Ukraine’s rebranded neo-Nazis dazzle the Western press on tour

As the Third Assault Brigade continues its European PR journey, its roots in the radical Azov Battalion are conveniently forgotten

“Four soldiers from Ukraine’s popular Third Assault Brigade kicked off their meet-and-greets in the Polish capital on Sunday, home to large numbers of Ukrainian refugees, more than two years into the conflict,” reported Agence France Presse in an article picked up by the French state media’s Radio France Internationale (RFI).

“Popular?” Really? That’s the only defining characteristic that came to mind when describing the Ukrainian Army faction created in 2022 from what was left of the Azov Battalion in the wake of the battle of Mariupol? 

A little digging in the French press itself would have revealed that, when this same Brigade was being trained here in France last year, a leaked report prompted the French investigative outlet, Mediapart, to describe one member as having a Nazi SS logo tattooed on his head, while a photo of the same guy showed him with a swastika flag.

When Mediapart started digging around online for details on some of the other members who were training in central France, at the La Courtine camp, they hit a social media jackpot of 'Heil Hitler' salutes, Hitler art, and a potpourri of various Nazi SS division emblems like they were some kind of Hitlerized stamp collection. 

And those were just the half-dozen or so attendees who were dumb enough to post it all over social media when this rebranded Azov Batallion had gone to all the trouble of hiring a 12-person, full-time media team, including a cameraman, press officers, and editors, according to the European Center for Policy Analysis.

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A Ukrainian showman and comedian who was also a member had been doing some vlogging to promote the Third Assault Brigade, according to the think tank. All this industrial-grade whitewashing and here these trainee members were, all over social media, Naziing it up. 

Guess the Azov brand was too tarnished. Too closely associated with neo-Nazism. And with losing to Russia. So here’s the rebranding. They should have to take out an ad in the newspapers announcing a name change like anyone else. Especially since it’s pretty clear that the Western press isn’t going to take the initiative and investigate in the public interest. That would be rather inconvenient for all the Western elites interested in promoting these “heroes” to do the West’s bidding against Russia. Who needs a negotiated peace that could save lives on all sides when the Western elites have an opportunity to stuff the pockets of their special-interest cronies by making and selling more weapons. 

Enter the Azov movement’s Third Assault Brigade’s six-country, nine-city European summer tour. If the Olympic Games in Paris or music festivals in Ibiza aren’t your thing, then perhaps you’d like to fork over €20 to hang out with members of a rebranded neo-Nazi group at the Intercontinental Hotel in Berlin, or let them regale you alongside one of Europe’s largest Picasso collections at the Ludwig Museum in Koln. Billed as the “Our People are Everywhere” tour, with admission available for purchase on a European ticketing site alongside gigs like the band Thirty Seconds to Mars’ concert in Istanbul and Lenny Kravitz’s latest tour. Instead of those shows, people can be entertained by “stories from the front,” according to their online promotion.

The spin here in Europe now seems to be that all these guys are “popular” heroes. And if you happen to notice that the group is the successor to Azov, then the spin dictates that they’re not all neo-Nazi bad guys. That’s just Russian propaganda. Which is kind of like someone joining Alcoholics Anonymous and then arguing that they’re strictly there for the free coffee and snacks. 

The Western press used to at least be a bit more honest, prior to the Ukraine conflict going red-hot. “Azov fighters are Ukraine’s greatest weapon and may be its greatest threat,” The Guardian reported in 2014, calling the group’s “far-right volunteers” a “danger to post-conflict stability.” Even in the early days of the conflict’s latest incarnation, on March 5, 2022, an NBC News piece, whose author clearly had no love lost for Russian President Vladimir Putin, nonetheless underscored that “Ukraine’s Nazi problem is real,” and cautioned of the need to “guard against it.”

Fast forward just over two years and the Azov movement has now toured Stanford University as heroes, where a research department has since dropped Azov from its roster of radicalized groups, and Oxford’s Reuben College. They received a warm welcome at the British Parliament’s Westminster Palace for a roundtable discussion, and former Prime Minister Boris Johnson was photographed posing with their flag, whose wolf’s hook symbol was used by various Nazi divisons during the Second World War. And just last month, Washington lifted its ban on directly supplying the Azov movement with weapons.

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The US State Department said at the time that Russia had “long tried to conflate Ukraine’s National Guard Unit of 12th Special Forces Brigade Azov with a militia formed to defend Ukraine against Russia’s invasion in 2014, called the Azov Battalion,” which it says was “disbanded in 2015.” Well, that settles it, then. All the neo-Nazis just went home a decade ago, kicked up their feet, cracked open a cold one, and took up gardening and soap carving.

“After a thorough review, Ukraine’s 12th Special Forces Azov Brigade passed vetting,” the State Department added, adding that “no evidence” of violations of the questionable, neo-Nazi kind had been found. That’s not actually that hard to believe when considering that the entirety of the Canadian parliament couldn’t see an original article Nazi when he was plopped right in front of them, clapping and cheering for an actual bona fide World War II-era Ukrainian Nazi invited as a guest of honor to celebrate Vladimir Zelensky’s visit to Ottawa – before learning that a Ukrainian killing Russians was effectively Hitler’s homeboy. Woops. 

Canada also knew exactly who Azov was, even before the current conflict, when military brass worried about its trainees’ Nazi tattoos, but ultimately just decided to keep their mouths shut in the hope that the media would never find out, as the Ottawa Citizen reported. But the State Department said they all retired? Guess those were the ones who got bored with their reconversion to competitive dog grooming?

While the Western establishment treats anti-establishment right-wingers in their own countries as the enemy, they’re celebrating actual neo-Nazi groups as cool and heroic badasses. Perhaps – just maybe – it has everything to do with the masters that each serves.