“Nazis in Ukraine: seeing through the fog of the information war”, March 30, 2022, Gabriel Rockhill, Liberation News, at < https://www.liberationnews.
“Corporate media parrots the Azov Battalion”, 5 April 2022, Jason Melanovski, WSWS, at < https://www.wsws.org/en/
Introduction by dmorista:
As the extremely one-sided “Battle to Control the Narrative” proceeds the massive Corporate Controlled Media continues to ignore fairly obvious evidence of far-right and fascist organizing and operations in Ukraine. It is left to alternative sources to point out what is really happening The extremist right wing activities in Ukraine occurred over Ukrainian history, during and immediately after WW 2 and in the more recent time frames since the Euromaidan Coup of 2014, and in the period immediately before the current war. The first article posted here “Nazis in Ukraine: seeing through the fog of the information war” looks at the origins of what Russian President Putin called a: “ 'special military operation … to de-militarise and de-Nazify Ukraine.' Western bourgeois media immediately decried these stated goals, regularly repeating that the allegations of Nazism in Ukraine are nothing more than Russian 'fake news.' Former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, went so far as to flatly state that 'there are no Nazis in the Ukraine.' ” (Emphasis added) A bit farther on the article adds that: “ ... any attempt to provide a sober and concrete analysis of the actual history of Nazism in the region runs the risk of being disingenuously labeled and dismissed as 'pro-Putin' because it does not support this war-mongering narrative.”
Ukrainian fascist organizations that supported the German operations that killed civilians in Ukraine during the period of German rule were founded and operated in 1942 and 1943. These included: “The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed force, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrainska povstanska armiia—UPA)”. The article quotes a source that stated that: “the OUN played a significant part in the extermination of the Jews and other ‘undesirables,’ often performing the dirty work of the German Einsatzkommando extermination squads (eg the killing of children), and continuing after the war under American sponsorship”. In the post war years Rockhill notes that: “The U.S. intelligence services worked closely with several organizations of former Nazi collaborators like these in order to run extensive sabotage, terror and assassination campaigns against the USSR. .... NATO was deeply involved in this anti-communist war, as demonstrated perhaps most clearly by Operation Gladio. Overseen by the CIA and MI6, NATO established a large secret army of trained militants, many of whom were well established Nazis and fascists.”
The article also points out that: “(Adolf) Heusinger served as Hitler’s Chief of the General Staff of the Army and later became Chairman of the NATO Military Committee (1961-1964). NATO did not content itself, then, with having Nazis do some of its dirty work by recruiting them into its secret armies to run heinous anti-communist terrorist campaigns. It also integrated them directly into its leadership, thereby sending a clear message to the world regarding its political orientation”. (Emphasis Added)
The most important recent event in the development of the far-right in Ukraine was the late 2013 - 2014 Euromaidan Coup. That coup: “ ... relied on far-right shock troops such as the fascist organization Right Sector and the ultranationalist Svoboda Party to overthrow the elected government of Viktor Yanukovych. Three members of Svoboda were installed as members of the first post-coup government, and the co-founder of Svoboda, Andriy Paruby, was parliamentary speaker for five years”.
In the penultimate section of the article the author writes that: “In Ukraine today, fascist elements are present in the capitalist ruling class, paramilitary organizations, the Ukrainian military, the parliament, and certain sectors of society. While it would be a mistake to assume that they are in each case the dominant force, it would be equally erroneous to ignore their presence, extensive reach and the support they enjoy from the Zelenskyy government and imperialist forces outside the country. …. ( Zelenskyy) received ample funding from a handful of private donors, including most notably the billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi, who was his single biggest supporter. …. Kolomoyskyi is, moreover, one of the major funders of the ultranationalist militias in Eastern Ukraine, including the fascist Azov and Aidar battalions …. In 2015, it was estimated that there were some 30 nationalist militias fighting separatists in eastern Ukraine … Far from cracking down on these ultranationalist militias, many of which display open signs of Nazism and fascism, Kolomoyskyi’s actor-turned-president has not only allowed them to act with impunity, but he has also woven a tight relationship between his administration and open fascists”.
