The 3rd Army Corps, and a new "Azov family" in the National Guard
“Pro-Ukraine” propagandists like to have it both ways when it comes to the Azov movement, which they’ve long distinguished from the (not really) “depoliticized” Azov Brigade in the National Guard of Ukraine (NGU). These entities get conflated again when whitewashing the broader neo-Nazi movement.
The western media’s favorite Ukraine “experts” all but claimed that those in NGU Azov ceased to be real “Azovites,” because the neo-Nazi “origins” of the 2014 Azov Battalion were ostensibly overcome in the National Guard, and the extremists left the unit at some point between 2014-22, either because they were purged, or simply retired from military service and joined the Azov veterans’ movement.
If people really believed this, alarm bells should have been going off as new Azov units formed outside the National Guard and consolidated under the fascistic leadership of Andriy Biletsky, the original Azov commander. After all, his core followers are “old” Azov veterans, the type who never bothered to clean up their image. The depoliticization experts apparently took an oath of silence as more openly neo-Nazi fighters began to receive the hero treatment in Ukraine and abroad.
By 2023, with one Azov brigade “clean,” and the other (Biletsky’s 3rd Assault) “dirty” —according to the experts’ forgotten logic — and both of them famous, it became inconvenient for the anointed truth-tellers to seriously distinguish one unit from the other. “Didn’t we already settle this issue?” some journalists must have wondered about Biletsky’s proudly extremist forces. “Russian propagandists never grow tired of the discredited ‘Ukrainian Nazi’ trope!”
Over three years into the full-scale Russo-Ukrainian war, the Azov movement, although fractured, leads an army within an army, from one regiment (2022) to a pair of brigades and other units (2023), and now two corps (2025), which suggests the Azovites will command tens of thousands of soldiers, comparable to the 1940s Ukrainian Insurgent Army that they valorize. Most important is the 3rd Assault Brigade in the Ground Forces of Ukraine, the foundation of Biletsky’s new 3rd Army Corps. By 2024, you could read about Azov’s Führer (“Vozhd”) in the western media as an effective and quotable military leader, without any reference to his neo-Nazi movement, which is the best armed and most powerful one in the world. (more...)
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