Neo-Nazis active in Ukraine as White House adds 3,000 troops
February 3, 2022 1:07 PM CST BY BEN CHACKO AND JOHN WOJCIK
New recruits take an oath of allegiance before being sent to the eastern part of Ukraine to join the ranks of the neo-Nazi 'Azov Battalion' in Kiev, Ukraine. | Sergei Chuzavkov / AP
There’s an increasingly surreal air regarding the war scare over Ukraine.
...
Nazis in the Donbass
The self-governing separatist People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk are backed by Russia, but their forces are not part of the Russian army.
On the other side of the trenches the situation is even more complex. The Western media, particularly in Europe, has gushed over the heroic “volunteers” manning the battle lines for Ukraine in the Donbass, even running interviews with ex-soldiers from the West “contracted” to fight for Ukraine (that is, mercenaries).
K
iev’s forces in the Donbass war are by no means all regular soldiers. Far-right forces were the foot soldiers of the 2014 Maidan coup that provoked the conflict, and have been on the front lines ever since.
Most notorious is the Azov Battalion, a neo-Nazi unit formed from ultras from the Metalist Kharkiv football club in 2014. Its founder, Andriy Biletsky, is an unsubtle fascist, having called on Ukraine to lead a crusade of the “white races” against the “Semite-led untermenschen.”
Ukraine’s Interior Ministry authorized the formation of paramilitary battalions that year, and Azov was one. Another, the Aidar Battalion, formed the same year, also has far-right ideological associations.
These fascist units are allowed a cloak of respectability by Ukraine’s rehabilitation of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera and rewriting of history to portray genocidal organizations like his Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which played a major role in the Holocaust, as anti-Soviet patriots.
People’s World in the U.S., Morning Star in the U.K., and other newspapers are sometimes accused of exaggerating the fascist character of the 2014 coup in Ukraine and its aftermath, since the Kiev government itself is not overtly fascist. But the turning over of police and military units to fascist control by the regular Ukrainian government speaks volumes about the power of fascists in Ukraine. And the current government itself glorifies actual fascists like Bandera. Then, of course, the current government is guilty in the very least of having the bad taste of marches through the capital commemorating regiments of the Waffen SS.
By autumn 2014, Amnesty International was warning the Ukrainian government that it had documented war crimes “including abductions, unlawful detention, ill-treatment, robbery, extortion, and possible executions committed by the Aidar Battalion” in the Donbass.
The mother of one separatist fighter reported the head of her son being mailed to her in a box following his capture by “white nationalist paramilitaries.” Yet that September, the Azov Battalion was formally enrolled in the National Guard of Ukraine.
Enter the mercenaries
Are these the forces that Western “volunteers” or mercenaries are signing up with? Certainly they have tried to recruit foreigners in the past. Hope Not Hate warned in 2018 that the Azov Battalion was working with a British group called the Misanthropic Division to recruit far-right British activists to travel to Ukraine to fight.
Ukrainian Communist Party leader Petro Symonenko says foreign mercenaries are allowed to sign up with the Ukrainian military as a matter of course, and it is not just units like Azov which recruit them.
“After the 2014 coup, Ukraine has turned into a sump of neo-Nazis from around the world. In the Donbass, there are mercenaries from many countries as part of the volunteer battalions,” he tells me, “including the U.K.
“In addition to the ideological Nazis you have the ‘human safari’ scum, who see the war in the Donbass as a kind of extreme entertainment.
“Then you have the private military companies—fighters and instructors from Letera-43 from Italy, Halo Trust, Greystone, ‘Academi’ (known as Blackwater before 2009) from the U.S. and others. And there are a lot of official instructors from NATO countries—the U.S., Britain, Canada, and so on.”
Leaving aside the risks to people back at home of allowing these mercenaries to travel to warzones to fight alongside known extremists—we saw the potential consequences when a fighter, returned from the NATO-backed war to overthrow Gaddafi in Libya, killed 22 people in the Manchester Arena terror attack in 2017—the picture is explosive.
Ukraine’s militarized Donbass border swarms with professional soldiers, neo-Nazi paramilitaries, trigger-happy adventurers and “war tourists,” mercenaries, NATO “advisers,” and, thanks to the recent war scare, there’s a growing direct Western military presence.
It would not take much to light this tinderbox and quite a few of the unsavory characters in that mix would not be averse to doing so.
That is why the only sane approach to this crisis is de-escalation. The governments of the NATO countries must be pressed to withdraw troops from Ukraine and stop loading up an army bristling with “volunteers” with heavy weaponry.
Talks with Russia and Ukraine on reviving the Minsk peace process have to be revived, as Putin requested in Moscow this week. The U.S. and NATO must cease their dangerous brinksmanship.
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