Canuckus Deploracus Loc: North of the wall

Milosia2 Loc: Cleveland Ohio

It was Putin’s big lie.
He said they’re going into Ukraine to save the Ukrainians from the N**is .
Too funny.
Lies more than trump !

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/1/who-are-the-azov-regiment

Profile: Who are Ukraine’s far-right Azov regiment?
The far-right neo-N**i group has expanded to become part of Ukraine’s armed forces, a street m*****a and a political party.

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

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

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

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

So what is the Azov regiment?
Azov is a far-right all-volunteer infantry military unit whose members – estimated at 900 – are ultra-nationalists and accused of harbouring neo-N**i and w***e s*********t ideology.

The unit was initially formed as a volunteer group in May 2014 out of the ultra-nationalist Patriot of Ukraine gang, and the neo-N**i Social National Assembly (SNA) group. Both groups engaged in xenophobic and neo-N**i ideals and physically assaulted migrants, the Roma community and people opposing their views.

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

A few months after recapturing the strategic port city of Mariupol from the Russian-backed separatists, the unit was officially integrated into the National Guard of Ukraine on November 12, 2014, and exacted high praise from then-President Petro Poroshenko.

“These are our best warriors,” he said at an awards ceremony in 2014. “Our best volunteers.”

Who founded Azov?
The unit was led by Andriy Biletsky, who served as the the leader of both the Patriot of Ukraine (founded in 2005) and the SNA (founded in 2008). The SNA is known to have carried out attacks on minority groups in Ukraine.

In 2010, Biletsky said Ukraine’s national purpose was to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen [inferior races]”.

Biletsky was elected to parliament in 2014. He left Azov as elected officials cannot be in the military or police force. He remained an MP until 2019.

The 42-year-old is nicknamed Bely Vozd – or White Ruler – by his supporters. He established the far-right National Corps party in October 2016, whose core base is veterans of Azov.

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

These forces were privately funded by oligarchs – the most known being Igor Kolomoisky, an energy magnate billionaire and then-governor of the Dnipropetrovska region.

In addition to Azov, Kolomoisky funded other volunteer battalions such as the Dnipro 1 and Dnipro 2, Aidar and Donbas units.

Azov received early funding and assistance from another oligarch: Serhiy Taruta, the billionaire governor of Donetsk region.

Neo-N**i ideology
In 2015, Andriy Diachenko, the spokesperson for the regiment at the time said that 10 to 20 percent of Azov’s recruits were N**is.

The unit has denied it adheres to N**i ideology as a whole, but N**i symbols such as the swastika and SS regalia are rife on the uniforms and bodies of Azov members.

For example, the uniform carries the neo-N**i Wolfsangel symbol, which resembles a black swastika on a yellow background. The group said it is merely an amalgam of the letters “N” and “I” which represent “national idea”.

Individual members have professed to being neo-N**is, and hardcore far-right ultra-nationalism is pervasive among members.

In January 2018, Azov rolled out its street patrol unit called National Druzhyna to “restore” order in the capital, Kyiv. Instead, the unit carried out pogroms against the Roma community and attacked members of the L***Q community.

“Ukraine is the world’s only nation to have a neo-N**i formation in its armed forces,” a correspondent for the US-based magazine, the Nation, wrote in 2019.

Human rights violations and war crimes
A 2016 report by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OCHA) has accused the Azov regiment of violating international humanitarian law.

The report detailed incidents over a period from November 2015-February 2016 where Azov had embedded their weapons and forces in used civilian buildings, and displaced residents after l**ting civilian properties. The report also accused the battalion of raping and torturing detainees in the Donbas region.

What has been the international response to Azov?
In June 2015, both Canada and the United States announced that their own forces will not support or train the Azov regiment, citing its neo-N**i connections.

The following year, however, the US lifted the ban under pressure from the Pentagon.

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

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

The oscillation of Facebook
In 2016, Facebook first designated the Azov regiment a “dangerous organisation”.

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

However, on February 24, the day Russia launched its invasion, Facebook reversed its ban, saying it would allow praise for Azov.

“For the time being, we are making a narrow exception for praise of the Azov regiment strictly in the context of defending Ukraine, or in their role as part of the Ukraine national guard,” a spokesperson from Facebook’s parent company, Meta, told Business Insider.

