The 'Experts' Lied to Us
How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Nazis
Last week’s post chronicled the whitewashing of the notorious Azov unit in the National Guard of Ukraine (NGU) by the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Guardian. Citing mostly unnamed “experts” and “analysts,” the Western media has claimed that Azov’s “integration” in the NGU led the group to quietly overcome its “neo-Nazi past.”
Last month the historian Marta Havryshko noted that a (formerly) USAID-funded Ukrainian outlet produced a “heroic saga” documentary about the NGU Azov Brigade, featuring one of its ideological/recruitment officers, Vladyslav “Docent” Dutchak. According to Havryshko, the filmmaker said to him, “The roots of this demonization of Azov go back to its formation. So, I have to ask — were there people in the unit at the beginning who held neo-Nazi views?”
“I didn’t see such people in the unit,” Dutchak answered. Back in 2015, before the New York Times and Foreign Policy magazine described Azov as “openly neo–Nazi,” but after it joined the National Guard, a foreign affairs reporter for USA Today interviewed Alex, a drill sergeant in the Azov Regiment, who “admitted he is a Nazi and said with a laugh that no more than half his comrades are fellow Nazis.”
He said he supports strong leadership for Ukraine, like Germany during World War II, but opposes the Nazis’ genocide against Jews. Minorities should be tolerated as long as they are peaceful and don’t demand special privileges, he said, and the property of wealthy oligarchs should be taken away and nationalized. He vowed that when the war ends, his comrades will march on the capital, Kiev, to oust a government they consider corrupt.
Andriy Diachenko, a spokesperson for the Azov Regiment, tried to do some damage control, and said that “only 10% to 20%” of Azov fighters in the National Guard were really Nazis. “I know Alex is a Nazi, but it’s his personal ideology. It has nothing to do with the official ideology of the Azov,” Diachenko told Oren Dorell from USA Today. “He’s a good drill sergeant and a good instructor for tactics and weapons skills.” Dorell also spoke with Oleg Odnorozhenko, then deputy commander of the regiment, who “complained that Alex does not speak for the group.” Odnorozhenko was in those days the main ideologue of two neo-Nazi organizations (the Social-National Assembly and Patriot of Ukraine) associated with the Azov Battalion.
After a handful of critical mainstream media reports, the House of Representatives unanimously adopted an amendment to its 2015 military spending bill to ban US assistance and training to the “Azov Battalion,” which the late Congressman John Conyers (D-MI) denounced as a “repulsive neo-Nazi” group. The Nation reported that the House Defense Appropriations Committee eventually stripped Conyers’ amendment “under pressure from the Pentagon.” (The amendment finally stuck, or so it seemed, in 2018.)
In the meantime, Kristofer Harrison, a former advisor to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in the George W. Bush administration, smeared Conyers as “Putin’s Man in Congress” for promoting “the Moscow-inspired lie that [the Azov Regiment] is a neo-Nazi organization.” Azov’s emblem isn’t a wolfsangel, he insisted; “the resemblance is merely coincidental.” Harrison offered no serious debunking of “the Moscow-inspired lie,” but said that “one of [Ukraine’s] most effective units” had “some PR spade work to do.” He helped them get started by interviewing “Azov’s spokesman, Roman Zvarych.”
The Azov’s spokesman, Roman Zvarych, told me that the battalion has a selective screening program that accepts only 50 out of almost 300 recruits each month. He says they have a thorough background check and reject members for various reasons, including having fascist leanings. He explained further that they have actually committed two former members to psychiatric hospitals because of their pro-fascist viewpoints.
In those days, the Azov Regiment had a Swedish neo-Nazi running its training program, while Roman Zvarych allegedly functioned as “the interlocutor between the Ukrainian far-right and their foreign sponsors.” Zvarych was a leader of the new “Civic Corps,” on its way to establishing a political party for Azov veterans. Today his brother, Ihor Zvarych, is the treasurer of the nationalist Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA).
Born in Yonkers, New York in 1953, Roman Zvarych at least used to be a prominent member of the OUN-B, or “Banderite” faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. (Note for readers of the “Bandera Lobby Blog”: Andriy Diachenko, the other Azov spokesman, was a former member of the OUN-B’s “Youth Nationalist Congress” from western Ukraine.) By the 1980s, the OUN-B took over the UCCA, and Zvarych became a personal secretary to Banderite ideologue Yaroslav Stetsko, who led the OUN-B from 1968 until his death in 1986. In the early 1990s, his widow Slava Stetsko co-founded the unsuccessful far-right political party, “Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists,” with Roman Zvarych. Meanwhile, according to the historian Per Rudling, the 1990’s “Social-National Party of Ukraine” — a neo-Nazi forerunner to the Azov movement — rooted itself in “Stetsko’s ideology of ‘two revolutions,’ one national and one social.”
Zvarych regularly participated in events of the Stetskos’ Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, “the largest and most important umbrella for former Nazi collaborators,” and the World Anti-Communist League, the unofficial “Fascist International” of the Cold War. Decades later, Zvarych reportedly helped the Azov movement seize its “ATEK” headquarters in a former factory on the outskirts of Kyiv, which became the home of a recruitment and training center for the Azov Regiment, as well as an Azovite sergeant school, named after OUN founder Yevhen Konovalets. As told by the journalist Leonid Ragozin, “The school functioned outside Ukraine’s system of military education - one of many reasons to suspect that Azov was highly autonomous and never truly integrated in the armed forces.” (More recently, the Azov school formed the 354th Mechanized Training Regiment in the Ground Forces of Ukraine.)
