Russia Matters, 6/16/23

When asked by the Levada Center in May whether, to achieve a victory in Ukraine, Russia should (Option 1) or should not (Option 2) use nuclear weapons, some 86% of Russian respondents chose the second option, including 18% who said Russia should probably not use nuclear weapons and 68% who said Russia should definitely not use nuclear weapons in the conflict under any circumstances.

This interview with Scott Ritter provides some interesting background on Wagner and Prighozhin.

By Tony Kevin, Consortium News, 6/14/23

On Friday [June 9th] The Guardian Australia website carried a news report, with a follow-up piece on Monday, whose implications for free speech are profoundly disturbing.

They concern a Radio New Zealand, or RNZ, broadcasting employee — unnamed, but everyone in the small New Zealand broadcasting world will soon know who it is — who has been placed on leave while their professional conduct is investigated.  Obviously, a career hangs in the balance. 

The malign ghosts of Orwell’s 1984 stalk this story.

‘Russian Garbage’

This unnamed person in RNZ committed the cardinal sin of “inappropriate editing” of incoming Reuters news feeds on the war in Ukraine to insert “Russian garbage” in the contemptuous words of Paul Thompson, chief executive of RNZ. That is to say, they drew on Russian news sources to insert balancing pro-Russian material to the incoming Western news agency feeds.  

The Guardian tells us that in fact accurate information about Ukraine was added to the Reuters copy:

“The articles in question made a range of amendments: adding the word ‘coup’ to describe the Maidan revolution; changing a description of Ukraine’s former ‘pro-Russian president’ to read ‘pro-Russian elected government’; adding references to a ‘pro-western government’ that had ‘suppressed ethnic Russians’; and on several occasions adding references to Russian concerns about ‘neo-Nazi elements’ in Ukraine.” 

And more truth was added to the story, The Guardian says:

“In one article, a paragraph was added reading: ‘The Kremlin also said its invasion was sparked by a failure to implement the Minsk agreement peace accords, designed to give Russia speakers autonomy and protection, and the rise of a neo-Nazi element in Ukraine since a coup ousted a Russian-friendly Ukrainian government in 2014.’

Another added that Russia launched its invasion ‘claiming that a US-backed coup in 2014 with the help of neo-Nazis had created a threat to its borders and had ignited a civil war that saw Russian-speaking minorities persecuted.’”

This, it seems, is an offence not to be countenanced any longer in New Zealand. “An RNZ spokesperson, John Barr, said in a statement after the first article came to public attention that ‘RNZ is taking the issue extremely seriously and is investigating how the situation arose,’” the newspaper wrote.

The Guardian, in its effort to “correct” the story, says: “Ukraine says these claims are discredited Kremlin propaganda … The anti-corruption movement was peaceful and had widespread public support. Yanukovych fled to Russia months later after his security forces shot dead more than 100 unarmed protesters.”  

[Consortium News has published numerous stories laying out the facts of the events of 2014, including these two exhaustively corroborated accounts: On the Influence of Neo-Nazism in Ukraine and Evidence of US-Backed Coup in Kiev]

‘Gutted’

The RNZ executive Thompson was “gutted” to learn what has been going on under his watch. We read that 250 past published articles have been gone through “with a finetooth comb” to investigate and counter such offensive inserted material, and thousands more are being reviewed.

Sixteen such offending  articles have been found and warning commentaries added to them. Investigations continue while the staffer remains indefinitely suspended. The responsible minister is being briefed. Clearly these editors have not delved very deeply into the Ukraine story.

Luke Harding’s Involvement 

Both Guardian articles carry a tagline that says “Additional reporting by Luke Harding.” This should be a key warning to everyone in New Zealand’s and Australia’s broadcasting world, indeed in the entire English-speaking world.

Harding carries a formidable reputation as an inveterate anti-Russian British journalist with alleged strong links to the U.K. anti-Russian disinformation system and even to MI6, the U.K.’s secret intelligence service.

He was heavily involved in the Julian Assange affair and in the now discredited campaign to label former U.S. President Donald Trump as under Russian control. He is known as a leading Western disinformation warrior.

Normal Editorial Practice

Australian Broadcasting Company journalists edit incoming feeds from Reuters and other wire services all the time. They add context, link to previous stories, add Australian-relevant material. 

The problem is, this person in RNZ was adding such context from the “wrong ‘side.’”

