How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Nazis (Part 1)
The whitewashing of Azov by New York Times, Washington Post, and The Guardian
People still often refer to the “Azov Battalion,” which joined the National Guard of Ukraine (NGU) in 2014 and became the Azov Regiment, with two battalions. In 2023, this “openly neo-Nazi” unit was upgraded again as the 12th Special Forces Azov Brigade, with nine battalions on paper, including divisions for artillery, tanks, and air defense. And now NGU Azov commander Denys Prokopenko leads the 1st Azov Corps, consisting of five brigades, including the 12th Special Forces unit and another Azovite brigade.
Meanwhile, the broader Azov movement led by Andriy Biletsky is forming the 3rd Army Corps. There are other Azovite units, and Azov-inspired ones. After three years of war, the “gentle Azovization” of the Ukrainian armed forces is accelerating, but this seems to be met with the quiet approval of western media and officials. Apparently they consider far-right nationalism to be Ukraine’s secret weapon.
In 2022, Russia captured the remaining Ukrainian coastline on the Sea of Azov to establish a land bridge to the Crimean peninsula. The main obstacle, which the Russians destroyed, was the city of Mariupol, with its principal defenders being the NGU Azov Regiment. This partially explains the immediate role played by neo-Nazis in the information war.
With eyes on Mariupol in the early days of the war, the western media mostly abandoned any remaining concern and curiosity about neo-Nazis in the Azov Regiment (and other Azovite units). Hundreds of Azov fighters, in addition to other soldiers and civilians, held out for weeks in the city’s massive Azovstal Iron and Steel Works. New York Times reporter Michael Schwirtz, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, called it “Ukraine’s version of the Alamo.”
In “The Battle for Azovstal,” a podcast episode by the New York Times, Schwirtz claimed that “this group has a very complicated history going back to 2014,” when Andriy Biletsky, an infamous neo-Nazi, founded a “battalion of misfits” that welcomed everyone. “Anybody who wanted to could join … And, very, quickly, the Azov Battalion became associated with a band of far-right nationalists bordering on fascists.” But this was just “a small contingent of people,” and an “association that the Azov Battalion had in its infancy.” Or so they said…
As I’ve said before, the New York Times is a case study in the western media’s whitewashing of the most powerful neo-Nazi movement in Ukraine, and probably the world. Andrew Kramer, the Kyiv bureau chief for the NYT, appears to have been its first reporter to describe the “Azov group” as anything other than a “pro-Ukrainian paramilitary” force, a “militia fighting in the east,” or “one volunteer unit.” In 2015, Kramer wrote that Azov is “openly neo-Nazi.”
In early 2022, the NGU Azov Regiment was still “far-right,” according to the New York Times. On February 25, the day after Russia attacked Ukraine, the NYT worried that Azov “has drawn far-right fighters from around the world.” Over the next month, the Times said this “far-right military unit” is “known for having neo-Nazi sympathizers but remains a fringe presence in the country and its military.” That spring, amidst the Russian siege of Mariupol, the ideology of the Azov Regiment started to become past-tense in the “newspaper of record,” for example: “the Azov Battalion … was founded as a far-right volunteer unit.”
During the second half of April, Azov evolved from “a force that does include far-right soldiers, some of them foreign, including white supremacists and people who have been described as fascists”; to “a highly skilled and controversial unit” that is “filled with far-right fighters”; to “a force that does include nationalist soldiers, which the Kremlin has used to paint the unit as fascist”; and finally, a complicated unit “whose history as a far-right group has helped fuel Russia’s largely false claim that it is fighting fascists in Ukraine.” The Times settled on a phrase about Azov’s “history” that it repeatedly deployed. The far-right “roots” of the unit “lent a veneer of credibility” to Russian propaganda.
In May 2022, one might have read in the New York Times, “Though the Azov Battalion was founded in 2014 out of Ukraine’s ultranationalist and neo-Nazi groups, experts say the group has quelled much of its extremist side under pressure from authorities.” Around that time, the NYT conducted a soft-ball interview with Lt. Illia Samoilenko, “an intelligence officer who speaks fluent English, [and] seemed intent on defining the legacy of the Azov Battalion.”
“We know about our past,” he said. He acknowledged the Azov regiment’s “obscure” origins and its past association with far-right extremists — something he said the group had shed when it became part of the national military. Independent military analysts and experts who study the far right support that assertion, saying that Azov’s incorporation into the regular combat forces of the Ukrainian military led to a purging of extremist elements. Lt. Samoilenko said lingering public misperceptions about the battalion could explain why the group did not get as much support as it might have in the run up to the war.
