nationalist views and groups, along with their preachers and propagandists, have been granted significant legitimacy by the wider society.” They were “a real physical threat to left-wing, feminist, liberal, and LGBT activists, human rights defenders, as well as ethnic and religious minorities,” the organization said, and cautioned they had “become increasingly active,” disrupting events and carrying out attacks at a higher frequency.

The same year, Human Rights Watch documented at least two dozen violent attacks by far-right groups in the first six months of the year, warning that they were “on the rise,” and admonishing the government for doing little about it or even recruiting members for “policing activities.” “The authorities in Ukraine have consistently failed to prevent and punish violence by ‘far-right’ groups, which has grown steadily since at least 2015,” Amnesty International reported then, charging authorities with “a patent disregard for the rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly” of those targeted, and complaining that extremists “plan and perpetrate such attacks openly, and often boast about their violent actions on social media and offline.”

The press today points to the far right’s diminishing electoral success, ignoring that it has coincided with the political center’s opportunistic adoption of parts of the far-right wish list, including glorifying Nazi collaborators and promoting Holocaust “revisionism.” It’s for this reason that the Simon Wiesenthal Center charged in 2018 that “Ukraine has been one of the major propagators of a distorted version of Holocaust history which seeks to hide or minimize crimes committed by Ukrainian nationalists” and that it was “choosing to rehabilitate antisemitism and to censor history.” That was the same year the Israeli government published a report stating that antisemitic attacks in the country had doubled since the previous year and numbered more than the total for all of Eastern Europe combined.

In fact, some of the best reporting on the dangers of Ukraine’s far right has come from the very mainstream Western press now playing it down. The same BBC now reassuring its viewers that ultranationalists in Ukraine are nothing to worry about, and besides, they don’t really hold any Nazi sympathies anyway, has run piece after piece on Azov and the Far Right more broadly over the years.

That includes this 2015 segment on the far-right Right Sector and its dreams of overthrowing another government, as well as this 2018 segment on the National Militia, the Azov-linked paramilitary that works with the police to patrol Ukraine’s streets. As government officials warn in the latter video that extremists are warming up for a coup and are being tolerated by Ukraine’s interior ministry, we’re told that Azov “has well-established links to the far right,” “its logo has clear Nazi overtones,” and its “toxic racism has in public at least been replaced by patriotic nationalism.” We can only assume today’s BBC is either unaware of its own past reporting, or considers it, too, part of a successful Kremlin propaganda campaign.

Despite extensively covering the subject of fascism in the context of domestic politics in the West, the usually progressive Guardian has barely mentioned the Ukrainian far right through this war, except to play down the issue and change the subject to Putin. Yet here it was just four years ago reporting on “fears that Ukraine’s shaky democracy was in danger of being hijacked by an increasingly confident far right.” Here it is a year before that, reporting on Azov’s extensive network of children’s summer camps, noting that “its influence is spreading” and showing instructors clearly tattooed with racist slogans and Nazi insignia working with kids. Here it is years earlier, on the “increasing worry” that groups like Azov “pose the most serious threat to the Ukrainian government, and perhaps even the state, when the conflict in the east is over.”

In fact, even the US government–funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has for years reported on the dangers of Ukraine’s far right, something that would now get it charged with spreading Kremlin propaganda. The outlet has covered police officials’ declarations of admiration for storied Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, a series of unpunished attacks on Romany camps by ultranationalists, the receipt of government funds by some of those same groups, a State Department–designated “hate group” that won a lawsuit against a news outlet that deemed it to be neo-Nazi, as well as the growing “public presence” of the Azov movement and its efforts for “the expansion of its movement abroad.”

Here’s Time magazine just last year reporting on Azov, which it called “much more than a militia,” owing to its political party, summer camps, publishing houses, and police-associated vigilante force. Its spokesperson told Time that Azov’s goal was creating a far-right coalition across the West to seize power in Europe. “Unlike its ideological peers in the U.S. and Europe, it also has a military wing with at least two training bases and a vast arsenal of weapons, from drones and armored vehicles to artillery pieces,” went the report, which quoted “law enforcement officials on three continents” to charge Azov with “a central role in a network of extremist groups stretching from California across Europe to New Zealand.” All of this is hard to square with the now-ubiquitous claim that Ukraine’s far right is irrelevant, unremarkable, and plays a role no different from that of similar groups in the West.