Rockhill closes out the article with this statement: “Finally, it should not be lost on us that the Biden administration, which came to power as a purported bulwark against the spread of fascism at home, is continuing the U.S. policy of supporting fascist forces in one of the primary hubs for international fascism. This clearly demonstrates that the struggle against fascism can never be limited to a domestic battle”.
The WSWS article (“Corporate media parrots the Azov Battalion”) covers some of the same ground with different references, but a substantively similar analysis of events, looking mostly at what has occurred since the Euromaidan Coup of 2014. The Article notes that “ ... western media reporting on the bombing was largely based on tweets from Kyiv Independent reporter Illia Ponomarenko, who has admitted to being 'consecrated' into the Azov Battalion. … Ponomarenko regularly posts gory photos of dead Russian soldiers and calls for NATO to intervene in the war on Ukraine’s behalf, thus assisting a social media campaign by Ukraine’s armed forces and the far-right … Notably, Ponomarenko’s employer, the newly created Kyiv Independent, receives its funding from western imperialism, including Washington’s National Endowment for Democracy and the EU’s European Endowment for Democracy.
“More recently, photos of the apparent killing of civilians in Bucha first appeared on the social media accounts of figures such as Ponomarenko and the far-right 'activist' thug Serhii Sternenko. The photos and reports were then fed to Western media outlets, which again seized upon them to call for increased sanctions against Russia and the prosecution of President Vladimir Putin as a war criminal.” (Emphasis added)
Nazis in Ukraine: Seeing through the fog of the information war
On February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin undertook what he referred to as a “special military operation … to de-militarise and de-Nazify Ukraine.” Western bourgeois media immediately decried these stated goals, regularly repeating that the allegations of Nazism in Ukraine are nothing more than Russian “fake news.” Former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, went so far as to flatly state that “there are no Nazis in the Ukraine.” Similar claims resound throughout the mass media’s echo chambers, and the fact that the current president of Ukraine is Jewish is often short-sightedly presented as the only “proof” necessary.
Disputing the existence of Nazis and fascists in Ukraine serves the purpose of constructing a twisted but simplistic narrative loosely based on WWII: Putin is an evil, Hitler-like figure intent on attacking the freedom-loving Ukrainian government and its innocent supporters. The goal of such a narrative is to foster blind and unquestioning support for the Zelenskyy government, NATO and the imperialist Western powers. A “humanitarian” war, meaning a brutal NATO intervention that would likely spark WWIII, is thereby presented as a viable option. In this context, any attempt to provide a sober and concrete analysis of the actual history of Nazism in the region runs the risk of being disingenuously labeled and dismissed as “pro-Putin” because it does not support this war-mongering narrative.
But an examination that accounts for the complexities of concrete situations reveals that there is indeed a deep and expansive history of fascism in Ukraine, which has been aided and abetted by the US government. This does not however mean that fascism is necessarily the dominant force in the country or even in every domain in which it exists (the military, paramilitary forces, the parliament, society at large, etc.). Moreover, it does not imply in the least that one has to support Russia’s invasion, or even assume that ‘denazification’ is its primary goal. On the contrary, it is possible to understand that fascism is a very real force in Ukraine while opposing Putin’s decision to deploy troops.
A brief history of Nazis, NATO & Ukraine
To understand the current conflict, it is important to recall that Russians and Ukrainians once lived in relative harmony, when they were both part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which was founded on the principle of the self-determination of nations. This was violently interrupted in 1941, when the Nazis invaded the USSR, taking over much of Ukraine.
