By Marta Havryshko, Responsible Statecraft, 6/2/26
When Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he claimed one of his goals was the country’s “denazification.” The Kremlin still uses this narrative as a cornerstone of its war propaganda.
Both Ukraine and the West reacted by dismissing the claim outright as a cynical abuse of Holocaust history. Politicians, media outlets, academics, and educational institutions rushed to prove that Putin’s argument was fraudulent.
But in their zeal to deconstruct Russian propaganda, Western elites created a propaganda myth of their own: there are no Nazis in Ukraine. Or, if there are, they are supposedly isolated cranks with no influence.
This fiction required the whitewashing of Azov, a unit founded in 2014 by the neo-Nazi group Patriot of Ukraine under the leadership of Andriy Biletsky. Azov became notorious for extremist ideology, Nazi symbolism, and allegations of war crimes in the Donbas. In 2018, the U.S. Congress banned the group from receiving American weapons, funding, or training.
After Russia’s full-scale invasion, that stigma vanished almost overnight. Kyiv repackaged Azov, separating the most radical elements into a new formation, the 3rd Assault Brigade. Western media rebranded and whitewashed it. The language of “de-radicalization” and “depoliticization” became mainstream. Questioning this narrative became taboo and labeled as “Russian propaganda.” The result is a culture of deliberate silence.
Neo-Nazi networks are deeply embedded in parts of Ukraine’s military structure. Their presence is visible in units such as Azov, the Third Assault Brigade, the Russian Volunteer Corps, Bratstvo, the German Volunteer Corps, Karpatska Sich, and others. Yet Ukraine’s Western backers continue to arm, fund, and train these units without meaningful scrutiny.
Even more striking is the normalization of Nazi imagery itself. Official Ukrainian military channels and mainstream media regularly publish images of soldiers wearing swastikas, Waffen-SS insignia, and patches linked to neo-Nazi groups like Combat 18 and Misanthropic Division. This is no longer treated as scandalous. It has been normalized.
Most disturbing of all, some Ukrainian military units have incorporated Nazi-linked symbols into their official insignia.
The far right and Ukraine’s military culture
Many Ukrainian military units using Nazi symbols are led by men shaped by Azov and the far-right milieu around it. For example, there is Oleksandr Kravtsov, the well-known commander of the Vedmedi unit, which was part of Azov. His body is covered in Nazi imagery, including 1488 — references to the white supremacist “14 Words” slogan coined by David Lane and the coded salute “Heil Hitler.” (“H” is the eighth letter of the alphabet.) Tattooed across his chest is the SS motto: “My Honor Is Loyalty.” He turned that slogan into the motto of his own unit. SS lightning bolts became part of its official insignia.
After returning from Russian captivity, Kravtsov’s unit was folded into the Ukrainian military structure — first the 36th Brigade, then the 39th Coastal Defense Brigade. Nothing changed. The SS symbols and motto remained.
Many commanders in the 3rd Assault Brigade also came out of Azov and still hold extremist views. Unsurprisingly, they openly embrace the corresponding symbolism. A subunit of the 3rd Assault Brigade adopted a modified insignia (replacing two grenades with three) of the Dirlewanger SS Brigade — one of the most notorious Nazi formations of World War II. In 2025, the brigade unveiled the emblem publicly at a memorial in Kyiv. No scandal followed.
Azov also normalized the Black Sun — a symbol born in Himmler’s SS cult headquarters at Wewelsburg Castle and now used globally by neo-Nazis and white supremacist terrorists, including the 2019 Christchurch mosque terrorist in New Zealand and the recent San Diego Islamic Center shooter.
After 2022, Black Sun spread rapidly through Ukrainian military culture. It appeared in Azov-linked units such as the Decepticons platoon and the Mortars unit of the 3rd Assault Brigade. Soon it migrated further — into units with no openly ideological profile at all — and became part of the insignia of the 156th Zvaha Battalion and the Unmanned Systems Battalion of the 110th Brigade named after Marko Bezruchko.
