The Western Media Is Whitewashing the Azov Battalion

[mountaineer]

The Western Media Is Whitewashing the Azov Battalion
Before Russia invaded Ukraine, these fighters were neo-Nazis. They still are.
By Lev Golinkin
June 13, 2023

Vladimir Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine has already resulted in millions of losers—chief among them the civilians who’ve been tortured, murdered, forced to become refugees, or forced to spend their days worrying about loved ones fighting Russia.

But there are also winners: the neofascists whom Putin’s war has turned into heroes.

For seven years, Western institutions have warned about Ukraine’s Azov Movement, which began as a neo-Nazi paramilitary group in 2014 and became notorious for its worldwide recruitment of extremists.

Then came Russia’s invasion. Within months, Azov fighters were being feted in Congress and at Stanford University. MSNBC swooned over a Ukrainian soldier whose Twitter account overflowed with neo-Nazi images. Facebook made the stunning decision to allow posts praising the Azov Battalion, even though the company admitted that it was a hate group.

This overnight normalization of white supremacy was possible because Western institutions, driven by a zeal to ignore anything negative about our Ukrainian allies, decided that a neo-Nazi military formation in a war-torn nation had suddenly and miraculously stopped being neo-Nazi. ...

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[Kamaji]

[PeteS in CA]

Ukraine's army has 13 mechanized brigades, 2 armored brigades, and 2 mountain brigades. In US military organization, a brigade has 2 or 3 battalions. So if Ukraine organizes similarly, the Azov Battalion is 1/34 to 1/51 of the Ukrainian army. The supposedly neo-Nazi Azov Battalion is used to tar Ukraine as a whole as Nazi. The Azov battalion may be effective fighters, but they are 2%-3% of Ukraine's army.

Anti-Ukraine people are Himalayanizing a possibly illusory mole hill.

[Maj. Bill Martin]

Is there actual Nazi activity going on in Ukraine?  Not just guys wearing stuff, but actual persecution of minorities, etc.?

The reason I ask is because support for the German military is kind of a complicated issue in Ukraine.  There were Ukrainians who fought for the Germans because they justifiably hated the Russians so much.  Which is understandable.  So some of those Ukrainian military units had a reputation for fighting pretty ruthlessly against the Russians.  If the Russian-hating aspect of the Nazis is what those Ukrainians remember, I get it even though it is in very poor taste.  Obviously a different thing if they are engaging in Nazi-type crimes against people other than Russian troops.

[Hoodat]

The Azov Battalion ceased to exist in early 2015.  Eight years later, they are still scapegoating it.

[Kamaji]

Is there actual Nazi activity going on in Ukraine?  Not just guys wearing stuff, but actual persecution of minorities, etc.?

The reason I ask is because support for the German military is kind of a complicated issue in Ukraine.  There were Ukrainians who fought for the Germans because they justifiably hated the Russians so much.  Which is understandable.  So some of those Ukrainian military units had a reputation for fighting pretty ruthlessly against the Russians.  If the Russian-hating aspect of the Nazis is what those Ukrainians remember, I get it even though it is in very poor taste.  Obviously a different thing if they are engaging in Nazi-type crimes against people other than Russian troops.

No, no particular evidence of persecuting minorities.  Just guys who are really, really gung-ho Ukrainian patriots wearing insignia that some people have a rorschach-test-response to and "see" nazi-like insignia (sort of like how there is a "face" on Mars).

[Fishrrman]

Going 'way back to World War II, there were some in Eastern Europe who took sides with the Nazis because they hated the communists. And there were others who took the side of the communists, because they were the enemy of the Nazis.

Very tough times, with very difficult (but not illogical) choices...

[The_Reader_David]

There were interviews with the members of the Azov Battalion published on the BBC website a while back.  Their political view ranged from what would have been "liberal" in America in the 1970's to libertarian, aside from a strong streak of Ukrainian nationalism.  They like the Wolfangel heraldry not because it's Nazi, but because it's anti-Russian (and looks badass).  Bandara, a Ukrainian national hero, in the wake of the holodomor, initially sided with the Nazis (for understandable reasons), but fought against them later when they showed that they were essentially as bad as the Soviets. 

[mountaineer]

Going 'way back to World War II, there were some in Eastern Europe who took sides with the Nazis because they hated the communists. And there were others who took the side of the communists, because they were the enemy of the Nazis.

Very tough times, with very difficult (but not illogical) choices...

Mr. M's uncle was a Chetnik. They fought both the Nazis and the communists. They hated both groups equally, but they'd occasionally ally with one of them (temporarily) against the other.

[PeteS in CA]

Going 'way back to World War II, there were some in Eastern Europe who took sides with the Nazis because they hated the communists. And there were others who took the side of the communists, because they were the enemy of the Nazis.

Very tough times, with very difficult (but not illogical) choices...

It was a Pick-Your-Monster choice. From what I've read, when the Germans first conquered Ukraine, Ukrainians welcomed them as liberators. Memories of the Holodomor were but a decade (or less) old. To the Nazis, Ukrainians were racially inferior Slavs, so they were brutal to them, leading many Ukrainians to turn against the Germans. That initial welcome of the Germans was the basis for Stalinists labeling Ukrainians as "Nazis", and still is the basis of Russian slander.

[DefiantMassRINO]

Some Ukrainians welcomed the Nazi's after Stalin attempted genocide by famine and Russification via ethnic cleansing.

Nazi Ukranians would be an oxymoron because Nazi's view Slavs as an inferior race to be eliminated to make room for Lebensraum.

[Kamaji]

It was a Pick-Your-Monster choice. From what I've read, when the Germans first conquered Ukraine, Ukrainians welcomed them as liberators. Memories of the Holodomor were but a decade (or less) old. To the Nazis, Ukrainians were racially inferior Slavs, so they were brutal to them, leading many Ukrainians to turn against the Germans. That initial welcome of the Germans was the basis for Stalinists labeling Ukrainians as "Nazis", and still is the basis of Russian slander.

[The_Reader_David]

Some Ukrainians welcomed the Nazi's after Stalin attempted genocide by famine and Russification via ethnic cleansing.

Nazi Ukranians would be an oxymoron because Nazi's view Slavs as an inferior race to be eliminated to make room for Lebensraum.

Quite.  I've often thought that had the Nazis' racial theories been a little more based on biology and less on linguistics, they could have won the war.  Slavic language or not, the blond-haired blue-eyed Ukrainians and Russians were descended from Varangians, and were really of the same genetic stock as Scandinavians whom the Nazis embraced as "Aryan".  If Hitler had really understood just how much Lebensraum was available to the East, he might have thought that way "liberated" the Ukrainians and anti-Soviet Russians and made it to the Caucus oil fields with their help and..., at best the Cold War would have been between the Anglosphere and Nazi Europe, rather than between the West and the Soviets, at worst it would have been between the Nazis and the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere as in The Man in the High Castle.