This is just a drop in the ocean. While you’ll still find your fair share of denialism in older reporting — the impulse among reporters to way overcorrect in the face of Russian propaganda is nothing new — mainstream Western press reports (whether in the United States, Britain, Germany, or elsewhere in Europe) before 2022 will generally leave you far better informed about the reality of Ukraine’s far right and the dangers it poses than anything put out now or, from the looks of things, in the coming months and years.

And when this mass of inconvenient reporting isn’t simply memory-holed, it’s outright distorted. A recent Yahoo! News report dismissed as Kremlin propaganda the well-documented fact that far-right groups backed the 2014 revolution, citing a U.S. News & World Report from the time that called the charge “entirely baseless.” Who knows how many readers ever clicked through to the actual report and found out that the piece not only didn’t apply those words to that specific charge, but that it actually affirms that “far-right conservative groups exist in Ukraine and have played a central part of the ongoing revolution”?

Before this war, Western media coverage presented a Ukrainian far right that was uniquely well-organized, well-connected to both the Ukrainian state and private benefactors, increasingly emboldened, violent, and threatening to democracy, and on the march in terms of its influence. Suddenly, this same media is now telling us all of this is simply lies and Russian propaganda, in line with the favored talking point of the neo-Nazis themselves. Calling this “Orwellian” doesn’t do it justice.

The Dangers of Disinformation
The press outlets engaging in this revisionism and even rehabilitating Azov and other far-right extremists are doing an enormous disservice to their audiences and are not helping Ukraine in the process.

“The Western media coverage of the far right in Ukraine during the Russia-Ukraine war can help significantly boost the Ukrainian far-right popularity in the West,” says Katchanovski. “It can help to attract many far-right Western volunteers to far-right or far-right linked armed formations in Ukraine and new far-right followers in Western countries. There are already such signs.”

The press outlets rehabilitating Azov and other far-right extremists are doing an enormous disservice to their audiences.
Before the war, the German government–funded Counter Extremism Project had warned that Ukraine’s paramilitary training infrastructure “presents the risk that violence-oriented right-wing extremist and terrorist individuals from abroad obtain weapons and explosives training in Ukraine,” potentially “increas[ing] the effectiveness of the violence that these individuals may perpetrate in their home countries.” Yet despite years of media fixation on the threat of far-right terrorism — a threat that’s still relatively small at this stage but has the potential to get much worse — this concern, when it’s not dismissed as a Kremlin talking point, goes almost entirely undiscussed in the Western press, even as thousands of foreign fighters, some of them homegrown extremists, stream into the country.

There are serious risks for Ukraine, too. A Western public uninformed about the dangers of the far right is watching its governments, with no debate, send an avalanche of weaponry into the country, where it will fall (and some has already fallen) into the hands of extremists — the same extremists who have serially attacked vulnerable groups, want to institute a dictatorship, have repeatedly threatened and carried out violence against the government, and have already helped overthrow one president. With Zelensky now envisioning a postwar Ukrainian society with more armed people in the streets, and members of the military and National Guard — both institutions where extremists have made a home — patrolling everyday locations, this risk is all the bigger.

Putin’s war on Ukraine has, ironically, been a boon to its far right, which has been further legitimized, better equipped, and supplied with volunteers as a result of his attack. Tragically, the Western press is now also assisting this process, unwittingly advancing extremists’ preferred talking points. We don’t have to pretend there’s no far right problem in Ukraine to give the country our support and solidarity. But by rewriting history and doing PR for literal Nazis, we may be sleepwalking into more disaster.

[MDlaxfan76]

I wouldn't argue with the contention that the far right is a problem, including in Ukraine. And US for that matter.

But both Ukraine and the US have made efforts to clean out such, albeit insufficiently most of us would argue. Not all of us have agreed on this, say here in the US...

But, by comparison, we have a huge Russian propaganda campaign over years of doing so that is flat out Orwellian. Sure, some of these nationalists in Ukraine include some ugly, yes fascist, characters...but the worst of the fascist right wing in Europe, by far, is allied with Russia.

And Putin is far more of a brutal, fascist dictator than any other leader in Europe. By a wide margin.

So, the MOST IMPORTANT thing to communicate is that Putin is a lying POS war criminal...whose propaganda machine must be countered.

BTW, interesting article source, a socialist magazine targeted to US far left. Kinda slanted perspective, but fun to see you cite a far left source rather than a far right one...they all kinda come together at the extremes...but makes for interesting reading.