Azov mainstreamed another Nazi-linked emblem as well: the Wolfsangel, used historically by several Waffen-SS divisions. Rebranded as the “Idea of the Nation,” it became one of the most recognizable symbols in Ukraine’s wartime military culture. The symbol now appears far beyond Azov itself. The newly created Nachtigall Battalion — named after the Nachtigall Battalion formed by German military intelligence in 1941 — uses the same Wolfsangel-inspired insignia.
Some units within Ukraine’s military do not hide their fascination with the Third Reich’s military culture. For example, the 422nd Regiment of Unmanned Systems calls itself “Luftwaffe” and uses virtually the same eagle as Hitler’s air force. Its commander, Mykola Kolesnyk, regularly appears with the symbol on patches and clothing. The unit even sells merchandise featuring the Nazi eagle — hoodies, mugs, T-shirts, caps, keychains — to fundraise for the war.
Not just aesthetic choices
The use of Nazi symbols in Ukraine’s military is not merely an aesthetic problem. It is moral, political, historical, and legal.
First, it represents a form of historical revisionism and the gradual rehabilitation of Nazism itself — a direct challenge to the postwar Western consensus built on the memory of World War II. Within far-right military culture, Nazi imagery is often wrapped in romanticized narratives about anti-Soviet struggle. In practice this trivializes the sacrifice of the seven million Ukrainians who fought Nazism in the ranks of the Red Army alongside the Western allies (in contrast to the 300,000 who served in various military formations and police units on the side of Nazi Germany).
It also desecrates the memory of Nazism’s victims in Ukraine: 1.5 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, along with millions of Slavs, prisoners of war, Roma, the mentally ill, forced laborers, and countless others consumed by the machinery of racial extermination and exploitation.
Second, the problem is not only historical. It is profoundly contemporary. Every SS rune, Black Sun, or Wolfsangel displayed by Ukrainian soldiers hands the Kremlin another propaganda victory. Russian propagandists do not need to invent imaginary Nazis in Kyiv. They simply point to the insignia openly worn by some of Ukraine’s most celebrated military units — including formations branded as “elite,” such as the 3rd Assault Brigade.
Third, there is also a glaring legal contradiction. By openly using Nazi imagery, these units violate Ukraine’s own 2015 memory laws, which explicitly ban the propaganda of the Nazi regime and the public use of its symbols. The law describes such acts as an insult to the memory of millions of victims and have penalties of up to five years in prison.
Yet no one is prosecuted.
Why?
Because the Zelensky government — and President Volodymyr Zelensky himself as commander-in-chief — have made a political bargain with the far right. Since 2022, far-right activists and networks have flooded into the security and defense sector. In conditions of total war and chronic manpower shortages, this alliance became politically convenient, perhaps even inevitable. Now it is becoming entrenched.
The state depends on radicalized military formations for manpower and battlefield effectiveness. The far right, in turn, receives legitimacy, weapons, influence, and institutional protection. What emerged from wartime necessity is evolving into mutual dependence.
Ukraine’s Western partners have made their own bargain. They, too, depend on Ukrainian manpower to weaken Russia. And so they tolerate extremists inside Ukraine’s armed forces as long as those extremists continue fighting. More than that, they remain largely silent about the ideology and symbols involved, because acknowledging them would mean admitting an uncomfortable truth — that the neo-Nazi problem in Ukraine is not simply a Kremlin invention.
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Nazi-era specter haunts Kyiv: Poland and Israel turning against Zelensky
By Uriel Araujo, InfoBrics, 6/4/26
A new controversy has once again exposed the fragile foundations of the Polish-Ukrainian partnership and the unresolved historical issues plaguing Kyiv’s post-Maidan regime. Polish President Karol Nawrocki has signaled support for stripping Volodymyr Zelensky (his Ukrainian counterpart) of Poland’s highest state distinction – the Order of the White Eagle, awarded by former President Andrzej Duda.
The immediate trigger was Ukraine’s decision to rebury Andriy Melnyk (the infamous leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists – OUN), with state honors and in the presence of Ukraine’s top leadership, including Zelensky himself. Poland’s Nawrocki has thus argued that Ukraine is “not ready to become part of the European family” while it continues glorifying figures associated with Nazi collaborationism and anti-Polish (plus anti-Jewish) atrocities.