The ABC has long been exposed as an obedient servant of the U.S.-dominated Five Eyes intelligence network and runs along approved anti-Russian and anti-Chinese editorial lines. RNZ, by contrast, is still widely respected in New Zealand. But it committed the sin of allowing counter-perspectives to be heard on the responsibility for the present tragic war in Ukraine.

Read the two Guardian articles to see what exactly Harding in London and his colleagues in U.K. disinformation appear to be objecting to. It sends a strong message across the Tasman Sea, from New Zealand to the Australian media world: We watch every word you say and every word you write.

Cancelled for the Same Thought Crimes  

The examples of journalistic misconduct identified in the two articles match exactly research and opinions on the historical context and causes of the war in Ukraine and mounting Russia-West tensions that I have been trying to express publicly in Australia as an expert former senior diplomat since publication of my book Return to Moscow in 2017.

As a result I have been cancelled, unpersoned, silenced — dropped down the Australia Broadcasting Company memory hole, never to be allowed on its airwaves again. 

[Related: Caitlin Johnstone: 60 Minutes Australia Churning Out War-with-China Propaganda]

An innocuous interview I conducted from Moscow with Paul Barclay for the respected ABC program “Big Ideas” in February 2022 was “disarchived” — yes, you read it right — a few weeks later, under pressure from unidentified critics.

Ukraine is Losing

The war in Ukraine now winds steadily towards its inevitable pro-Russian denouement. Russia clearly has the military edge and this will not change now. Billions of dollars’ worth of supplied U.S./NATO equipment continues to be destroyed in combat.

In suicidal offensives ordered by the doomed Zelensky regime in Kiev, an estimated half a million Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or crippled since February 2022. [Exact casualty figures are very hard to come by]. Many more proxy warriors will die in coming weeks as this brutal war of attrition demanded by the U.S. and NATO continues to destroy what is left of poor Ukraine. 

Australians and New Zealanders with naïve faith in the professional integrity of their national broadcasters will continue to be insulated from these tragic truths. 

Fortunately, for those who dare to read them, there are now plenty of accessible reliable sources of alternative perspectives on Russia-West relations and the pivotal importance of the war in Ukraine in transforming the world. This world now looks very different from outside the Western laager. We are in the midst of huge global changes.

But, thanks to the likes of Harding and his Anglo-American friends, we won’t find such information anywhere on the ABC or RNZ. We Antipodeans in the colonies  will be the last to know. 

Tony Kevin is a former Australian senior diplomat, having served as ambassador to Cambodia and Poland, as well as being posted to Australia’s embassy in Moscow. He is the author of six published books on public policy and international relations.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

Some details have come out about the deal that Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko brokered to end the crisis. Yevgeny Prigozhin will be exiled to Belarus and Wagner forces who participated in the mutiny will not be prosecuted but will not be contracted into the Russian military while those who did not participate will be allowed to sign contracts with the Russian military.

While this serious crisis was fortunately ended quickly through negotiation with little bloodshed, it was an embarrassment for the Kremlin. But, at this time, I think that comments from various quarters that this means the Putin government is especially weak are exaggerated.

First of all, no Russian officials or high military commanders went against the Putin government to support Progozhin’s escapade. As other analysts have pointed out, Turkey’s Erdogan faced a coup attempt in 2016 that involved some of his military leaders and Erdogan is still going pretty strong. This event didn’t even rise to that level.

Time will tell what kind of substantive damage this has done to the Putin government. I’m open to changing my opinion based on how things unfold.

Of course, many in the western chattering classes, true to form, didn’t waste any time in putting out bad takes while the crisis was ongoing, breathlessly hoping for the Putin government to be overthrown or at the very least for a civil war to erupt. Some of these folks were suddenly rooting for a guy they’d condemned five minutes before as a war criminal. This just goes to show – if you needed anymore evidence – that for these people it doesn’t have to make sense. Anything they perceive to be bad for Putin and/or Russia is cause for celebration and the long-term consequences of major instability in a nuclear-armed country aren’t to be seriously considered unless you want to be seen as a party-pooper fascist.

These same people, after they recover from their profound disappointment that there’s no civil war in Russia and Putin isn’t hanging from a lamp post, will go back to having their garbage posted at The Atlantic or The New Yorker as if they just got drunk one night and showed their rear end at a party and everyone tacitly agrees not to bring it up. After all, the educated professional class doesn’t like to be too judge-y about personal and professional foibles.