According to John-Paul Himka, a quarter of all victims of the Holocaust lived in Ukraine, and Ukrainian ultra-nationalists collaborated with the Nazis in carrying out their horrendous deeds. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed force, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrainska povstanska armiia—UPA) participated in this genocidal rampage: “OUN militias were key actors in the anti-Jewish violence of summer 1941; OUN recruited for and infiltrated police formations that provided indispensable manpower for the Germans’ mobile killing units; and in 1943, thousands of these policemen deserted from German service to join the OUN-led nationalist insurgency, during which UPA killed Jews who had managed to survive the major liquidations of 1942.” According to Ian Sayer and Douglas Botting, “the OUN played a significant part in the extermination of the Jews and other ‘undesirables,’ often performing the dirty work of the German Einsatzkommando extermination squads (eg the killing of children), and continuing after the war under American sponsorship.”
Indeed, in the postwar era, the U.S. government discreetly integrated an alarming number of Nazi collaborators into a veritable international network of anti-communist fascists. By 1952, John Loftus estimates that there were “hundreds if not thousands of important Nazi collaborators from Byelorussia, the Ukraine, the Baltic states, and the Balkans” who had been brought to the United States (and many more had been operationalized around the world). The US Counter Intelligence Core (CIC) ran operation Anyface to protect the fascist leader of the OUN–the renowned Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera–from being brought to justice by the Soviets. Bandera’s chief of the national security service (SB), Mykola Lebed, was “the highest ranking Ukrainian Nazi to ever enter the United States.” CIA covert operations chief Frank Wisner admitted in 1951 there were “at least twenty former or active members of the SB of OUN/Bandera in the United States.”
The US intelligence services worked closely with several organizations of former Nazi collaborators like these in order to run extensive sabotage, terror and assassination campaigns against the USSR. In 1951, Wisner estimated that “over 35,000 members of the Russian secret police (MVD-MKGB) have been killed by OUN-UPA since the end of the last war.”
NATO was deeply involved in this anti-communist war, as demonstrated perhaps most clearly by Operation Gladio. Overseen by the CIA and MI6, NATO established a large secret army of trained militants, many of whom were well established Nazis and fascists. According to the official Italian Senate investigation into Gladio: “It emerges without the shadow of a doubt that elements of the CIA started in the second half of the 1960s a massive operation in order to counter by the use of all means the spreading of groups and movements of the left on a European level.” This included targeted killings and false flag terrorist attacks that were blamed on communists in order to terrify the civilian population into supporting rightwing governments and anti-communist raids.
The Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO from 1963 to 1969 was Lyman Lemnitzer, who had given the green light to Operation Northwoods in 1962. This operation, which was never implemented because President John F. Kennedy refused to sign off on it, consisted of planning false flag terrorist attacks against U.S. citizens that would be blamed on Cuba in order to justify a military invasion of the island.
Lemnitzer’s tenure overlapped with Adolf Heusinger’s, one of the many high-ranking Nazi and fascist officials who had been integrated into U.S. military and intelligence networks. Heusinger served as Hitler’s Chief of the General Staff of the Army and later became Chairman of the NATO Military Committee (1961-1964). NATO did not content itself, then, with having Nazis do some of its dirty work by recruiting them into its secret armies to run heinous anti-communist terrorist campaigns. It also integrated them directly into its leadership, thereby sending a clear message to the world regarding its political orientation.
The Maidan coup
In the ensuing years, the United States continued to work with Ukrainian fascists in their endless destabilization campaigns against the USSR. According to CIA specialist Douglas Valentine, “the CIA has been developing fascist assets in the Ukraine for 70 years.”
The Maidan coup in late 2013-2014, which was openly supported by the imperial powers in the United States and Europe, relied on far-right shock troops such as the fascist organization Right Sector and the ultranationalist Svoboda Party to overthrow the elected government of Viktor Yanukovych. Three members of Svoboda were installed as members of the first post-coup government, and the co-founder of Svoboda, Andriy Paruby, was parliamentary speaker for five years. Although Svoboda has since attempted to mollify its Nazi image, it maintains its substance as an ultranationalist, anti-communist party that openly praises Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, the politician and theorist of the militant wing of the fascist OUN.