Zvarych and Azov parted ways by the 2016 launch of the National Corps, an Azovite political party led by Andriy Biletsky, the first Azov commander, rumored to be called the “White Chief.” The creation of his National Corps ironically helped to launder the reputation of the military unit that he founded, as well as the larger Azov movement. After Vladimir Putin launched his “Special Military Operation,” the Western media (and apparently Washington) scrambled to revive a debunked narrative from several years ago. “Pro-Ukraine” propagandists essentially argued that Azov already achieved “deNazification,” if only by establishing a far-right political party.
When people said that the NGU Azov unit “shed any far-right associations,” that included the Azov movement led by Andriy Biletsky, who now commands the 3rd Army Corps in the Ground Forces. From 2023 until recently, Biletsky led the Azovite 3rd Assault Brigade, which will continue to exist in the new corps, like the NGU Azov Brigade. Certain “experts” argued before the war, such as Anton Shekhovtsov in 2020, that “the toxic far-right leadership formally left the [Azov] regiment and founded what would become a far-right party called ‘National Corps.’” The journalist Oleksiy Kuzmenko refuted this, also in 2020: “the available evidence indicates that the regiment remains joined at the hip to the internationally active National Corps party it spawned, and the wider Azov movement associated with the regiment.”
Shekhovtsov, a far-right activist turned “far-right expert,” was responding to an op-ed in the New York Times by then-Congressman Max Rose (D-NY) and former FBI agent Ali Soufan, in which they called for the US government to designate the “Azov Battalion” as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. In the spring of 2022, the Soufan Group, led by Rose and Soufan, made a U-turn and published a special report on Ukraine that claimed, “Azov has been largely regularized under the command and control of the Ukrainian armed forces, which has worked to winnow extremists from its midst. … According to experts on the European far-right like Anton Shekhovtsov, the Azov of 2022 is nothing like the group from eight years ago.” Mollie Saltskog, a senior intelligence analyst at the Soufan Group, told the Washington Post that the National Guard “had to purge a lot of those extremist elements.”
Vyacheslav Likhachev is another “expert” cited by the media to downplay the far-right in Ukraine. He has echoed Shekhovtsov’s claim that Biletsky and the National Corps retained no more than a symbolic link with Azov, having tried and failed “to exploit the Azov ‘trademark’ in political life.” To be fair, the NGU Azov unit, wanting US support, has paid lip service to this narrative. In a March 2022 statement to CNN, the Azov Regiment said it “appreciates and respects Andriy Biletsky as the regiment’s founder and first commander, but we have nothing to do with his political activities and the National Corps party.” However, as Oleksiy Kuzmenko wrote in 2020,
the role of the far-right leadership in the regiment remains evident. Both the National Guard unit and the political party admit to being part of the wider “Azov movement” led by the regiment’s first commander and current National Corps party leader Andriy Biletsky. The unit routinely hosts Biletsky (and other former commanders) at its bases and welcomes his participation in ceremonies, greeting him as a leader. Biletsky positions himself as the curator of the regiment, and has claimed to deal directly with Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov on related matters – a claim that Avakov appeared to confirm in early 2019. Shekhovtsov describes the regiment as a regular unit of the National Guard, but it is not. Regimental commanders have said that their unit owes its special status to being shielded from government interference. In 2019, the head of Azov’s military academy claimed Biletsky protected Azov from being “destroyed” by Ukraine’s leaders, while another commander described Biletsky as someone who “finds sponsors that really invest money.” Furthermore, Azov’s Kyiv recruitment center and military academy share a location with the offices of the National Corps.
The NGU Azov Brigade might have distanced itself from Andriy Biletsky in the past few years, but as deputy commander Illia “Gandalf” Samoilenko admitted in 2023, “Soldier to soldier and officer to officer, we have good relations with the 3rd Brigade [led by Biletsky].” In addition to the Yevhen Konovalets Military School, which unites the Azovite units and salutes Biletsky as their collective leader, the NGU Azov Brigade has a “standard-bearer school” named after Mykola Stsiborskyi, a fascist OUN ideologue who drafted an explicitly totalitarian constitution for Ukraine on the eve of World War II. The Azovites have also called this their “Natiocracy School,” named for Stsiborskyi’s concept of nationalist dictatorship. Kuzmenko observed several years ago, this school trains “political-ideological officers” for the NGU Azov unit, and was “tied to the far-right National Corps party” since its establishment in 2017. He called this “another strong link between AR [the Azov Regiment] and the larger Azov movement.”
“THE AZOV OF 2022 IS NOTHING LIKE THE GROUP FROM EIGHT YEAR AGO.”
Denys Prokopenko has been the NGU Azov commander since 2017. Andriy Biletsky made a speech at his torchlit inauguration ceremony. According to Stanford University’s “Mapping Militants Project,” Prokopenko was one of the earliest members of the Azov Battalion. He is known to be a former football hooligan, affiliated with the “Albatross” firm, which is a member of the racist “White Boys Club” that refers to Prokopenko as a “legend of our movement.” Reporting Radicalism, a website created several years ago by the Ukraine branch of the US-funded Freedom House, had this to say about the “death rune,” which Prokopenko has tattooed on his upper-right arm.
It is one of the most common neo-Nazi symbols and is used widely by members of the Far Right in various countries as a marker of Nazi, neo-Nazi, and racist views. ... The ‘death rune’ is used widely in Ukraine to demonstrate Nazi and racist views, often without any connection to a specific organization. Supporters of far-right ideologies almost always use it to symbolize death, most commonly in conjunction with the ‘life rune.’ This rune is almost never mistakenly used.