This whole fiasco with Wagner has brought to mind a point that Putin made several years back to the west at the UN. He scolded the west (rightly) for using terrorists to achieve their geopolitical goals against opponents and how it leads to unintended consequences because such forces cannot be controlled. Similarly, Putin used a loose cannon (Progozhin) to conduct certain operations with the short-term benefit of fewer casualties for the Russian army and it blew up in his face. Because he was a loose cannon, Prigozhin got full of himself, went off-leash and became a chaos agent. Putin should have known better.

By Lev Golinkin, The Nation, 6/12/23

Vladimir Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine has already resulted in millions of losers—chief among them the civilians who’ve been tortured, murdered, forced to become refugees, or forced to spend their days worrying about loved ones fighting Russia.

But there are also winners: the neofascists whom Putin’s war has turned into heroes.

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.

This overnight normalization of white supremacy was possible because Western institutions, driven by a zeal to ignore anything negative about our Ukrainian allies, decided that a neo-Nazi military formation in a war-torn nation had suddenly and miraculously stopped being neo-Nazi.

But the truth is that this is an easily debunked fantasy spun out by a handful of propagandists. Yet Western media has repeated their falsehoods with a neglect for the basic tenets of journalism that stretches beyond the fog of war into the realm of intentional blindness.

Our whitewashing of Azov takes place amid a deadly surge of white supremacy that stretches from New Zealand to Buffalo, N.Y. That makes this a story about more than Ukraine. It’s about the deepest, nothing-matters cynicism that screams about 300 neo-Nazis in polo shirts yet embraces a brigade of battle-hardened extremists. It’s about warning that white supremacy—especially after being mainstreamed by Donald Trump and Fox News—is an existential threat to our society, while making it clear that some exclusions apply.

It’s about “good people on both sides.”

Azov was born shortly after the 2014 uprising that ousted Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych. Those events triggered a counter-revolt by Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine’s eastern regions who supported Yanukovych.

It quickly became apparent that the Ukrainian Army had been severely degraded by decades of corruption, leaving the new government struggling to combat the rebels. Into that void stepped far-right groups that formed volunteer battalions to fight for Kyiv. One of these groups, created out of the Patriot of Ukraine neo-Nazi gang, gained fame by helping restore Ukrainian government control over the city of Mariupol, a port on the Sea of Azov. It became known as the Azov Battalion.

Azov’s tactics and ideology were exactly what you’d expect from a paramilitary element formed by neo-Nazis. Its insignia features popular neo-Nazi symbols: the Wolfsangel (a runic double hook) and the Sonnenrad (sun wheel). Since then, the unit has become infamous for torture and for its aggressive recruitment of white supremacists from around the globe.

In November 2014, Kyiv sought to gain control of the Azov Battalion by absorbing it into the government. Azov became a regiment in Ukraine’s National Guard, which made it a potential direct recipient of American aid. The prospect of organized white fanatics being aided by the US quickly came to the attention of Congress, where lawmakers attempted to ban the Pentagon from working with Azov, though they were ultimately unsuccessful. Later, in 2018, a ban on providing US military aid to the Azov Regiment did pass.

The media also ramped up scrutiny. “Volunteer Ukrainian Unit Includes Nazis,” USA Today reported in March 2015. The Daily Beast followed with a piece titled “How Many Neo-Nazis Is the U.S. Backing in Ukraine?”

Patriot of Ukraine—the gang whose members formed the original core of the Azov Battalion—always had geopolitical ambitions. Its leader, Andriy Biletsky, who was Azov’s first commander, capitalized on its notoriety to develop political and street-muscle wings for the Azov brand. The regiment soon became just one part of a far larger entity: the Azov Movement.

In 2016, Biletsky, who by then had left the regiment, established the far-right National Corps Party, headed by Azov veterans. Ukraine, despite Putin’s lies, is not teeming with fascists, which is why the National Corps has performed abysmally in elections. Where it did find success was in global networking with extremists.

Azov began sponsoring neo-Nazi concerts and sporting tournaments that attracted radicals: In 2018, the FBI arrested California white supremacists who had met with a member of the Azov Movement.

By 2021, the Azov Movement’s position as a premier hub of transnational white supremacy was firmly established. It was tracked by researchers; its fighters were banned from receiving military aid by Congress; and it was kicked off Facebook. The State Department declared its political wing a “nationalist hate group.” Journalists exposed its enlistment of fighters from Sweden to Australia.