The Azov Battalion was formed in May 2014 out of the ultra-nationalist Patriot of Ukraine (founded in 2005) and the Social National Assembly or SNA (founded in 2008) that is “known to have carried out attacks on minority groups.” The Azov Battalion, Right Sector and other fascist militias played a key role in consolidating power for the post-coup government in numerous ways: engaging in street violence against the Left, running intimidation campaigns against uncooperative politicians, setting up indoctrination camps for children and youth, and exerting pressure on the government to revise the education curriculum, ban the Russian language, and rewrite official state history. This post-coup period of street violence and intimidation culminated in what some have called the worst Nazi atrocity since WWII, when some 42 leftists perished in an inferno set by fascists in the Odessa trade union building.
This U.S.-backed regime change operation is what prompted the outbreak of a civil war in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine. When pro-Russian separatists declared their independence from the fascist Ukrainian puppet government, it was unable to contain them. So the Azov battalion and other fascist militias were unleashed, leading to the death of some 14,000 people (just before the 2022 invasion, Putin recognized the independence of the two regions of the Donbas). Azov received backing from Ukraine’s interior minister, Arsen Avakov, as well as U.S. arms and training. Due to its purported effectiveness in fighting Russian separatists, the battalion was integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard in 2014, formally becoming part of the state.
In 2015, the CIA, according to five former intelligence and national security officials, set up “a secret intensive training program in the U.S. for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel.” The same year, the U.S. Congress passed a spending bill that featured “hundreds of millions of dollars worth of economic and military support for Ukraine, one that was expressly modified to allow that support to flow to the country’s resident neo-Nazi militia, the Azov Regiment.”
Since there has been some debate regarding just how Nazi the Azov or other ultranationalist militias are, it is worth noting that the U.S. House of Representatives acknowledged in 2015 that Azov is “neo-Nazi.” Although the battalion has sometimes denied that it adheres to Nazi ideology as a whole, “Nazi symbols such as the swastika and SS regalia are rife on the uniforms and bodies of Azov members.” Their uniforms carry the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel symbol, which looks like a black swastika on a yellow background. Andriy Diachenko, the spokesperson for the regiment in 2015, claimed that “10% to 20% of the group’s members are Nazis.” It appears that he made this statement in order to downplay fears of Nazification. However, even if the numbers are that low, it necessarily follows that all of the other members of the Azov battalion are Nazi collaborators.
Regardless of whether or not Azov or similar battalions accept 100% of Nazi ideology, it is essential to recognize that their overall orientation is clearly fascist: they receive funding from reactionary elements of the capitalist ruling class to run violent para-state militias–which in some cases have been integrated into the state–that are ultranationalist, racist, pro-capitalist, and anti-communist. Andriy Biletsky is well positioned to understand their orientation because he served as the leader of the Patriot of Ukraine and the SNA, as well as the Azov Battalion, before serving as a member of the Ukrainian Parliament from 2014-2019. In an interview, he explained his position as follows: “The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival. A crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen [inferior races, according to the standard Nazi terminology].”
Fascism today in Ukraine
In Ukraine today, fascist elements are present in the capitalist ruling class, paramilitary organizations, the Ukrainian military, the parliament, and certain sectors of society. While it would be a mistake to assume that they are in each case the dominant force, it would be equally erroneous to ignore their presence, extensive reach and the support they enjoy from the Zelenskyy government and imperialist forces outside the country.
In the 2019 parliamentary election, Svoboda formed a united party list with other far-right parties: Right Sector, National Corps and the Governmental Initiative of Yarosh. They only obtained 2.15% of the votes, not surpassing the 5% threshold for a parliamentary seat. In the same election, Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People party, which ran on an anti-corruption platform and is described as centrist in the mainstream press, won 124 seats on the nationwide party list and 130 constituency seats.