Prokopenko was one of the first members of the Azov Regiment’s “Borodach Division” platoon, just like his predecessor, Maksym Zhorin. The group’s symbol was a bearded Nazi Totenkopf, which is flanked by SS bolts in some cases, for example, on the arm of Oleg Mudrak, who commanded the first battalion of the Azov Regiment in 2022. On the birthday of the Borodach (“Bearded Man”) Division, in 2017 and 2018, the regiment shared a group photo of Prokopenko’s old platoon on social media, but with their backs turned away from the camera, facing toward a large Perun idol outside of Kyiv.
Perun is a Slavic god of war, worshipped by some pagan fighters in Ukraine. In 2017, on the initiative of Maksym Zhorin, the third commander of the Azov Regiment, the unit installed a Perun idol on its base in Mariupol. As the shrine went up, Azov fighters threw up their right arms in a ceremony that involved bloodletting. According to the NGU Azov press service, this site was intended as a “sacred place, where before combat missions, each fighter could consecrate their weapons and worship the deity, gaining strength and invincibility from the shrine for the upcoming battle.”
Meanwhile Azov held a sports tournament to celebrate a 10th century Kievan prince’s military victory over Khazaria, which had a Turkic elite that converted to Judaism. “This grandiose victory over the Jewish state ranks among the most significant events in Slavic and world history,” Zhorin told assembled fighters. “With small forces, the prince was able to defeat the enemy. This testifies, first of all, to the courage and professionally high level of training of his warriors. The invincible spirit and weapons of the descendants of Perun destroyed the parasitic system. We can draw many parallels to today’s events.”
Kyrylo “Kirt” Berkal, who commanded the Yevhen Konovalets Military School and the 2nd battalion of the NGU Azov Regiment, led the Nazi pagan ceremony. Later that year he met with representatives of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), an agency in the U.S. Department of Defense tasked with countering “weapons of mass destruction and emerging threats.” According to the DTRA, since 2005, its Biological Threat Reduction Program has “assisted the Ukrainian government in converting former Soviet biological weapons research facilities,” which of course became the famous “US-funded biolabs.” In 2017, after Denys Prokopenko succeeded Maksym Zhorin as commander, the press service of the NGU Azov Regiment reported that its base in Mariupol hosted “a multinational inspection group” including U.S. military officials. The NGU Azov leadership held a meeting with the foreign delegation, which included several officials from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, such as Brian Cotter, an arms control inspection officer who is now a “Political-Military Planner” for the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.
According to Vyacheslav Likhachev, a favorite source for pro-Azov information warriors, “right-wing radicals who clearly articulated their views were deliberated ‘cleaned out’ by the new commandment of the regiment in 2017. In recent years, there are absolutely no grounds for accusations that neo-Nazis serve in the Azov regiment.” Supposedly under Prokopenko, Azov purged extremists as it worshipped a pagan god of war, established a “standard-bearer school” named after a fascist OUN ideologist, and developed its own version of the Nazis’ “Cathedral of Light.”
Defending History, an online publication that combats Holocaust revisionism in Eastern Europe, noticed the Azov Regiment staged a demonstration in September 2018 that “looks like it was inspired by the Nazis’ 1930s Nuremberg rallies. Searchlights, torches, the giant banners - Leni Riefenstahl’s legacy is alive and well.” Oleksiy Kuzmenko also commented on the “striking images” from this ceremony. It appears that Azov started to use searchlights in 2017, the year of Prokopenko’s ascent. Although the Black Sun already disappeared from its official chevron, NGU Azov videos regularly featured the following sequence until 2019.
If the expert Azov defenders had any shred of honesty or good intentions, they might at least acknowledge that their alleged “cleansing” missed some spots. For example, in 2021, Oleksiy Kuzmenko unmasked Yuriy “Milan” Gavrylyshyn as the head of a neo-Nazi network that “made its home in Ukraine’s major Western military training hub.” These days, Gavrylyshyn is a prominent NGU Azov officer who leads its recruitment center. In 2022, Kuzmenko also reported the “addition of notorious far-right figure Yuriy Mykhalchyshyn to the Azov Regiment” as a “recruitment officer.” Some twenty years ago, Mykhalchyshyn is known to have founded a short-lived “Joseph Goebbels Political Research Center.”
When Russia invaded Ukraine, Prokopenko’s forces in Mariupol included an absurdly neo-Nazi squad, the “Vedmedi SS,” which now serves in the Ukrainian Marine Corps. Around that time, Oleksiy Kuzmenko noted that the page for the Yevhen Konovalets Military School on the website of the Azov Regiment linked to an Azovite Youtube account featuring interviews with white nationalists from the US and Europe. Last year, another openly neo-Nazi unit, the “Neptune” tactical group, appeared in a reconnaissance company of the NGU Azov Brigade. The Neptune unit’s chevron often includes “88,” a well-known neo-Nazi code for “Heil Hitler,” and a wolfsangel rune, which Azov defenders insist has nothing to do with its trademark symbol.
Hundreds of former Azov fighters remain in Russian captivity, but there was never a purge. For that reason, the “experts” evidently fail to agree on who did the cleansing, and when (2014? 2017? 2022?), and if this was an organic process, or took place “under the pressure of U.S. and Ukrainian authorities.” For the most part, Azovites in the National Guard have made a superficial effort to clean up their image. Meanwhile other Azov units reap the PR benefits, without bothering to do the same.