“But we are continuing to ban all h**e speech, h**e symbolism, praise of violence, generic praise, support, or representation of the Azov regiment, and any other content that violates our community standards,” it added.

The reversal of policy will be an immense headache for Facebook moderators, the Intercept, a US-based website, said.

“While Facebook users may now praise any future battlefield action by Azov soldiers against Russia, the new policy notes that ‘any praise of violence’ committed by the group is still forbidden; it’s unclear what sort of nonviolent warfare the company anticipates,” the Intercept wrote.

Smedley_buzkill

You misspelled Biden. You also forgot to capitalize his name.

Milosia2 Loc: Cleveland Ohio

Great !
More grammar police.
The party of nothing.
Anything else you want to get off your chest ?

JFlorio Loc: Seminole Florida

Probably not. He was just pointing out the party of stupid can't spell very well.

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

https://unherd.com/2022/03/the-t***h-about-ukraines-n**i-m*****as/

The t***h about Ukraine’s far-Right m*****as
Russia has empowered dangerous factions in Zelenskyy's army
BY ARIS ROUSSINOS
(Aris Roussinos is UnHerd's Foreign Affairs Editor, and a former war reporter.)

March 15, 2022

Like any war, but perhaps more than most, the war in Ukraine has seen a bewildering barrage of claims and counter-claims made by the online supporters of each side. T***h, partial t***hs and outright lies compete for dominance in the media narrative. Vladimir Putin’s claim that Russia invaded Ukraine to “de-N**ify” the country is surely one of the clearest examples. The Russian claim that the Maidan revolution of 2014 was a “f*****t c**p” and that Ukraine is a N**i state has been used for years by Putin and his supporters to justify his occupation of Crimea and support for Russian-speaking separatists in the country’s east, winning many online adherents.

But the Russian claim is false: Ukraine is a genuine liberal-democratic state, though an imperfect one, with free e******ns that produce significant changes of power, including the e******n, in 2019, of the liberal-populist reformer, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Ukraine is, unequivocally, not a N**i state: the Russian casus belli is a lie. And yet, there is a danger that the understandable desire by Ukrainian and Western commentators not to provide ammunition for Russian propaganda has led to an over-correction — and one that may not ultimately serve Ukraine’s best interests.

During one recent news bulletin on BBC Radio 4, the correspondent referred to “Putin’s baseless claim that the Ukrainian state supports N**is”. This is, itself, disinformation: it is an observable fact, which the BBC itself has previously reported on accurately and well, that the Ukrainian state has, since 2014, provided funding, weapons and other forms of support to extreme Right-wing m*****as, including neo-N**i ones. This is not a new or controversial observation. Back in 2019, I spent time in Ukraine interviewing senior figures in the constellation of state-backed extreme Right-wing groups for Harper’s magazine; they were all quite open about their ideology and plans for the future.

Indeed, some of the best coverage of Ukraine’s extreme Right-wing groups has come from the open-source intelligence outlet Bellingcat, which is not known for a favourable attitude towards Russian propaganda. Bellingcat’s excellent reporting of this under-discussed topic over the past few years has largely focused on the Azov movement, Ukraine’s most powerful extreme Right-wing group, and the one most favoured by the state’s largesse.

Over the past few years, Bellingcat researchers have explored Azov’s outreach effort to American white nationalists and its funding by the Ukrainian state to teach “patriotic education” and to support demobilised veterans; it has looked into Azov’s hosting of neo-N**i black metal music festivals, and its support of the exiled, anti-Putin Russian neo-N**i group Wotanjugend — practitioners of a very marginal form of esoteric N**ism, who share space with Azov in their Kyiv headquarters, fight alongside them in the front line, and have also played a role t***slating and disseminating a Russian-language version of the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto. Unfortunately, Bellingcat’s invaluable coverage of Ukraine’s extreme-Right ecosystem has not been updated since the current hostilities began, despite the war with Russia providing these groups with something of a renaissance.

The Azov movement was founded in 2014 by Andriy Biletsky, former leader of the Ukrainian neo-N**i group Patriot of Ukraine, during the battle for control of Kyiv’s central Independence Square during the Maidan Revolution against the country’s Russia-leaning, elected president Viktor Yanukovych. Back in 2010, Biletsky claimed that it would one day be Ukraine’s role to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade… against Semite-led untermenschen“. The revolution, and the war which followed, would give him the national stage for which he had so long craved.