Zelenskyy’s party is named after the eponymous hit Ukrainian TV series that appealed to “Ukrainians frustrated with the country’s oligarchic elite, and the failure to drain the swamp after the country’s 2014 revolution.” In the series, Zelenskyy, a career actor and comedian, played the role of none other than the President of Ukraine. His meteoric rise to the actual presidency was thus due in no small part to his celebrity status as a famous actor, not unlike other political puppets in bourgeois democracies. Moreover, he received ample funding from a handful of private donors, including most notably the billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi, who was his single biggest supporter.
Kolomoyskyi owns an ownership stake in 1+1 Media Group, whose TV station carried “Servant of the People,” which retrospectively looks a lot like an extended campaign advertisement. His media outlet also provided security and logistical backup for the actor’s political campaign, during which time he traveled 14 times to Geneva and Tel Aviv, where Kolomoyskyi is based. The Pandora Papers revealed a spider web of offshore networks and financial entanglements between Zelenskyy and Kolomoyskyi.
Kolomoyskyi is, moreover, one of the major funders of the ultranationalist militias in Eastern Ukraine, including the fascist Azov and Aidar battalions, which have been accused of heinous war crimes in the Donbas region over the past eight years. He also allegedly funds “the Donbas, Dnepr 1, Dnepr 2 volunteer battalions.” When he was appointed governor of his home state of Dnipropetrovsk in March 2014, he was instrumental in crushing the separatist movement there by “spending more than $10 million to create the ‘Dnipro battalion.’”
In 2015, it was estimated that there were some 30 nationalist militias fighting separatists in eastern Ukraine. Financially supported by wealthy oligarchs like Kolomoyskyi and Serhiy Taruta (the billionaire governor of the Donetsk region who also funded the Azov battalion), they function as a powerful paramilitary force that supplements the Ukrainian military. In July 2015, Russia issued a warrant for Kolomoyskyi’s arrest for “organizing the killing of civilians” due to his financial support of the militants.
Far from cracking down on these ultranationalist militias, many of which display open signs of Nazism and fascism, Kolomoyskyi’s actor-turned-president has not only allowed them to act with impunity, but he has also woven a tight relationship between his administration and open fascists. For instance, in November 2021 Dmytro Yarosh, a former leader of Right Sector and avowed follower of Nazi collaborator Bandera, declared that he had been appointed as an advisor to the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Soon thereafter, Zelenskyy decorated Right Sector commander Dmytro Kotsyubaylo with the distinction “Hero of Ukraine.” On March 1 of this year, he appointed Maksym Marchenko, a former commander of the Aidar Battalion – which is accused of war crimes in Donbas – as the regional administrator of Odessa. There are numerous other ties between the Ukrainian government and military, on the one hand, and these ultra-nationalist and often fascist militias on the other.
While they’ve been busy empowering fascists, Ukrainian authorities also stripped communist parties of their right to participate in elections in 2015 and issued controversial ‘decommunisation’ laws: “The laws ban the display of Soviet symbols and change the status of the 09 May holiday marking the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in World War 2. The laws will effectively remove all mentions of ‘the Great Patriotic War’ (a Soviet term for World War 2) and replace it with ‘Second World War’; ban the Soviet Victory flag; and rename streets, squares, and even whole cities.” Tens of thousands of streets have since been renamed, along with nearly one thousand cities and villages. Over two thousand statues and monuments have also been removed in this expansive anti-communist cultural project. Despite widespread criticism, the current government has refused to revoke the laws. According to Abdul Rahman, “Zelensky’s reluctance to take on right-wing groups in the same way that he is targeting allegedly pro-Russian groups is a sign of their influence in setting the political discourse in the country.”