The affair exemplifies some of the deepest historical wounds separating Warsaw and Kyiv, not to mention aspects of Ukraine’s regime that are often whitewashed. It also illustrates how Ukraine’s ultranationalism (since at least 2014) has been a source of ethnopolitical tensions with neighbors in general, including Hungary, plus Romania and also Greece; and not just with Russia.
Melnyk was more than a patriotic activist: by the 1930s, the OUN had embraced increasingly radical and antisemitic positions. Many of its leaders collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II. Historian Grzegorz Motyka, among others, has documented how the OUN cooperated with German intelligence and prepared subversive operations against Poland in 1939 with Abwehr support.
The legacy of the OUN and its military wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), remains deeply explosive due to the Volhynia massacres: Ukrainian nationalists killed approximately 100,000 Polish civilians between 1943 and 1945, including coordinated attacks on Polish communities and churches during Bloody Sunday in July 1943.
For the last few years since 2022, Polish leaders have thus attempted to separate support for Kyiv’s war effort from these grievances. Yet that balancing act is becoming harder.
Even Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, hardly known for nationalist rhetoric, publicly criticized the tribute to Melnyk in Kyiv.
Poland is not a lone voice: Israel’s Foreign Ministry condemned the ceremony, declaring that “there is no place for ignoring historical truth,” Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial center warned that honoring leaders who collaborated with the Third Reich and genocide undermines Holocaust remembrance.
The controversy is a part of a wider issue. Shortly afterward, Zelensky also renamed an elite military formation with the honorary title “Heroes of the UPA,” thereby further inflaming Polish public opinion.
As I’ve argued, the politics of historical memory has long been the Achilles’ heel of Polish-Ukrainian relations. Back in 2021, I noted that Warsaw supported Ukrainian independence, NATO integration, and EU aspirations largely for geopolitical reasons, while remaining deeply uncomfortable with Kyiv’s glorification of Stepan Bandera, the OUN, and the UPA. These competing historical narratives have never been reconciled.
The irony is striking enough: in 2022, amid the escalation of the Russia-Ukraine war, Polish and Ukrainian leaders openly discussed unprecedented levels of integration. Zelensky even spoke of a future without borders between the two countries (which would be a de facto confederacy), while Duda declared that the Polish-Ukrainian border should unite rather than divide.
Bilateral tensions however never disappeared. In 2023, for instance, agricultural disputes led Warsaw to halt weapons deliveries temporarily, while then President Duda famously compared Ukraine to a drowning man capable of dragging down his rescuer. By 2024, disputes over the exhumation of Volhynia victims and disagreements regarding the issue of Crimea were already straining relations.
The current dispute also highlights that broader issue which Western media typically prefer to downplay: the role of neo-Fascism in post-Maidan Ukraine.
Critics often cite Zelensky’s Jewish background to dismiss concerns about extremism in Ukraine. Yet this does not negate the neo-Nazi influence – if anything, it makes the situation more embarrassing. A Russian-speaking secular Jew from Kryvyi Rih, Zelensky was not known for emphasizing his Jewish roots throughout his career as a comedian (quite on the contrary).
As President, he has frequently used Christian themes and given Easter addresses in speeches to Ukrainian soldiers, which of course does not align very well with a Jewish persona, even giving rise to speculations about a Christian conversation (that never happened).
Moreover, Zelensky was born a Russian-speaker in a very bilingual country such as his – he is fluent in Ukrainian but needed to improve his mastery of the language further as President – and actually counted on the votes of Russian speaking Ukrainians like himself; only to then reinvent himself as a Ukrainian nationalist. The point is that this is a flexible character, who acts according to circumstances. Like many Ukrainian leaders, Zelensky operates amid oligarchic ties and real pressure from far-right military and paramilitary figures, who have even publicly threatened his life if he deviates too much from their line. And, as I’ve noted before, these ideological forces continue to shape the state well beyond their electoral weight.
Be as it may, Poland is unlikely to abandon Ukraine overnight: Warsaw remains one of Kyiv’s most important partners. Yet nationalism is experiencing a revival on both sides of the border. Geopolitics can postpone disputes over memory and identity, but it cannot erase them. And the post-Soviet Ukrainian Question – particularly Kyiv’s far-right problem – remains a latent challenge for the entire continent.