In 2022, the National Corps and its paramilitary youth wing Centuria formed territorial defense (TDF) and special forces (SSO) units that were more openly neo-Nazi and eventually coalesced in Andriy Biletsky’s 3rd Assault Brigade, which is now creating the 3rd Army Corps. In an operation overseen by Ukrainian military intelligence, the SSO Azov-Kyiv Regiment tried to come to the rescue of the NGU Azov Regiment in Azovstal.
Several soldiers from the SSO Azov unit joined the Mariupol garrison, and numerous wounded Azovites from the National Guard were evacuated, in risky helicopter trips. These missions enamored people like John Spencer, the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute, who put an Azov sticker on his laptop.
Mykyta Nadtochiy, one of the evacuated Azovites, eventually gathered all the remaining forces that “became the backbone” of the post-Mariupol NGU Azov unit. Nadtochiy served as the acting commander until Denis Prokopenko returned to Ukraine in 2023. If there was ever going to be a purge, this might have been the time, but Nadtochiy also appears to be a neo-Nazi.
Among the SSO Azov fighters that flew to Avozstal was Ruslan “David” Serbov, who later became a “Jewish” ambassador of the NGU Azov Brigade. After his release from Russian captivity, Serbov spent at least a couple months in Israel receiving medical treatment. He took pictures there wearing a hoodie from a neo-Nazi Ukrainian brand. Its name is abbreviated as “NS” because that also stands for “National Socialism.” Soon after returning to Ukraine in early 2023, Serbov met with the “Galician Youth,” an Azov-linked group which spread antisemitic fliers before the war.
Earlier last year, the SSO “Lyubart” unit, established by Centuria members in the Volyn region, joined the NGU Azov Brigade as its 5th special forces battalion. Centuria, the openly neo-Nazi street wing of the Azov movement and the National Corps, more or less formed the backbone of the SSO Azov units. Its founder, Ihor Mykhailenko, commanded the NGU Azov Regiment after Biletsky — together they led the SSO Azov Kyiv-Regiment — and declared at Centuria’s fascistic launch ceremony that “everything anti-Ukrainian will be annihilated.” Now the Centuria-linked Lyubart unit is forming a brigade in the National Guard’s “depoliticized” 1st Azov Corps.
In the spring of 2022, the Guardian tried to explain that the Azov Regiment used to have a “nationalist far-right affiliation … but has become a unit of the Ukrainian national guard,” as if the Interior Ministry of Ukraine would never tolerate far-right nationalists. Arsen Avakov, the Interior Minister from 2014-21, was widely regarded as the chief patron of the Azov movement. In those years, a former deputy commander of the Azov Battalion served as the chief of police in Kyiv Oblast.
The far-right Svoboda party has a Nazi-infested battalion in the National Guard’s elite “Rubizh” brigade, and nobody pretends that their “extremist side” is screened and purged. In any case, the New York Times assures us that “experts say the [NGU Azov] group has quelled much of its extremist side under pressure from authorities.” It would be more accurate to say that “much of its extremist side” is forming the 3rd Army Corps. Dmytro “Velichar” Babych led the “special communications service” of the Azov Regiment when he was killed in action in 2022. A dozen years earlier, Babych planted a bomb in an Orthodox church that killed an 80-year-old nun.
In his 2020 article, “Why Azov should not be designated a foreign terrorist organization,” Anton Shekhovtsov acknowledged that the “National Corps is actively building contacts with like-minded movements and organizations across the West while many Western far-right activists visit representatives of the National Corps in Ukraine.” He admitted that the Azov Battalion was “formed by the leadership of a neo-Nazi group called ‘Patriot of Ukraine’ in spring 2014.” (Babych, for example, led the organization in Zaporizhia, where he forged ties to a local neopagan group.) But, Shekhovtsov argued, “while the ideologically inimical nature of Azov’s roots is indisputable, it is likewise certain that Azov attempted to depoliticize itself; the toxic far-right leadership formally left the regiment,” to build the Azov movement. Svyatoslav Palamar, the deputy commander of the Azov Brigade, and before that a member of the Patriot of Ukraine, perhaps did not yet receive the memo. “We have a leader in Andriy Biletsky,” he said in 2019, five years after Biletsky left the unit.
“The historical mission of our Nation in this turning point of the century is to lead the White Peoples of the world in the last crusade for their existence. A march against the Semitic-led subhumans.” Andriy Biletsky’s infamous quote is actually an excerpt from the manifesto of his Kharkiv-based neo-Nazi organization “Patriot of Ukraine,” which dissolved into the Azov movement. The 1990’s “Social-Nationalist Party of Ukraine” disbanded its paramilitary youth wing, the Patriot of Ukraine, when it rebranded as the Svoboda party in 2004, but Biletsky revived the group in Russian-speaking Kharkiv (AKA Kharkov). Under his leadership, the organization defined its ideology as “Ukrainian racial Social-Nationalism.” According to the manifesto of this Nazi pagan paramilitary group that launched Azov, “Our task is to fight for the creation of a powerful Social-Nationalist movement that will encompass the entire Nation and gain power in the State.”
On the day that Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the Intercept published an article about Facebook’s decision to “temporarily allow its billions of users to praise the Azov Battalion, a Ukrainian neo-Nazi military unit previously banned from being freely discussed under the company’s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy.”
According to internal policy materials reviewed by The Intercept, Facebook will “allow praise of the Azov Battalion when explicitly and exclusively praising their role in defending Ukraine OR their role as part of the Ukraine’s National Guard.” Internally published examples of speech that Facebook now deems acceptable include “Azov movement volunteers are real heroes, they are a much needed support to our national guard”; “We are under attack. Azov has been courageously defending our town for the last 6 hours”; and “I think Azov is playing a patriotic role during this crisis.”