There have also been a number of important symbolic gestures that glorify ultra-nationalists and Nazi collaborators, thereby fostering a broader culture of fascism within certain sectors of Ukrainian society. Zelenskyy claimed in an interview, for instance: “There are indisputable heroes. Stepan Bandera is a hero for a certain part of Ukrainians, and this is a normal and cool thing. He was one of those who defended the freedom of Ukraine.” Zelenskyy also publicly defended Ukrainian footballer Roman Zolzulya as a “true patriot” when he was accused of being a Nazi due to his photos with Nazi collaborator Bandera and his open support of the Azov Battalion. Moreover, Zelenskyy’s former Prime Minister, Oleksiy Honcharuk appeared on stage at a neo-Nazi concert organized by the fascist C14 movement.
It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Ukraine was the only country, along with the United States, which voted against the UN General Assembly’s draft resolution “combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fueling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.” Important media outlets have broadcast Nazi propaganda, which resound throughout the broader culture. In 2014, a Ukrainian journalist on Hromadske TV openly called for genocide in Donbas, claiming that “there is a certain category of people that must be exterminated.”
On March 13 of this year, Ukrainian TV presenter Fahruddin Sharafmal issued an impassioned call for genocide and the slaughter of Russian children on a morning show on Channel 24. With a photograph of the notorious Nazi Adolf Eichman behind him, he said: “I allow myself to quote Adolf Eichmann, who said that in order to destroy a nation, you must destroy, first of all, its children. Because if you kill their parents, the children will grow up and take revenge. By killing children, they will never grow up and the nation will disappear.” “And when I get the chance to take out the Russians,” he went on, “I will definitely do it. Since you call me a Nazi, I adhere to the doctrine of Adolf Eichmann, and I will do everything in my power to ensure that you and your children never live on this earth. You have to understand that it’s about the victory of the Ukrainian people, not about peace. We need victory. And if we have to slaughter all your families – I’ll be one of the first to do it.” Channel 24 is part of the TRK Lux media conglomerate that is controlled by wealthy Ukrainian businesswoman Kateryna Kit-Sadova and her husband Andriy Sadovyi (the mayor of Lviv and former leader of the Self Reliance political party).
Zelenskyy has recently used the Russian invasion as a pretext to ban 11 political parties, including the largest opposition party that holds 43 seats in the parliament, while having communist leaders arrested. Alleging to fight against Russian “misinformation,” he also took control of news outlets, imposing a centralized information policy that combines all national TV channels into “a single information platform of strategic communication.” Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs is working directly with an international network of public relations firms to wage information warfare and control the narrative. According to a senior NATO official: “They are really excellent in stratcom [strategic communication] — media, info ops, and also psy-ops.”
Zelenskyy’s experience as a career actor has certainly been an asset in these endeavors. After all, he seeks to depict his government as free and democratic – not unlike the Western imperialist powers it is aligned with – while it supports fascist militias, receives funding from reactionary capitalists (who also fund Nazi battalions), glorifies ultranationalists and Nazi collaborators, emboldens a culture of fascism, bans political parties, and tightly controls news and information.
The fascist threat is international
Although Ukraine might seem to some in the United States or elsewhere to be a distant land with little bearing on one’s immediate political environment, it is actually an important center for the global fascist movement. According to Aljazeera: “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.” In an investigative report from early 2021, Time found that “Azov is much more than a militia. It has its own political party; two publishing houses; summer camps for children; and a vigilante force known as the National Militia, which patrols the streets of Ukrainian cities alongside the police […] 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.” Olena Semenyaka, the head of international outreach for Azov, told the reporters: “It could be described as a small state within a state.”
Ali Soufan has estimated that “more than 17,000 foreign fighters have come to Ukraine over the past six years from 50 countries.” In 2019, U.S. lawmakers wrote a letter to the State Department in which they stated that “the link between Azov and acts of terror in America is clear.” A 2018 FBI affidavit stated that Azov “is believed to have participated in training and radicalizing United States-based white supremacy organizations.” This included members of the white-supremacist Rise Above Movement, which were indicted for having “‘violently attacked and assaulted counter-protestors’ at several white nationalist and white supremacist events throughout the U.S., including the violent ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville.”