Some so-called experts might “support that [evidence-free] assertion,” but the New York Times must have known this was hardly the consensus among those who study the far-right in Ukraine. The Times did not bother to fact-check Samoilenko, and subsequently began to describe Azov as “a former far-right militia” with ambiguous “connections to far-right movements” and “a hard-core contingent” that has “far-right origins.” The newspaper became a broken record when it mentioned “the Azov regiment, whose roots in far-right movements have offered a veneer of credibility for Mr. Putin’s tenuous claims that Ukraine has been infected with Nazism.” As for Samoilenko, better known as “Gandalf,” he once told a Czech reporter, “I don’t believe in any Holocaust, it’s just a story.”
The New York Times downgraded Azov from “far-right” to “nationalist.” Unidentified “analysts” assured the Times that “the Russian media’s portrayal of the group exaggerates the extent to which its members hold neo-Nazi views.” In July 2022, this infamous military unit “with roots in ultranationalist political groups” became a “strongly nationalistic group of fighters whose fame in Ukraine and early connections to far-right political figures have been used by the Kremlin to falsely depict the entire country as fascist.” That summer, Michael Schwirtz wrote that Azov became “a source of inspiration and pride for Ukrainians, with the commanders’ likenesses displayed on billboards around the country.”
Even Azov’s undeniably extremist “origins” were watered down as “strongly nationalist,” and the Times said that “Russian propaganda has attempted to paint [the Azov Regiment] as neo-Nazis.” Unfortunately for this newspaper, its Kyiv bureau chief once described Azov as “openly neo-Nazi,” and in 2019 the World News section published an article on the “Global Reach of White Extremism,” which mentioned “the Azov Battalion, a Ukrainian neo-Nazi paramilitary organization.”
It used to be standard to downplay the Azovites as a “fringe presence,” until that changed, and it became fashionable to whitewash these elite neo-Nazis as “fighters who are regarded in Ukraine as national heroes.” By the end of 2022, the New York Times described the “Azov Battalion” as “a powerful symbol of resistance,” “a nationalist fighting force,” and “a nationalist group whose early ties to far-right figures have been used by the Kremlin.”
In 2023, the Azov Brigade quickly went from having “far-right connections” to “onetime far-right connections,” and by spring, the unit reportedly had “little or no political bent.” In June, the month that Ukraine began its failed counter-offensive, the New York Times reported the death of Oleh Mudrak, the former commander of the first battalion in the Azov Regiment, not long after his release from Russian captivity. The Times did not mention Mudrak’s numerous Nazi tattoos, including a Black Sun and SS bolts on his arm, but explained that captured Azov members, “long painted as neo-Nazis by Russia as part of its justification for the war, came in for especially harsh treatment.” Last year, the New York Times said that the Azov Brigade simply “has a nationalist heritage.”
About a decade ago, the Washington Post reported that Azov “has become a source of controversy for its use of neo-Nazi symbols and rhetoric.” In 2017, WaPo published an op-ed by former USAID project officer Josh Cohen that touched on the Azov movement: “Ukraine’s ultra-right militias are challenging the government to a showdown.” Five years later, less than two weeks after Russian forces invaded, a team at the Post wrote about the (re-)emergence of Azov as “a controversial defender of Ukraine.” The article mentioned “the battalion’s far-right nationalist ideology,” and said that its “own leaders and fighters concede that some extremists remain in their ranks.” However, the Washington Post reassured readers, “Under pressure from U.S. and Ukrainian authorities, the Azov battalion has toned down its extremist elements.” That spring, Azov was described as “a nationalist group” and “far-right.”
In January 2023, when Meta reversed its ban on the NGU’s Azov unit, the Post still described the regiment as “a Ukrainian far-right military group” with “connections to far-right nationalist ideology.” However, “Meta argues that the Azov Regiment is now separate from the far-right nationalist Azov Movement. It notes that the Ukrainian government has formal command and control over the unit.” Within a few months, WaPo reliably echoed the story about “Azov’s apparent evolution,” and reported that “[Azov] Brigade leaders are seeking to move past the controversy surrounding Azov’s far-right roots.” That summer, Azov was said to be “one of Ukraine’s most adept military units,” and a former “far-right militia with ultranationalist roots.” In some cases, it was acknowledged to be a “controversial” brigade that “undoubtedly has at least some extremists in its ranks” and “has used the medieval Wolsangel insignia made infamous by Nazi German SS units.”