The materials stipulate that Azov still can’t use Facebook platforms for recruiting purposes or for publishing its own statements and that the regiment’s uniforms and banners will remain as banned hate symbol imagery, even while Azov soldiers may fight wearing and displaying them. In a tacit acknowledgement of the group’s ideology, the memo provides two examples of posts that would not be allowed under the new policy: “Goebbels, the Fuhrer and Azov, all are great models for national sacrifices and heroism” and “Well done Azov for protecting Ukraine and its white nationalist heritage.”
In December 2024, the same Intercept reporter, Sam Biddle, wrote this about “The Facebook Apostate” Hannah Byrne.
For two years, Hannah Byrne was part of an invisible machine that determines what over 3 billion people around the world can say on the internet. From her perch within Meta’s Counterterrorism and Dangerous Organizations team, Byrne helped craft one of the most powerful and secretive censorship policies in internet history.
…
Still, Byrne had doubts about the model because of the clear intimacy between American state policy and Meta’s content moderation policy. Meta’s censorship systems are “basically an extension of the government,” Byrne said in an interview. …
Within weeks [of the Russian invasion], Byrne found the moral universe around her inverted: The heavily armed hate group sanctioned by Congress since 2018 were now freedom fighters resisting occupation, not terroristic racists. As a Counterterrorism and Dangerous Organizations policy manager, Byrne’s entire job was to help form policies that would most effectively thwart groups like Azov. Then one day, this was no longer the case. “They’re no longer neo-Nazis,” Byrne recalls a policy manager explaining to her somewhat shocked team, a line that is now the official position of the White House.
In early 2023, Meta welcomed the Azovites back to Facebook and Instagram, allegedly because it was convinced that “the Azov Regiment is now separate from the far-right nationalist Azov Movement.” But as Oleksiy Kuzmenko explained years ago, it is “next to impossible to draw a clear line between the [Azov] regiment itself and the wider Azov movement, including the National Corps.” With the creation of other Azovite military units, it became easier, and yet, while Meta continued to ban Andriy Biletsky and his political party, it opened the floodgates for his Azov movement, in particular for Centuria, the 3rd Assault Brigade, and their dominant neo-Nazi elements.
Shortly before the Ukrainian government announced Meta’s change of policy, Biletsky’s brigade hosted a “Day of the Dead” ritual, which featured the ceremonial burning of a Viking longboat. “Inside the flame, our fallen symbolically board drakkars to travel to Valhalla,” explained Maksym Zhorin. The NGU Azov chief of staff, Bohdan Krotevych, appeared on the podium with Andriy Biletsky, who reached for the flags of the Azov Regiment and the 3rd Assault Brigade, and brought them together in his hands.
A year later, on the eve of 2024, Lt. Illia “Gandalf” Samoilenko of the NGU Azov Brigade said, “A huge amount of efforts has been invested to break through these myths and lies” about his unit — “a lot of international campaigns, a lot of conferences, visits.” Samoilenko, for example, a former Holocaust denier, went to the United Nations and Davos, and spoke at the Harriman Institute in New York. He’s the one who said, “Soldier to soldier and officer to officer, we have good relations with the 3rd [Assault] Brigade.”
The Association of Azovstal Defenders Families (AADF), established in 2022, has played an important role in this “huge amount of efforts.” The wife of the Hitler-tattooed “Vedmedi SS” commander spoke at the group’s first press conference. Led by Kateryna Prokopenko, the wife of the NGU Azov commander, and Yulia Fedosiuk, whose husband is a sergeant in the Azov Brigade, the AADF has coordinated “Free Azovstal Defenders” rallies in Ukraine and abroad, and led international Azovite delegations to lobby, network, and fundraise. Days before their husbands surrendered in Mariupol, Prokopenko and Fedosiuk visited the Vatican in Rome and met Pope Francis with Peter Verzilov, a former spokesperson for Russia’s “Pussy Riot.”
Whereas Mrs. Prokopenko is apparently a figurehead of the AADF, Mrs. Fedosiuk is undoubtedly an operative of the Azov movement. Yulia Fedosiuk led “Silver of the Rose,” an anti-feminist group linked to Azov, and is a former staffer of “Plomin,” a far-right publishing house affiliated with the Azov movement. Fedosiuk was close friends with Plomin co-founder Serhiy Zaikovskyi, “a representative of the intellectual wing of the [neo-pagan] Native Faith movement of Ukraine.” In 2019, when the journalist Aris Roussinos visited the Azov movement’s “Cossack House” in Kyiv, where Plomin was based, he spoke with Fedosiuk. “We use the example of the [mystical fascist] Codreanu movement,” she said, referring to the Iron Guard of Romania.
Like Olena Semenyaka, the “international secretary” of the National Corps, Yulia Fedosiuk might still be an assistant to Ukraine’s youngest member of parliament, Sviatoslav Yurash. In 2021, Vienna’s prestigious Institute for Human Sciences controversially awarded Semenyaka a short-lived fellowship. “Far-right experts” Anton Shekhovtsov and Vyacheslav Likhachev came to Semenyaka’s defense. Shekhovtsov, a “former” far-right activist, even bemoaned this example of “cancel culture,” and declared Azov researcher Michael Colborne, “The Stalker of Semenyaka of the Year.” In 2020, Anton Shekhovtsov admitted that her party was “actively building contacts with like-minded movements and organizations across the West while many Western far-right activists visit representatives of the National Corps in Ukraine.” A change of heart? As of early 2023, Shekhovtsov “liked” over 100 of Semenyaka’s Instagram posts, including pictures of her working out, visiting boxing clubs, and promoting the Azov movement.