[DocBarrister]

Should a member of this forum be spewing Putin’s repugnant fascist lies and propaganda?

DocBarrister

[old salt]

I wouldn't argue with the contention that the far right is a problem, including in Ukraine. And US for that matter.

But both Ukraine and the US have made efforts to clean out such, albeit insufficiently most of us would argue. Not all of us have agreed on this, say here in the US...

But, by comparison, we have a huge Russian propaganda campaign over years of doing so that is flat out Orwellian. Sure, some of these nationalists in Ukraine include some ugly, yes fascist, characters...but the worst of the fascist right wing in Europe, by far, is allied with Russia.

And Putin is far more of a brutal, fascist dictator than any other leader in Europe. By a wide margin.

So, the MOST IMPORTANT thing to communicate is that Putin is a lying POS war criminal...whose propaganda machine must be countered.

BTW, interesting article source, a socialist magazine targeted to US far left. Kinda slanted perspective, but fun to see you cite a far left source rather than a far right one...they all kinda come together at the extremes...but makes for interesting reading.

Diversion Alert --- nobody is disputing any of the negative stuff you say about Putin. That has nothing to do with you being an apologist for a Ukrainian neo-Nazi organization. Now that they are fighting the Russians, they have been magically transformed into heroes & you are whitewashing them.

Just be honest. They may be neo-Nazi skin heads, but they're our neo-Nazi skin heads, because they are our proxy fighters against the Russians.
We find them useful. If they were a US group, you'd go nuts if they were allowed to exist, let alone be welcomed into our National Guard.
Would you be ok with their US equivalents serving in our military ? Would you give them a waiver for their tattoos ?
They are fierce fighters, so are the Chechens & Wagner mercenaries.

[a fan]

I wouldn't argue with the contention that the far right is a problem, including in Ukraine. And US for that matter.

But both Ukraine and the US have made efforts to clean out such, albeit insufficiently most of us would argue. Not all of us have agreed on this, say here in the US...

But, by comparison, we have a huge Russian propaganda campaign over years of doing so that is flat out Orwellian. Sure, some of these nationalists in Ukraine include some ugly, yes fascist, characters...but the worst of the fascist right wing in Europe, by far, is allied with Russia.

And Putin is far more of a brutal, fascist dictator than any other leader in Europe. By a wide margin.

So, the MOST IMPORTANT thing to communicate is that Putin is a lying POS war criminal...whose propaganda machine must be countered.

BTW, interesting article source, a socialist magazine targeted to US far left. Kinda slanted perspective, but fun to see you cite a far left source rather than a far right one...they all kinda come together at the extremes...but makes for interesting reading.

Diversion Alert --- nobody is disputing any of the negative stuff you say about Putin. That has nothing to do with you being an apologist for a Ukrainian neo-Nazi organization. Now that they are fighting the Russians, they have been magically transformed into heroes & you are whitewashing them.

Just be honest. They may be neo-Nazi skin heads, but they're our neo-Nazi skin heads, because they are our proxy fighters against the Russians.
We find them useful. If they were a US group, you'd go nuts if they were allowed to exist, let alone be welcomed into our National Guard.
Would you be ok with their US equivalents serving in our military ? Would you give them a waiver for their tattoos ?
They are fierce fighters, so are the Chechens & Wagner mercenaries.

Yeah.....and the American Right....hyped by the same US media...... played the same game with the Afghanis. We all know how that worked out. Same goes for many of the folks we've armed since WWII. Saddam was a swell guy...good thing we armed him and propped up his regime, right?

This is what we do. This is who we are as a nation.

[old salt]

Should a member of this forum be spewing Putin’s repugnant fascist lies and propaganda?

DocBarrister

Decent blokes.
https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-war- ... n-12605181
The Azov Regiment (or Brigade) were formed as a volunteer fighter group in May 2014, soon after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea.

They fought Russian-backed separatists in the eastern Donetsk region of Ukraine and helped recapture the southern port city of Mariupol after it was temporarily taken over by the Russians that year.

Taking their name from the Sea of Azov off the coast of Mariupol, they were originally made up of members of the ultra-nationalist group Patriot of Ukraine and the neo-Nazi Social National Assembly Group (SNA).

Both have links to neo-Nazism and white supremacism, but in 2015, a spokesperson for the group said that only between 10 and 20% of recruits were Nazis.