Then came Russia’s invasion. Within months, many of these same institutions had plunged into an Orwellian stampede to persuade the West that Ukraine’s neo-Nazi regiment was suddenly not a problem.

It wasn’t pretty. In 2018, The Guardian had published an article titled “Neo-Nazi Groups Recruit Britons to Fight in Ukraine,” in which the Azov Regiment was called “a notorious Ukrainian fascist militia.” Indeed, as late as November 2020, The Guardian was calling Azov a “neo-Nazi extremist movement.”

But by February 2023, The Guardian was assuring readers that Azov’s fighters “are now leading the defence of Mariupol, insisting they have shed their previous dubious politics and rapidly becoming Ukrainian heroes.” The campaign believed to have recruited British far-right activists was now a thing of the past.

The BBC had been among the first to warn of Azov, criticizing Kyiv in 2014 for ignoring a group that “sports three Nazi symbols on its insignia.” A 2018 report noted Azov’s “well-established links to the far right.”

Shortly after Putin’s invasion, though, the BBC began to assert that although “to Russia, they are neo-Nazis and their origins lie in a neo-Nazi group,” the Azov Regiment was being “falsely portrayed as Nazi” by Moscow.

Meanwhile, Germany’s state-owned Deutsche Welle required only three months after the invasion to pivot from calling Azov “a neo-Nazi volunteer regiment” to saying it was “accused of having [a] neo-Nazi past” by Russia. By this logic, the BBC’s and Deutsche Welle’s previous Azov coverage had been lies concocted by the Kremlin.

There is a kernel of truth in the allegations that Azov is just a Russian bogeyman. The Kremlin and Ukraine’s neo-Nazis have a symbiotic relationship that reaches to the very heart of this war: Putin needed a pretext to justify his illegal invasion; for that, he turned to Azov. Moscow seized on Azov’s existence to paint all of Ukraine as a cesspool of fascism in need of “denazification.” Azov is the linchpin in Putin’s narrative—without it, his excuse for the war is gone.

In turn, Azov’s defenders have capitalized on Russia’s obsession by implying that anyone who criticizes the group is a Putin apologist. Moscow and Azov use each other to defend the indefensible: For Russia, it’s acceptable to invade a sovereign country to fight neo-Nazis; for the West, it’s appropriate to lionize neo-Nazis because they’re fighting Russia.

OUT WITH THE OLD, IN WITH THE OLD

The problem with insisting that Azov’s neo-Nazism is just a Russian lie is the abundance of evidence to the contrary. Seven years’ worth of Western articles chronicling the group’s nature was too much to ignore. This left Azov’s whitewashers with the unenviable task of cobbling together a come-to-Jesus story in which Azov began as a neo-Nazi paramilitary group but somehow saw the error of its ways before 2022.

The narrative that emerged goes like this: (a) Azov’s deradicalization started after it joined Ukraine’s National Guard—over time, Biletsky and other veterans of the 2014 battalion were filtered out, implying that the new leadership is neo-Nazi free; (b) yes, there are a few leftover neo-Nazis in the National Corps, Azov’s political party; but (c) that doesn’t matter, because the Azov Regiment—later a brigade—has long since separated from the National Corps, which is little more than a fringe political sideshow.

These talking points were propagated by Kyiv, Azov, and a handful of experts furnishing quotes from one journalist to the next; the press, in turn, dashed out articles reporting these claims as fact. In reading these pieces, one quickly notes the absence of evidence. The “Azov has been denazified” story is presented as verified truth, often using quotes from the same few experts who also state it without offering proof.

There’s a reason for that: The whole thing is composed of easily disprovable falsehoods.

Take the notion that Azov was deradicalized after joining the National Guard in November 2014. This ignores the fact that Western outlets routinely documented Azov’s neo-Nazism over the next seven years, through 2021.

Whatever reformative influence Kyiv had to offer clearly didn’t work: Azov continued to recruit white supremacists, and in 2016, it was accused by human rights groups of committing war crimes—the only difference being that after 2014, it did so as part of a NATO-trained force.

Next is the lie that Azov denazified itself by jettisoning veterans of the original 2014 neo-Nazi battalion—a claim echoed by Reuters, The Financial Times, the AP, The Jerusalem Post, and others around the spring of 2022, when the regiment was commanded by Denys Prokopenko and his deputy, Svyatoslav Palamar.