Although Semenyaka said in late 2022 that a charity established by the National Corps consumed a “considerable part of my current activities,” she also coordinated the Azovites’ geopolitical project, the “Intermarium Support Group.” According to Oleksiy Kuzmenko, “The advance of the Intermarium is seen by Azov as an integral part of the long-term strategy of Reconquista, which is meant to bring together nations of European origin globally under the [white supremacist] banner of reclaiming land and culture.” Reconquista is the name of Azov’s more ambitious geopolitical agenda, “to create our own Right International,” in Semenyaka’s words—and to “defend the white race.” In 2023, the NGU Azov-linked AADF supported an Azov movement delegation that traveled to Lithuania. This trip was organized by Olena Semenyaka under the banner of the “Intermarium caucus” that Yurash established in the Ukrainian parliament several years ago.
Semenyaka might have played a role in organizing the first delegation that the Azov movement dispatched to the United States in 2022, which raised money for the National Corps’ new charity organization and allegedly met with over fifty members of Congress. Prokopenko and Fedosiuk from the AADF joined a few Azov veterans led by Giorgi Kuparashvili, the commander of the Yevhen Konovalets Military School, who represented Georgia at the founding conference of the Intermarium Support Group in 2016 and met representatives of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency in 2017. During the siege of Mariupol, Kuparashvili was seriously wounded and evacuated from Azovstal. Shortly before the Russian invasion, Oleksiy Kuzmenko noted that the page for the Konovalets school on the official website of the Azov Regiment linked to the “RECONQUISTA Ukraina” Youtube channel, featuring interviews with white nationalists from the US and Europe.
The first Azov delegation arrived in the US in September 2022 and made its first public appearance at the Ukrainian Cultural Center of New Jersey. Then the group went to Washington. Kuparashvili later told an audience in Detroit about their alleged success. “We went to the Senators, Congressmen, from both parties,” Kuparashvili said. “Honestly, the majority we met, there were like over fifty of them, and the head of their fractions, they all gave 100% support.” Among other things, they advocated for prioritizing the release of Azovite POWs, and for Congress to lift restrictions on supplying arms and training to Azov. “We told them, ‘are you supporting this [Azov ban]?’ and everybody knows it’s just a mistake,” according to Kuparashvili.
The Detroit event raised $33,416 for “Support Azov,” the National Corps charity that took up a “considerable part” of Olena Semenyaka’s time. Among other items, they auctioned an Azov Regiment patch with its controversial wolfsangel. Before the bidding commenced, Kuparashvili insisted that it’s not what it looks like. “If you know, there is a symbol,” he said, tapping the patch on his left arm, “which I’m gonna explain now, because they call us Nazis, all this crap.”
Another “Azovstal defender” on this trip was Vladyslav Zhaivoronok, whose release from Russian captivity was prioritized due to his severe injuries. He apparently went by “WP” because this was a double entendre for his call-sign “Wikipedia” and the neo-Nazi slogan “White Power.” According to the Anti-Defamation League, which I hesitate to cite at this point, the acronym is sometimes “used to denote things that are white supremacist, such as ‘wp music’ or ‘wp skinhead.’” In the case of this Azov veteran, his Instagram username used to be “wp_cyberpunk,” and he wrote “WP” on his helmet. In June 2023, Chief Rabbi of Ukraine Moshe Azman delivered a propaganda coup to Azov and recorded a video with Zhaivoronok, blessing him as a hero of Ukraine. Recently, Azman introduced “Wikipedia” to South Carolina pastor Mark Burns, who is described in the media as “Trump’s spiritual advisor.”
In September 2022, over a hundred POWs from NGU Azov were released in a surprise prisoner exchange, including Denys Prokopenko, Svyatoslav Palamar, and Illia Samoilenko. Zelensky awarded the title “Hero of Ukraine” to Prokopenko and Palamar. Whereas Zhaivoronok spent months in the US for medical rehabilitation, AADF president Kateryna Prokopenko cut her trip short, in order to meet her husband in Turkey. The New York Times ran a story about their “emotional reunion” that only described the “Azov Battalion” as “celebrated.”
Fedosiuk, Kuparashvili, “Wikipedia,” and another wounded Azov veteran returned to Washington and then traveled across the country to speak at Stanford University in California. Stanford professor Michal McFaul, the former US ambassador to Russia (2012-14), dropped in to give moral support. Earlier that year, Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) published a detailed report on the “Azov Movement … a far-right nationalist network.” The CISAC is part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, which McFaul directs. He took no issue with Azov’s “Nazi-linked” symbol projected on screen behind him. In June 2023, as Rabbi Azman blessed “WP,” another Azov delegation made its way to Stanford University. This time it was Yulia Fedosiuk, her newly freed husband Arseniy, and Kateryna Prokopenko.
Arseniy Fedosiuk has been pictured with people making Nazi salutes. Based on his VK profile, he appears to be a neo-Nazi himself. A picture of his laptop showed a Patriot of Ukraine sticker, and another suspicious sticker that began, “Das ist mein kampf…” He also followed an overtly pro-Nazi page called “12 years not a slave,” referring to the years when Hitler was in power. Fedosiuk’s profile on Academiu.edu says that he studies “Right-Wing Extremism.” In early 2023, he received medical assistance in Israel. Yulia Fedosiuk and Azov intelligence officer Illia Samoilenko joined him there. Samoilenko appears to have been accompanied by two Ukrainians that live in Israel, one of whom is a pretty blatant neo-Nazi that even captioned a photo with Fedosiuk and Samoilenko in Tel Aviv with a reference to the slogan, “White Pride World Wide.”