They denied adhering to Nazi ideology as a whole but still use symbolism such as the swastika and SS regalia.

After recapturing Mariupol, in November 2014 the unit were praised by Ukraine's then-president Petro Poroshenko and allowed to integrate into the Ukraine National Guard.

The group received government backing after officials realised the military was too small to fight off the separatists on their own.

Although they are largely based out of Mariupol and serve in the south and the east, they have been deployed elsewhere.

In January 2018 they rolled out their self-styled 'street patrol' unit to 'restore order' in Kyiv, which resulted in attacks on members of the LGBTQ and Roma communities.

A 2016 report by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights accused the Azov Regiment of violating humanitarian law.

They were banned by Facebook under its 'dangerous group' policies until the Russian invasion in February this year.

Analysts have said that after years of working with the military, they have made efforts to disassociate from far-right ideologies.

Vladimir Putin, however, has used their Nazi links to justify the Russian invasion, branding it a 'special operation to de-Nazify Ukraine'.

[NattyBohChamps04]

Azov Regiment was like 1,000 people right?

In a nation of 45 Million?

Just curious.

[Farfromgeneva]

It’s another way to attempt to build the case to let Russia do whatever they want wherever they want. That’s all.

[MDlaxfan76]

I wouldn't argue with the contention that the far right is a problem, including in Ukraine. And US for that matter.

But both Ukraine and the US have made efforts to clean out such, albeit insufficiently most of us would argue. Not all of us have agreed on this, say here in the US...

But, by comparison, we have a huge Russian propaganda campaign over years of doing so that is flat out Orwellian. Sure, some of these nationalists in Ukraine include some ugly, yes fascist, characters...but the worst of the fascist right wing in Europe, by far, is allied with Russia.

And Putin is far more of a brutal, fascist dictator than any other leader in Europe. By a wide margin.

So, the MOST IMPORTANT thing to communicate is that Putin is a lying POS war criminal...whose propaganda machine must be countered.

BTW, interesting article source, a socialist magazine targeted to US far left. Kinda slanted perspective, but fun to see you cite a far left source rather than a far right one...they all kinda come together at the extremes...but makes for interesting reading.

Diversion Alert --- nobody is disputing any of the negative stuff you say about Putin. That has nothing to do with you being an apologist for a Ukrainian neo-Nazi organization. Now that they are fighting the Russians, they have been magically transformed into heroes & you are whitewashing them.

Just be honest. They may be neo-Nazi skin heads, but they're our neo-Nazi skin heads, because they are our proxy fighters against the Russians.
We find them useful. If they were a US group, you'd go nuts if they were allowed to exist, let alone be welcomed into our National Guard.
Would you be ok with their US equivalents serving in our military ? Would you give them a waiver for their tattoos ?
They are fierce fighters, so are the Chechens & Wagner mercenaries.

mmm, I'd be very concerned if our professional fighting forces didn't make every effort to scrub out Neo-nazis, white supremacists of any kind.

My understanding is that the Ukrainians did so after 2014 with Azov as they brought them inside the Ukrainian military structure, but surely they'd not have been as rigorous about such as we would be given our own volunteer forces. They were at war with Russia, a vastly superior enemy at the time.

But sure, let's say we were invaded by the Chinese, a massive assault of our West Coast, with Mexico aligned and supportive from our south, and we didn't have the technology much less scale to repulse them, our cities across the country were being struck by missiles, would I be flipped out if some militia groups of white supremacists fought back as part of the resistance to such? No.

Obviously, we don't face such an existential threat, we have the technology capacities and volunteer military already sufficient to respell such, so let's be clear that's not the Ukrainian situation.

[MDlaxfan76]

Azov Regiment was like 1,000 people right?

In a nation of 45 Million?

Just curious.

Currently estimated at 900-2,500, though presumably that's been reduced by the Russian killing. Only 10-20% were what would be fairly described as "nazis"...so, maybe 500 at most.

The Mariupol population alone was over 400,000.

[Typical Lax Dad]

It’s another way to attempt to build the case to let Russia do whatever they want wherever they want. That’s all.

Sympathizer.

[Typical Lax Dad]

I wouldn't argue with the contention that the far right is a problem, including in Ukraine. And US for that matter.

But both Ukraine and the US have made efforts to clean out such, albeit insufficiently most of us would argue. Not all of us have agreed on this, say here in the US...

