The Western Media Is Whitewashing the Azov Battalion
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.
The Indepenent UK: Nationalists not extremists: Pravy Sektor deny radicalism claims and say they want to ‘serve’ Ukraine
Pravy Sektor was initially formed as a confederation of radical nationalist groups. Some of these, including one called White Hammer, were expelled. Others, like Patriot of Ukraine, the paramilitary wing of the country’s Social-National Assembly, left the group after it supposedly watered down its militancy.
- Defenders of the Ukrainian Azov Battalion, which the F.B.I. calls “a paramilitary unit” notorious for its “association with neo-Nazi ideology,” accuse us of being part of a Kremlin campaign to “demonize” the group. (New York Times)
- Progressives in Greece reject Zelensky’s address to parliament with neo-Nazis (People's Dispatch)
- US lawmakers welcomed notorious Georgian warlord now boasting of war crimes in Ukraine (The Grayzone)
- Partnering With Neo-Nazis in Ukraine: An Inconvenient History (Antiwar.com)
- Are there really neo-Nazis fighting for Ukraine? Well, yes — but it's a long story (Salon)
- Neo-Nazi groups recruit Britons to fight in Ukraine (The Guardian)
- Facebook is reversing its ban on posts praising Ukraine's far-right Azov Battalion (Business Insider)
- For Ukraine's Far Right, War With Russia Can Be an Opportunity (Haaretz)
- Western Media Fall in Lockstep for Neo-Nazi Publicity Stunt in Ukraine (FAIR)
- Canadian officials who met with Ukrainian unit linked to neo-Nazis feared exposure by news media (Ottawa Citizen)
- Ukraine crisis: the neo-Nazi brigade fighting pro-Russian separatists (Telegraph)
- Rein in Ukraine's neo-fascists (CNN)
- Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are On the March in Ukraine (The Nation)
- America’s Collusion With Neo-Nazis (The Nation)
- Amnesty Intl: Ukrainian Nationalist Volunteers (the Aidar Battalion) Committing 'ISIS-Style' War Crimes (Newsweek)
- Preparing for War With Ukraine’s Fascist Defenders of Freedom (Foreign Policy)
- Svoboda: The rise of Ukraine's ultra-nationalists (BBC News)
- Profile: Ukraine's ultra-nationalist Right Sector (BBC News)
- Azov is "run by the extremist Patriot of Ukraine organization, which considers Jews and other minorities sub-human” (BBC News)
- Is the US backing neo-Nazis in Ukraine? (Salon)
- Kiev renames major street to honor Russian Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera (The Times of Israel)
- Euromaidan: The Dark Shadows Of The Far-Right In Ukraine Protests (IB Times)
- "The most aggressive element of the opposition is a group calling itself Pravy Sektor, a right-wing nationalist organization that critics liken to Nazis.”. (Washington Post)
- 15,000 Ukraine nationalists march for divisive Bandera (USA Today)
- Volunteer Ukraine unit include Nazis (USA Today)
St. Pete for Peace articles & videos on how and why the U.S. has supported neo-Nazis in Ukraine since 2013
- Urmas Paet: “All the evidence shows that the people who were killed by snipers from both sides, among police men and people in the street, that they were the same snipers killing people from both sides.”
- Cathy Ashton: “Well that’s, yeah…”
- Urmas Paet: “And she also showed me some photos and she said that has medical doctor, she can say that it is the same handwriting…”
- Cathy Ashton: “Yeah…”
- Urmas Paet: “Same type of bullets… and it’s really disturbing that now the new coalition, that they don’t want to investigate what exactly happened. So that there is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovich, but it was somebody from the new coalition.”