How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Nazis

 

The whitewashing of Azov by New York Times, Washington Post, and The Guardian

People still often refer to the “Azov Battalion,” which joined the National Guard of Ukraine (NGU) in 2014 and became the Azov Regiment, with two battalions. In 2023, this “openly neo-Nazi” unit was upgraded again as the 12th Special Forces Azov Brigade, with nine battalions on paper, including divisions for artillery, tanks, and air defense. And now NGU Azov commander Denys Prokopenko leads the 1st Azov Corps, consisting of five brigades, including the 12th Special Forces unit and another Azovite brigade.

Meanwhile, the broader Azov movement led by Andriy Biletsky is forming the 3rd Army Corps. There are other Azovite units, and Azov-inspired ones. After three years of war, the “gentle Azovization” of the Ukrainian armed forces is accelerating, but this seems to be met with the quiet approval of western media and officials. Apparently they consider far-right nationalism to be Ukraine’s secret weapon.

In 2022, Russia captured the remaining Ukrainian coastline on the Sea of Azov to establish a land bridge to the Crimean peninsula. The main obstacle, which the Russians destroyed, was the city of Mariupol, with its principal defenders being the NGU Azov Regiment. This partially explains the immediate role played by neo-Nazis in the information war.

With eyes on Mariupol in the early days of the war, the western media mostly abandoned any remaining concern and curiosity about neo-Nazis in the Azov Regiment (and other Azovite units). Hundreds of Azov fighters, in addition to other soldiers and civilians, held out for weeks in the city’s massive Azovstal Iron and Steel Works. New York Times reporter Michael Schwirtz, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, called it “Ukraine’s version of the Alamo.”

In “The Battle for Azovstal,” a podcast episode by the New York Times, Schwirtz claimed that “this group has a very complicated history going back to 2014,” when Andriy Biletsky, an infamous neo-Nazi, founded a “battalion of misfits” that welcomed everyone. “Anybody who wanted to could join … And, very, quickly, the Azov Battalion became associated with a band of far-right nationalists bordering on fascists.” But this was just “a small contingent of people,” and an “association that the Azov Battalion had in its infancy.” Or so they said…  (more...)

How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Nazis