Making her way back to Stanford University in 2023, Yulia Fedosiuk posted a selfie with the caption, “Surf the Kali Yuga,” which is a far-right meme that “essentially means embracing being the bad guy and riding the wave of the dark age and what it might bring.” The special guest at this event was Francis Fukuyama, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute directed by Michael McFaul. Fukuyama told a local news website that he’s “proud to support” the Azov Brigade, and dismissed a reporter’s concern about their “longstanding far-right ties and connections to neo-Nazis.” In an email to the SFGATE news website, Fukuyama said, “I think you need to do a little more reading on Azov. They originated among Ukrainian nationalists, but to call them neo-Nazis is to accept Russia’s framing of what they represent today. By the time they defended Mariupol they were fully integrated into the [Armed Forces of Ukraine] and are heroes that I’m proud to support.” Fukuyama greeted the Azovites, with a quote from NGU Azov commander Denys Prokopenko projected on the screen behind them that said, “Ukraine belongs to us.”
Bellingcat, the investigative journalism group that “popularized OSINT tradecraft” with support from the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy, published some vital work on the Azov movement, until 2022. Whereas Oleksiy Kuzmenko was their most valuable contributor, Michael Colborne actually worked for Bellingcat and led their “Anti-Equality Monitoring Project” (AEMP) which was mostly focused on the Ukrainian far-right. “Azov needs a war,” he said in December 2021. A few months later, while Russia invaded Ukraine, Colborne’s book on the Azov movement came out. But he nearly went silent on the topic. Since then, Colborne appears to have deleted the AEMP account and his personal one on Twitter/X, erasing years of social media posts about the far-right in Ukraine.
“There are clearly neo-Nazis within its ranks,” Colborne told the Washington Post in the spring of 2022, but clarified that he “wouldn’t call it explicitly a neo-Nazi movement.” (In the past, he described Azov as a “a key node in a global far-right extremist network” and a “dangerous neo-Nazi-friendly extremist movement” with “often outright neo-Nazi affiliations.”) Over a year later, the Washington Post reported that “Michael Colborne, who wrote a book about the Azov movement and leads Bellingcat’s work on the global far right, said the [NGU Azov] unit’s focus appears to have shifted over time from ideology to military effectiveness.”
He said that any remaining far-right elements within Azov probably would continue to be “diluted” as the unit grows and that the issue had become less important as Ukraine confronts an existential threat. “In Ukraine, the term nationalist or patriot describes a heck of a lot of people right now,” Colborne said.
In October 2022, less than two weeks after the first Azov event at Stanford, the journalist Lindsey Snell was dogpiled by “pro-Ukraine” Twitter trolls and info-warriors for sharing the above image of SSO Azov fighters. As the former Bellingcat editor Natalia Antonova said, “These aren’t members of Azov. These aren’t Ukrainians. Look at their kit. You’re posting disinformation, Lindsey.” Although Snell shared proof that these were Azovites from Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine, this didn’t matter to people like Antonova and Illia Ponomarenko, a popular reporter at the Kyiv Independent, who continued to mock her, “This is the most massive L seen on Twitter in years.”
A researcher at George Washington University also confirmed Lindsey Snell’s findings, and Aric Toler, the former director of research at Bellingcat, chimed in, “there’s no real reason to doubt these photos,” but Antonova refused to give in. “Imagine trying to correct someone in good faith — but they are too addicted to likes,” she said after Snell blocked her. Earlier that year, Antonova touted her expertise, “having studied Azov for years and having dealt with death threats for my research.” A couple months ago, she told somebody, “You don’t know anything about modern day Azov. There’s a reason there’s no more weapons bans facing them, they’re as integrated as the rest of the UKR National Guard.”
“NAZI!!!!” tweeted Dmytro Kozatsky, a 26 year old press officer in the Azov Regiment, three days before the last of his unit surrendered in Mariupol. Thanks to Elon Musk’s Starlink, he was using a short-lived internet connection to argue with a Dutch blogger who brought up some of Kozatsky’s deleted social media posts, including pictures of a pizza he made with a swastika on top, and an image of his ankle tattoo featuring a double-armed swastika worn by some German concentration camp guards.
Before surrendering, Kozatsky uploaded his Azovstal photos to the internet, and made a short film, “Last day at Azovstal.” The Guardian published his work with a disclaimer that the regiment “retains some far-right affiliations.” During his imprisonment, Kozatsky won several photography awards for his Azovstal series, “The Light Will Win.” Not long after his release from Russian captivity in September 2022, Kozatsky took a trip to the United States. Around that time, Blue Star Press published Relentless Courage, a hardcover book of images of the Ukraine war “from some of the most respected photojournalists of our time,” in addition to some essays, one of them by Oksana Markarova, the Ambassador of Ukraine to the United States. Kozatsky’s famous self-portrait, standing in a beam of light in Azovstal, went on the front cover. Whereas the first Azov delegation to Washington only managed to land TV interviews with Newsmax, a far-right channel, Kozatsky appeared on MSNBC with the Ukrainian ambassador and a four time Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist.
From Washington, Dmytro Kozatsky rode to New York City in a motorcade of Ukrainian activists sponsored by United Help Ukraine, a DC-based charity that works closely with the Ukrainian embassy and has supported several far-right Ukrainian units since 2014. The United Help Ukraine website used to display a certificate from the original Azov Battalion signed by Andriy Biletsky, featuring a large Black Sun in the background. Kozatsky attended a New York City film festival for the US premier of “Freedom on Fire,” a documentary that used his pictures and footage, including a video of Azov fighters bringing candy to children in Azovstal. After the screening, Kozatsky participated in a Q&A session with Evgeny Afineevsky, the Israeli-American director, who previously admitted that he downplayed the Ukrainian far-right in his Oscar-nominated prequel, “Winter on Fire.”