Alongside other far-Right groups, such as Right Sector, the nascent Azov movement played an outside role in the fighting against Ukrainian security police which left 121 dead and secured the success of the revolution. Acquiring control of a large property, just off Independence Square, from the Ministry of Defence, Azov turned the building, now named Cossack House, into its Kyiv headquarters and recruiting centre. Though Azov has since toned down its rhetoric, and many of its fighters may be non-ideological and simply attracted by its martial reputation, its activists are often to be seen covered in tattoos of SS totenkopfs and lightning bolt runes, or sporting the Sonnenrad or Black Sun symbol of esoteric N**ism. Derived from a pattern created for Himmler at Wewelsburg castle in Germany, chosen as an occultic Camelot for senior SS officers, the Sonnenrad is like the Wolfsangel rune of the SS Das Reich division one of Azov’s official symbols, worn on their unit patches and on the shields behind which their fighters parade in evocative torchlit ceremonies.

I’ve visited Cossack House multiple times to interview senior Azov figures, including the leader of its National M*****a (which provides auxiliary patrolling muscle to Ukraine’s official police force), Ihor Mikhailenko, and Azov’s International Secretary and intellectual linchpin, Olena Semenyaka. It’s an impressive setup: along with classrooms for the educational lectures they provide with state funding, Cossack House is home to Azov’s literary salon and publishing house, Plomin, where glamorous young hipster intellectuals busy themselves with organising Right-wing seminars and book t***slations, beneath glossy posters of f*****t luminaries such as Yukio Mishima, Cornelius Codreanu, and Julius Evola.

But Azov’s power derives from the gun, not their literary efforts. Back in 2014, when the Ukrainian army was weak and underequipped, Azov volunteers under Biletsky’s leadership fought at the vanguard of the battle against Russian-speaking separatists in the east, reconquering the city of Mariupol, where they are currently under siege. Effective, courageous and highly ideological fighters, Azov’s efforts in the east won them great renown as defenders of the nation, and the support of a grateful Ukrainian state, which incorporated Azov as an official regiment of Ukraine’s National Guard. In this, Azov is believed to have enjoyed the support of Arsen Avakov, a powerful oligarch and Ukraine’s Interior Minister between 2014 and 2019.

Both Ukrainian human rights activists and leaders of rival extreme Right-wing groups have complained to me, in interviews, about the unfair advantage Avakov’s patronage gave the Azov movement in establishing its dominant role in Ukraine’s Rightwing sphere — including official functions as e******n observers and state-sanctioned auxiliary police. Ukraine is not a N**i state, but the Ukrainian state’s support — for wh**ever reasons, valid or otherwise — of neo-N**i or N**i-aligned groups makes the country an outlier in Europe. The continent has many extreme Right-wing groups, but only in Ukraine do they possess their own tank and artillery units, with the state’s support.

This awkwardly close relationship between a liberal-democratic state supported by the West and armed proponents of a very different ideology has caused some discomfort in the past for Ukraine’s Western backers. The US Congress has gone back and forth in recent years on whether Azov should be blocked from receiving American arms shipments, with Democrat lawmakers even urging in 2019 that Azov be listed as a global terrorist organisation. In interviews, Semenyaka complained to me that this unease was a result of their listening to Russian propaganda, and insisted that American cooperation with Azov would be beneficial for both parties.

In this, the current war has surely come as a blessed relief for Azov. Biletsky’s attempt to found a political party — the National Corps — met with almost zero success, with even a united bloc of Ukraine’s far- and extreme Right-wing parties failing to clear the very low hurdle for parliamentary representation in the last e******n: Ukrainian v**ers simply do not want what they are selling, and reject their worldview. Yet in time of war, Azov and similar groups come to the forefront, with the Russian invasion seemingly reversing the downward spiral that set in for them following Avakov’s resignation due to international pressure. Judging by their social media, Azov’s armed units are expanding: they’re forming new battalions in Kharkiv and Dnipro, a new special forces unit in Kyiv (where Biletsky is organising at least some aspects of the capital’s defence) and local defence m*****as in western cities such as Ivano-Frankivsk.