In June 2024, the Washington Post broke the news that the State Department cleared the Azov Brigade for US weapons and training, ignoring a Congressional ban that refers to the “Azov Battalion.” The US government insisted that the Azov Brigade of 2024 had nothing to do with the Azov Battalion of 2014, not long after the Ukrainian government celebrated Azov’s “10th anniversary,” going back to the day that Andriy Biletsky became its founder. “The two units are not the same, despite persistent Russian disinformation to conflate them,” the State Department Bureau of Political Affairs said in June 2024, chastising Erik Sperling, who runs a progressive think tank in Washington and brought about the Azov ban as a former senior advisor to Congressman Ro Khanna.
Fact check for you, @ErikSperling: USG [the US Government] never provided supported to the now disbanded militia known as the “Azov battalion.” In contrast, The 12th Special Forces “Azov” Brigade received arms and equipment after successfully completing necessary security forces vetting. [Original emphasis]
The WaPo article that triggered this exchanged quoted Svyatoslav Palamar, the brigade’s deputy commander, several times. For example: “Now that the ban is lifted, it brings us to a full understanding of how poisonous Russian propaganda is.” The Post did not issue an apology for its previous reporting, but dropped the issue about Azov’s “past.” The Washington Post noted that Palamar joined the Azov Battalion in 2014 (before its alleged cleansing), but did not mention his long-time membership in the “Patriot of Ukraine,” the neo-Nazi group that largely formed the unit.
In 2014, The Guardian published several articles that dealt with Azov and the far right in Ukraine. Aside from an op-ed by sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko, titled “Ukraine has ignored the far right for too long – it must wake up to the danger,” the bylines all included Shaun Walker, who is today the Guardian’s central and eastern Europe correspondent. The most significant article of his, “Azov fighters are Ukraine’s greatest weapon and may be its greatest threat,” is worth quoting at length.
The Azov causes particular concern due to the far right, even neo-Nazi, leanings of many of its members. Dmitry claimed not to be a Nazi, but waxed lyrical about Adolf Hitler as a military leader, and believes the Holocaust never happened. Not everyone in the Azov battalion thinks like Dmitry, but after speaking with dozens of its fighters and embedding on several missions during the past week in and around the strategic port city of Mariupol, the Guardian found many of them to have disturbing political views, and almost all to be intent on "bringing the fight to Kiev" when the war in the east is over.
The battalion's symbol is reminiscent of the Nazi Wolfsangel, though the battalion claims it is in fact meant to be the letters N and I crossed over each other, standing for "national idea". Many of its members have links with neo-Nazi groups, and even those who laughed off the idea that they are neo-Nazis did not give the most convincing denials.
"Of course not, it's all made up, there are just a lot of people who are interested in Nordic mythology," said one fighter when asked if there were neo-Nazis in the battalion. When asked what his own political views were, however, he said "national socialist". As for the swastika tattoos on at least one man seen at the Azov base, "the swastika has nothing to do with the Nazis, it was an ancient sun symbol," he claimed. …
Dmitry said he believes that Ukraine needs "a strong dictator to come to power who could shed plenty of blood but unite the nation in the process”. Many in the Azov battalion with whom the Guardian spoke shared this view, which is a long way from the drive for European ideals and democracy that drove the protests in Kiev at the beginning. The Russian volunteer fighting with the Azov said he believes Ukraine needs “a junta that will restrict civil rights for a while but help bring order and unite the country.”
In 2018, Guardian reporter Kevin Rawlinson referred to Azov as “a notorious Ukrainian fascist militia,” and days later, the Guardian published an article by journalist Marc Bennetts about the newest arm of the Azov movement, its paramilitary street wing, the National Militia, which later became “Centuria.” Bennetts described the Azov movement as “a far-right group with a military wing [the Azov Regiment] that contains openly neo-Nazi members, and its political spin-off, the National Corpus party.” A year later, the Guardian published a photo essay about “Ultranationalism in Ukraine,” according to which, “The growing presence of far-right groups in Ukraine leaves the west in a quandary.” It mentioned “the Azov battalion, a Ukrainian ultra-right paramilitary group that advocated white supremacist views.”