But, by comparison, we have a huge Russian propaganda campaign over years of doing so that is flat out Orwellian. Sure, some of these nationalists in Ukraine include some ugly, yes fascist, characters...but the worst of the fascist right wing in Europe, by far, is allied with Russia.

And Putin is far more of a brutal, fascist dictator than any other leader in Europe. By a wide margin.

So, the MOST IMPORTANT thing to communicate is that Putin is a lying POS war criminal...whose propaganda machine must be countered.

BTW, interesting article source, a socialist magazine targeted to US far left. Kinda slanted perspective, but fun to see you cite a far left source rather than a far right one...they all kinda come together at the extremes...but makes for interesting reading.

Diversion Alert --- nobody is disputing any of the negative stuff you say about Putin. That has nothing to do with you being an apologist for a Ukrainian neo-Nazi organization. Now that they are fighting the Russians, they have been magically transformed into heroes & you are whitewashing them.

Just be honest. They may be neo-Nazi skin heads, but they're our neo-Nazi skin heads, because they are our proxy fighters against the Russians.
We find them useful. If they were a US group, you'd go nuts if they were allowed to exist, let alone be welcomed into our National Guard.
Would you be ok with their US equivalents serving in our military ? Would you give them a waiver for their tattoos ?
They are fierce fighters, so are the Chechens & Wagner mercenaries.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/amp/ncna1010221

[old salt]

I'd be very concerned if our professional fighting forces didn't make every effort to scrub out Neo-nazis, white supremacists of any kind.

My understanding is that the Ukrainians did so after 2014 with Azov as they brought them inside the Ukrainian military structure, but surely they'd not have been as rigorous about such as we would be given our own volunteer forces. They were at war with Russia, a vastly superior enemy at the time.

n January 2018 they rolled out their self-styled 'street patrol' unit to 'restore order' in Kyiv, which resulted in attacks on members of the LGBTQ and Roma communities.

A 2016 report by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights accused the Azov Regiment of violating humanitarian law.

They were banned by Facebook under its 'dangerous group' policies until the Russian invasion in February this year.

[old salt]

It’s another way to attempt to build the case to let Russia do whatever they want wherever they want. That’s all.

Sympathizer.

We are about to hear a lot about the Azov Regiment, both for their holdout in Mariupol & in Putin's May 9th speech.
Let's see how much the msm tells us about their history & how much whitewash is applied.

Yes, there are a lot of sympathizers for the Azov Regiment. Some in this forum.

[old salt]

I wouldn't argue with the contention that the far right is a problem, including in Ukraine. And US for that matter.

But both Ukraine and the US have made efforts to clean out such, albeit insufficiently most of us would argue. Not all of us have agreed on this, say here in the US...

But, by comparison, we have a huge Russian propaganda campaign over years of doing so that is flat out Orwellian. Sure, some of these nationalists in Ukraine include some ugly, yes fascist, characters...but the worst of the fascist right wing in Europe, by far, is allied with Russia.

And Putin is far more of a brutal, fascist dictator than any other leader in Europe. By a wide margin.

So, the MOST IMPORTANT thing to communicate is that Putin is a lying POS war criminal...whose propaganda machine must be countered.

BTW, interesting article source, a socialist magazine targeted to US far left. Kinda slanted perspective, but fun to see you cite a far left source rather than a far right one...they all kinda come together at the extremes...but makes for interesting reading.

Diversion Alert --- nobody is disputing any of the negative stuff you say about Putin. That has nothing to do with you being an apologist for a Ukrainian neo-Nazi organization. Now that they are fighting the Russians, they have been magically transformed into heroes & you are whitewashing them.

Just be honest. They may be neo-Nazi skin heads, but they're our neo-Nazi skin heads, because they are our proxy fighters against the Russians.
We find them useful. If they were a US group, you'd go nuts if they were allowed to exist, let alone be welcomed into our National Guard.
Would you be ok with their US equivalents serving in our military ? Would you give them a waiver for their tattoos ?
They are fierce fighters, so are the Chechens & Wagner mercenaries.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/amp/ncna1010221

Give credit to the US military for finding this nut & arresting him before he did any damage.
They did not put him in command of a National Guard Regiment comprised of 2500 of his fellow neo-Nazis.
This clown was a gun nut & keyboard warrior who indulged his neo-Nazi fantasies on his govt work computer.