Nazism and fascism are very real factors in Ukraine, and they have been extensively documented. Recognizing this fact is essential to having a nuanced understanding of the current conflict, but it does not at all imply support for Putin’s military intervention, which has had horrific consequences for the lives of many innocent workers.
Finally, it should not be lost on us that the Biden administration, which came to power as a purported bulwark against the spread of fascism at home, is continuing the US policy of supporting fascist forces in one of the primary hubs for international fascism. This clearly demonstrates that the struggle against fascism can never be limited to a domestic battle. It must always be carried out within an internationalist framework and thus inseparably linked with a resolute anti-imperialism.
The author expresses his gratitude to Helmut-Harry Loewen for his invaluable suggestions and assistance in locating the best sources on fascism in Ukraine
Corporate media parrots the Azov Battalion
Over a month into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Western corporate media now uncritically passes on information sourced from the fascist Azov Battalion.
During the 2014 United States-backed coup of elected President Viktor Yanukovych, the general stance of Western media towards Kiev was uncritical, downplaying or ignoring the leading role fascist forces played in bringing down the Yanukovych government.
These forces, including the Svoboda Party and the Right Sector, out of which the Azov Battalion emerged, openly place themselves in the traditions of Nazi collaborationist organizations like the OUN-B and the UPA, which were responsible for the massacres of tens of thousands of Jews, Poles as well as Ukrainian civilians during World War II.
So blatant was the presence of prominent neo-Nazi forces in Ukraine that following the 2014 coup and outbreak of civil war in the eastern Donbass region, several media outlets such as Time, USA Today, the New York Times and others released stories admitting that indeed, the most dedicated soldiers within Ukraine’s Armed Forces were neo-Nazis.
In a 2015 USA Today article titled “Volunteer Ukrainian unit includes Nazis,” Azov Battalion spokesman Andriy Diachenko admitted that 10 to 20 percent of Azov’s members were neo-Nazis.
Time magazine noted in a January 2021 article “How a white-supremacist Milita uses Facebook to Radicalize and Train New Members,” that Azov’s neo-Nazi ideology and history were undeniable.
Regarding Azov founder Andriy Biletsky and his former Patriot of Ukraine group, Time reported that “Biletsky’s nickname within the group was Bely Vozhd, or White Ruler, and his manifesto seemed to pluck it’s narrative straight from Nazi ideology. Ukrainian nationalists, it said, must ‘lead the white nations of the world in a final crusade for their survival, a crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen,’ a German term for ‘subhumans,’ with roots in Nazi propaganda.”
Even though the US was funnelling billions of weapons into Ukraine’s military and paramilitary, Azov-related articles often attempted to distance the United States from the backing of Azov. Thus, a 2015 New York Times article on Ukraine’s far-right militias attempted to reassure its readers by uncritically reporting that “Americans are specifically prohibited from giving [military] instruction to members of the Azov group.”
In reality, pictures show that US officers have long been involved in training members of the Azov Battalion.Now, with NATO’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, all such pretences by the media have been abandoned. The Azov Battalion is integrated into Ukraine’s National Guard and is now playing a prominent role in the war, especially in Mariupol, a predominantly Russian-speaking city in southern Ukraine, control over which is of key strategic significance.
As the Western media plays a critical role in distributing imperialist propaganda on the war, “information” from the Azov Battalion is now propagated directly to Western audiences—often with no mention of its ties to neo-Nazis.
NBCs chief foreign policy correspondent Richard Engel led the way in whitewashing Azov when in early February he showed the Azov Battalion training Mariupol residents in the use of weapons and first aid. Despite the fact that Azov’s use of a Wolfsangel insignia, which is associated with Hitler’s SS in the Second World War, was clearly identifiable, Engel failed to mention Azov at all.