Along with other extreme Right-wing groups such as Karpatska Sich (whose militancy against Western Ukraine’s Hungarian-speaking minority, including Roma, has drawn criticism from the Hungarian government), the Eastern Orthodox group Tradition and Order, the neo-N**i group C14, and the extreme Right-wing m*****a Freikorps, the Russian invasion has allowed Azov to restore its earlier prominence, burnishing its heroic reputation with its dogged defence of Mariupol alongside regular Ukrainian marines. While just a few weeks ago there was still a concerted Western effort to not directly arm Azov, now they seem to be a prime beneficiary of Western munitions and training: these pictures tweeted by the Belarusian opposition outlet NEXTA show Azov fighters being instructed in the use of British-made NLAW anti-tank munitions by blurred-out trainers.

Similarly, until the Russian invasion, Western governments and news outlets frequently warned of the dangers of Western neo-N**is and w***e s*********ts gaining combat experience fighting alongside Azov and their allied N**i subfactions. Yet in the heat of the moment, these concerns seem to have dissipated: a recent photograph of newly-arrived Western volunteers, including Britons, in Kyiv shows Azov’s Olena Semenyaka smiling happily in the background, alongside the Swedish neo-N**i and former Azov sniper Mikael Sk**lt. Indeed, Misanthropic Division, a unit of Western neo-N**is fighting alongside Azov, is currently advertising on Telegram for European militants to join the flow of volunteers and link up with them in Ukraine, “for victory and Valhalla.”

Like Ukraine’s other extreme Right-wing m*****as, Azov are dogged, disciplined and committed fighters, which is why the weak Ukrainian state has found itself forced to rely upon their muscle during its hours of greatest need: during the Maidan revolution, during the war against separatists from 2014 onwards, and now to fend off the Russian invasion. There has been a certain new-found reticence abroad to speak frankly about their role, no doubt for fear that doing so will provide ammunition for Russian propaganda. This fear is surely misplaced: after all, groups such as Azov are only prominent precisely because of Russia’s meddling in Ukraine. Instead of de-N**ifying the country, Russian aggression has helped solidify the role and presence of extreme Right-wing factions in Ukraine’s military, reinvigorating a waning political force rejected by the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians.

If anything, the primary threat posed by groups such as Azov is not to the Russian state — Russia happily supports extreme Right-wing elements in its Wagner mercenary group and in the separatist republics, after all — nor to Western nations whose disaffected citizens may find themselves drawn to a combat role alongside them. Instead, the threat is to the future stability of the Ukrainian state itself, as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch have long warned. While they may be useful now, in the event of the decapitation or evacuation of Ukraine’s liberal government from Kyiv, perhaps to Poland or Lviv, or more likely, in the event of Zelenskyy being forced by events to sign a peace deal surrendering Ukrainian territory, groups like Azov may find a golden opportunity to challenge what remains of the state and consolidate their own power bases, even if only locally.

Back in 2019, I asked Semenyaka if Azov still saw itself as a revolutionary movement. Thinking carefully, she replied, “We are ready for different scenarios. If Zelenskyy is even worse than [ex-president] Poroshenko, if he is the same kind of populist, but without certain sk**ls, connections and background, then, of course, Ukrainians would be heavily in danger. And we have already developed a plan of what can be done, how we can develop parallel state structures, how we can customise these entry strategies to save the Ukrainian state, if [Zelenskyy] would become a puppet of the Kremlin, for instance. Because it’s quite possible.”

Senior Azov figures have been explicit, over the course of years, in stating that Ukraine has unique potential as a springboard for the “reconquest” of Europe from liberals, homosexuals and immigrants. While their broader contintental ambitions may have a very doubtful chance of success, a broken, impoverished and angry postwar Ukraine, or worse, a Ukraine suffering years of bombardment and occupation with large areas outside central government control, would surely be a fertile breeding ground for a form of extreme Right-wing militancy not seen in Europe for many decades.

Continues...

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

[quote=dtucker300]The t***h about Ukraine’s far-Right m*****as
Russia has empowered dangerous factions in Zelenskyy's army
BY ARIS ROUSSINOS
(Aris Roussinos is UnHerd's Foreign Affairs Editor, and a former war reporter.)

March 15, 2022

Continued from previous message...


Right now, Ukraine and Zelenskyy may well need the military capabilities and ideological zeal of nationalist and extreme Right-wing m*****as simply to fight and win their battle for national survival. But when the war ends, both Zelenskyy and his Western backers must be very careful to ensure that they have not empowered groups whose goals are in direct conflict with the liberal-democratic norms they both pledge adherence to. Arming and funding Azov, Tradition and Order and Karpatska Sich may well be one of the hard choices forced by war, but disarming them must surely be a priority when the war ends.