Oleksiy Kuzmenko shared the above video in August 2020: "Ukraine's far-right Azov movement now openly talks an EXPANSIONIST agenda for Ukraine and 'Fight of civilizations'. 'We have to attain victories over foreign enemies by grabbing territory': Azov's promo video from the roll-out of the 'Centuria' organization on August 1st."In 2020, the Guardian published an article that described Azov as a “neo-Nazi extremist movement” and “a neo-Nazi paramilitary force.” About a week before Putin launched his so-called Special Military Operation, the Guardian reported that a British airport was conducting checks “over fears far-right extremists may travel to Ukraine.” According to this article, “The most notorious far-right group is the Azov Battalion, a paramilitary force which uses Nazi-linked symbols and has had many members who have professed far-right extremist views.” Almost three years later, the Guardian reported, without any sense of alarm, “Ukraine’s highest profile combat unit [NGU Azov Brigade] to recruit English-speaking soldiers.”
In April 2022, during the siege of Mariupol, the Guardian published an article that described Azov as “a unit associated with a far-right political party [National Corps] and containing a significant proportion of neo-Nazis.” A month later, the Guardian started to dodge this reality and echo the new narrative that Azov “has in the past had nationalist far-right affiliation … but has become a unit of the Ukrainian national guard.” (It joined the National Guard in 2014.) The next day, another article acknowledged that “some of its leaders are known to hold far-right views.”
A few days later, the Guardian published an article which said Azov “has historical far-right affiliations,” and a series of photos from the press service of the Azov Regiment, with a caption that clarified, “The Azov regiment retains some far-right affiliations.” In a flurry of articles about the surrender of Ukrainian forces that held out for weeks in Azovstal, the Guardian arrived at the following formulation, which it repeated numerous times (with some variations): “The Azov regiment was formed in 2014 as a volunteer militia to fight Russia-backed forces in east Ukraine, and many of its original members had far-right extremist views. Since then, the unit has been integrated into the Ukrainian national guard and its commanders say it has moved away from its far-right origins.”
By September, the Guardian said at least three more times that the Azov regiment “retains some far-right affiliations.” That month, Shaun Walker wrote that Azov “first formed as a volunteer battalion in 2014, when many of its members had far-right leanings.” In February 2023, Walker and a team of Guardian journalists (including Luke Harding) explained that leaders of the Azov Brigade are “insisting they have shed their previous dubious politics and rapidly becoming Ukrainian heroes.”
In March 2024, the Guardian conceded, “The Azov brigade has often been criticized for its links with Nazism and the far-right … [and] some have suggested its far-right links and symbolism have remained.” However, less than a month later, the Guardian's defense and security editor Dan Sabbagh insisted that Azov “has shed any far-right associations … and is one of the military’s elite forces.” After Washington cleared the brigade for US weapons and training, the Guardian reported that “current members reject accusations of extremism and ties with far-right movements.”
This leading UK publication has also dropped the issue of the “revered” Azov’s “past,” apparently except when Sabbagh wants to bring it up (“decade-old nationalist origins have made it a target of Russian propaganda”). He wrote the January 2025 article about the goal of “Ukraine’s highest profile combat unit to recruit English-speaking soldiers” for its own International Azov Battalion.
Last summer, the Guardian quoted a Telegram post from NGU Azov officer Roman Ponomarenko. Fellow readers of “Events in Ukraine” will recognize the name of this Azov military analyst. His other “area of expertise” is “World War II and Ukrainian formations in the German armed forces,” and he also runs a neo-Confederate Facebook page dedicated to the US Civil War. According to Ponomarenko, the “Galicia Division” of the Nazi Waffen-SS was “the most motivated and well-trained Ukrainian military formation of the 20th century.”
So did Azov change, or just its Western media coverage? Stay tuned for Part 2: The ‘Experts’ Lied to Us: ‘Evolution,’ ‘Integration,’ and ‘Depoliticization.’ If you want to support my work, you can “Buy Me a Coffee.” Thanks for reading.
Great work! The whitewashing of neo nazism by our media is unforgivable and will never be forgotten.
Regarding the claim that Azov members' fascistic tendencies are at odds with "the drive for European ideals and democracy that drove the protests in Kiev at the beginning", in early 2022 Yevhen Karas of C14 was proud to say precisely the opposite about his group's involvement in Maidan: https://open.substack.com/pub/alipmcg/p/the-smoking-gun-tying-the-west-to
Yes, the WhiteWash Crowd doesn’t believe in anything. So why not?
What is interesting is who by name has the Azov “account” which of course it is exactly.