On March 22, CBS News published a defence of Azov titled “The Azov Battalion: How Putin built a false premise for war against ‘Nazis’ in Ukraine.”
In the article, CBS quoted Ruslan Leviev, an analyst with the Conflict Intelligence Team, as an expert in its defence of Azov.
Leviev flatly lied to CBS: “There are no Nazi battalions in Ukraine.”
“There is (the Azov) regiment … There are (estimated) several thousand people who are in this regiment. It is indeed a group where many members adhere to nationalist and far-right views. But a lot of people also join it because it is one of the most prepared and fit-for-war units,” Leviev assured CBS.
Later, on April 1, CNN featured a video on the Erin Burnett Upfront show of Azov Battalion Captain Bohdan Krotevych claiming that Russian forces had created “mountains of corpses on the streets,” noting that Krotevych is part of “ultra nationalist far-right battalion.”
But this disclosure had no impact on Burnett, who repeated Krotevych’s accusations as a statement of fact. Burnett also relayed Krotevych’s claim that the Mariupol bombing had killed 400 people, 100 more than the widely quoted figure of 300 dead.
On March 29, CNN published a story titled “A far-right battalion has a key role in Ukraine's resistance. It’s neo-Nazi history has been exploited by Putin,” defending Azov as an “effective fighting force” and downplaying its neo-Nazi ideology as a matter of the past.
After covering the myriad fascist violent incidents, and quoting at length from its leaders, the article denounces any questioning of the information coming from Azov regarding the war, such as the bombing of the Mariupol theatre as “Russian disinformation.”
Despite going to great lengths to sanitize Azov, the story was too truthful for the Ukrainian bourgeoisie, as parliament member Serhiy Taruta published an open letter and on Facebook called on CNN to quit publishing “Russian propaganda.”
Serious questions remain regarding the bombing of the Mariupol Theater, which Russia has accused Azov of blowing up as a false flag operation to elicit support for a no-fly zone in Ukraine. Whatever the nature of the bombing, it was quickly seized upon by Western media outlets and governments to call for an intensification of the anti-Russia war drive.
As Max Blumenthal reported on the GrayZone, Azov photos of the theatre bombing were quickly disseminated through western media outlets with no disclaimer that they were taken by a neo-Nazi militia.
Azov Battalion Deputy Commander Svyatoslav Palamar has been widely used as a source on the situation in Mariupol, including by CNN, the New York Post and the Telegraph. Again, no mention is made of Azov’s neo-Nazi ideology.
Blumenthal also noted that the western media reporting on the bombing was largely based on tweets from Kyiv Independent reporter Illia Ponomarenko, who has admitted to being “consecrated” into the Azov Battalion.
Ponomarenko has built a large following on Twitter since the beginning of Russia’s invasion and serves as a conduit for Ukrainian war propaganda back to western audiences.
A cheerleader for Ukrainian nationalism and war, Ponomarenko regularly posts gory photos of dead Russian soldiers and calls for NATO to intervene in the war on Ukraine’s behalf, thus assisting a social media campaign by Ukraine’s armed forces and the far-right that directly violates the Geneva Convention for the humane treatment of prisoners of war.
Notably, Ponomarenko’s employer, the newly created Kyiv Independent, receives its funding from western imperialism, including Washington’s National Endowment for Democracy and the EU’s European Endowment for Democracy.
More recently, photos of the apparent killing of civilians in Bucha first appeared on the social media accounts of figures such as Ponomarenko and the far-right “activist” thug Serhii Sternenko. The photos and reports were then fed to Western media outlets, which again seized upon them to call for increased sanctions against Russia and the prosecution of President Vladimir Putin as a war criminal.
Photo captions by the New York Times indicate that Azov Battalion soldiers were among the first to enter Bucha on April 2 after Russian forces left the town on March 30. Despite this fact, claims of a wanton Russian massacre are promoted uncritically while those calling for investigation before judgement are smeared as “Russian trolls.”
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