As we have seen in Syria, there is nothing that radicalises a civilian population more than dispossession, bombing and bombardment. Just as in Syria, there is surely a danger that temporarily empowering extremist factions for their military utility, even indirectly, may have grave and unintended consequences. And in Syria, too, there were strong early taboos among Western commentators in discussing the rise of extremist m*****as that would later cannibalise the rebel cause, for fear of validating Assad’s propaganda that the rebels were all terrorists: this early reticence did not, in the end, work in the rebels’ favour.

It is not doing Putin’s work for him to observe frankly that there are extremist elements fighting against him in Ukraine: indeed, it is only by carefully monitoring — and perhaps, curtailing — their activities now, that we can ensure they will not deepen Ukraine’s misery in the years to come. For years, liberal Western commentators complained that the Ukrainian state was turning a blind eye to its Right-wing extremist factions: it serves no good purpose for the same commentators to now do the same thing themselves.

https://unherd.com/2022/03/the-t***h-about-ukraines-n**i-m*****as/

Canuckus Deploracus Loc: North of the wall

You're finally educating yourself on the issue

Now look up their Chechen allies...

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

There's nothing contrary to what I have said compared to this. You just can't accept that there are multiple views that all have some merit besides your own snarky comments that you paint as the only fact and viable opinion.

(Russian President Vladimir Putin referenced the presence of such units within the Ukrainian military as one of the reasons for launching his so-called “special military operation … to de-militarise and de-N**ify Ukraine”) Putin has been saying it since he became president, but it is not the reason he invaded Ukraine. Zelensky didn't become President until 2019. Much of this existed and was institutionalized in Ukraine before Zelensky came to office, as a reform candidate. Not a perfect one, but nevertheless.

(Azov regiment - estimated at 900 – are ultra-nationalists and accused of harbouring neo-N**i and w***e s*********t ideology.)

(In 2015 - 10 to 20 percent of Azov’s recruits were N**is. Yeah, that is a real hotbed of n**ism. However, there's no denying that a problem exists.)

(In June 2015, both Canada and the United States announced that their own forces will not support or train the Azov regiment, citing its neo-N**i connections.)

(T***snational 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.) Numbers probably in the hundreds which are hundreds too many. Maybe more like in the dozens.

Canuckus Deploracus Loc: North of the wall

Lots of opinions, few facts...



Zelensky didn't do anything to den**ify the Ukraine... 😂😂😂
https://adarapress.com/2022/02/25/ukrainian-president-zelensky-deepens-alliance-with-far-right/



https://workers.today/us-backed-f*****t-azov-battalion-in-ukraine-is-training-and-radicalizing-white-s*********ts/

Rather larger than that.. And the accusation has to do with their uniforms and ideology... But please, if the guy with a swastika and black sunsets on his uniform assures you he's not a n**i, you should probably believe him😂😂😂😂



And where do they recruit from??? Three guesses which part of the Ukraine... Those that don't join can still work with the n**i party...



😂😂😂Go back and re read the article you're quoting from...In the next line it admits that they then decided to continue training them...FFS😂😂😂



Yep...Sad little n**i LARPers love the Azov...I know a few of their fans... Sick pseudo f*****ts...

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

I presented facts earlier, as you did too. It's a conundrum. F*****ts are sickos and so are those who let them continue to gain power. But nothing is totally one-sided. I also expressed my opinion on several facts and others' opinions presented here. One can't change everything at once. It's an imperfect world and will always be. Thanks for your honest assessment of the situation. Perhaps we helped others to see this conflict more clearly as it is a muddy mess. Proceed with caution.

The entire issue for America is not about Russia but about American Politicians from both parties but particularly on the left and Trump's inquiry into Biden's corruption in Ukraine and elsewhere. All roads lead to H****r B***n's laptop and the Biden family mafia. This all goes back to the Obama administration. Everything else is a distraction. What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.

Canuckus Deploracus Loc: North of the wall

Well said

Eyes on the prize

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

Chinese airline 737 crash. So sad. 132 souls lost! I hope we find out what happened. Very strange that it was at nearly 30,000 feet and dropped down in two minutes, going straight into the ground.

Canuckus Deploracus Loc: North of the wall

Yes... Horrific...

I've got money on the pilot being triple v****d with P****r... Heart attack...