“Hey, I got a question!” a woman called out from the audience. “Why don’t you let everybody here know that Mr. Kozatsky is an open neo-Nazi?!”
“Fuck you! Shut the fuck up! Get the fuck down you piece of shit!” Members of the audience, who just watched the movie, immediately started to curse her. “Kremlin shill! Get out of here fucking bitch!” Before staff members kicked her out of the theater, she yelled, “We are being propagandized like the Germans were in the Thirties! He is a neo-Nazi and we are celebrating neo-Nazis!” Another man stood up after she left. He didn’t know her, but was also waiting to say something. “I oppose this war, but this guy’s got a huge amount of antisemitic content. I’ve got copies here… Let’s address it!” He too was removed from the School of Visual Arts Theatre in Manhattan.
Dmytro Kozatsky subsequently tried to address the “aggressive disinformation campaign” that “Russian servants” waged against him. They didn’t understand “Ukrainian humor,” which makes “a mockery of Russian propaganda about so-called ‘Nazism in Ukraine.’” Kozatsky used to be fond of wearing far-right clothing and posting references to 1488, a well-known neo-Nazi code. Scrolling back through his “likes” on Twitter (when those were still public), I found graffiti that said “Death to Yids,” and Nazi memes, for example, a Totenkopf captioned, “Your face when you read news about gypsies.” The latter was posted in 2018, the year that the US Helsinki Commission (now Azov’s biggest fans in Washington) warned, “attacks on Roma in Ukraine have escalated dramatically.” Kozatsky ended his public “apology” with a caveat: “if the Russian servants see me as a threat and are conducting such an aggressive disinformation campaign against me, then I am doing everything right.”
After getting dinner with the actor Sean Penn, the former Azov press officer was soon on his way back to Washington with Evgeny Afineevsky and a couple Ukrainians who appeared in the documentary, including another Azov Regiment wife. First they attended a screening of the film at the State Department. The next day, there was another screening and Q&A to kick off a “Ukraine in Washington” conference organized by the US-Ukraine Foundation. This think tank has a “Friends of Ukraine Network” with a member list that reads like a “Who’s Who” of Russia and Ukraine-obsessed Beltway hawks. The event had an awards ceremony to honor the following “Stars of Ukraine”: Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH), Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), and Evgeny Afineevsky. Kozatsky and the “Freedom on Fire” crew took a group picture with Kaptur, a co-founder and co-chair of the Congressional Ukraine Caucus.
Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation and perhaps the youngest member of Zelensky’s inner circle, also spoke at this December 2022 event in Washington. He brought gifts from United24, the official fundraising platform of Ukraine, which is associated with Fedorov’s ministry and at some point started to use Kozatsky’s famous self-portrait. Kozatsky, Afineevsky, and Marcy Kaptur posed with United24 bracelets, “made from the last pre-war batch of steel manufactured at the legendary Azovstal plant.”
Fedorov soon announced in January 2023 the “important news” that Meta agreed to remove the Azov Regiment from its list of dangerous organizations, just in time for the unit’s elevation to a brigade and the launch of its own fundraising platform. Fedorov’s ministry apparently helped to convince Meta that “the Azov Regiment is now separate from the far-right nationalist Azov Movement.” The Ukrainian government, and especially the media arm of United24, a state-run propaganda outlet for the English-speaking world, has done its best to promote the Azovites (and not just from the National Guard) as elite warrior heroes.
According to Dmytro Kozatsky, now a photographer for the Defense Ministry of Ukraine, the Secretary General of NATO greeted him at the June 2024 meeting of NATO Defense Ministers in Brussels. Meanwhile, the State Department approved the Azov Brigade to receive US weapons and training. In the days leading up to this news, Azov veterans golfed at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington, Stanford University’s Militant Mapping Project (supported by the CISAC and Freeman Spogli Institute) quietly deleted its profile on the Azov movement, and the UK “Conservative Friends of Ukraine” held a fundraiser for the AADF in London with Boris Johnson. The UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on Ukraine also hosted a roundtable discussion with an Azov delegation including AADF leaders, Arseniy Fedosiuk, Ruslan Serbov, and a representative of the “Natiocracy School” — all of whom met the former Prime Minister that evening.
“We must not believe a single word of Putin’s propaganda about the Azov Brigade,” Boris Johnson declared, because they are “gallant soldiers” and “heroes” on whom “we rely wholly.” That night, Serbov gave Johnson a copy of his memoir about Mariupol, with a Hitler-tattooed friend of his, the “Vedmedi SS” commander, on the front cover. It was around this time that Guardian editor Dan Sabbagh insisted Azov “has shed any far-right associations … and is one of the military’s elite forces.” As the journalist Lev Golinkin once said, “we went out of our way to glorify Azov. Nobody forced us to. It’s been a choice, and considering that Googling Azov’s name yields hit after hit about white supremacy, it’s a conscious, informed one. Putin isn’t the only one obsessed with Azov. We can’t get enough of them. They’re our neo-Nazis.”
Thanks for reading! If you want to support my work, you can “Buy Me a Coffee.” Stay tuned for more on the 3rd Assault Brigade and the international “Azov Lobby,” coming soon.
The same Azov that sponsored a neonazi music festival in Kiev in September, 2021?
Not the first time that bona fide Nazis were whitewashed, once they became politically useful.
Thorough. Thanks