The problem is that both Prokopenko and Palamar were Azov members going back to 2014. Supposedly led by new blood, the unit was actually commanded by veterans of its far-right beginning.

Palamar’s neo-Nazi roots reach back even further—he belonged to the Patriot of Ukraine gang that formed Azov. Yet the AP and Haaretz both cited Palamar downplaying Azov’s extremism while reporting nothing about his past with Patriot of Ukraine.

Prokopenko, for his part, came out of the White Boys Club, superfans of the Dynamo Kyiv soccer team (far-right groups organized around soccer teams are common across Europe), who celebrated him when he was given an award in October 2022. The group’s Facebook posts have typically included phrases like “100% White” and “88” (code for “Heil Hitler”), praise for Holocaust perpetrators, and Waffen-SS insignia.

During his time in Azov, Prokopenko’s platoon was unofficially called the Borodach Division. Its insignia was the Totenkopf, the skull-and-crossbones design used by the SS, which has become a popular neo-Nazi symbol. (Azov’s version added some fascist whimsy by giving the skull a beard and hipster mustache.)

Azov’s current acting commander—who took over in June 2022, after Prokopenko surrendered to Russian forces—is also an original Azov veteran.

But that’s just the first Azov Brigade. Over the past year, the movement has spawned new formations led by extremists.

MORE HEADS FOR THE HYDRA

In February 2022, as Russian tanks tore across the land, Ukraine began activating territorial defense forces (TDFs), militia units based in cities. Prominent ones included Azov offshoots in Kyiv, Dnipro, and Sumy, which were eventually merged. Today, the Azov Movement counts two brigades: the initial one in the National Guard and the recently created one in the army.

Maksym Zhorin, an Azov TDF commander in Kyiv who’s a veteran of the 2014 battalion and a leader in the National Corps (Azov’s far-right party, which the Western media assures us has been severed from the military units) worked closely with Biletsky.

Rodion Kudryashev, the deputy commander of Azov’s army brigade, is also a 2014 veteran and a National Corps leader; he says Biletsky is the first person he turns to for guidance. An Azov SSO Regiment commander, Denys Sokur, previously headed the National Corps’ Sumy branch.

Dmytro Kukharchuk, one of the main commanders of Azov’s army brigade (he commands the unit’s Second Battalion), is another 2014 veteran who worships Biletsky and has been photographed with a T-shirt of the Reconquista Club, a thinly veiled reference to the white supremacist movement to “reconquer” Europe.

Azov runs its own military school, an example of the enormous autonomy that Kyiv grants the movement. Its commander, Kyrylo Berkal, is another 2014 veteran whose social media featured Nazi symbols.

These are only some examples of Azov military units commanded by veterans of the original neo-Nazi battalion and/or leaders of the National Corps. So much for denazification.

NEO-NAZI BRIGADE CHECKS ITS WHITE PRIVILEGE

A few years ago, the ex–Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke embarked on a rebranding campaign by telling journalists that he was not a white supremacist but a “human rights activist.” His claim was covered by Esquire, ABC, Politico, and The New York Times.

Whether Duke sincerely meant what he said depends on one’s definition of “human.” Yet none of the outlets that reported on his rebranding were naive enough—or, given the recent rise of white terrorism, oblivious enough—to start referring to the former Grand Wizard of the KKK as “human rights activist David Duke.”

In their rush to lionize Azov, however, Western institutions have been far more reckless. The Times of London celebrated Azov’s supposed conversion by referring to it as “an elite battalion challenging its far-right reputation.” The purported evidence for this included a Ukrainian soldier’s claim that “We are patriots but we are not Nazis,” and a statement by “an expert on the European right” that “Azov has evolved so far from its origins as to make its far-right roots meaningless.”

The photos The Times ran with the article show an Azov soldier wearing a T-shirt for M8L8TH, a vicious neo-Nazi band with songs praising Hitler and featuring unabashed anti-Semitism. M8L8TH is linked to Azov; the California neo-Nazis arrested by the FBI had met with its lead singer in Kyiv. It’s hard to find a more fitting illustration of the media blithely whitewashing neo-Nazis.

Forbes similarly cheered Azov’s alleged denazification by running the demonstrably false claim that it had stopped using the Wolfsangel symbol. The Wolfsangel is one of the first things you see on Azov’s website, just as it was on the day the Forbes story ran; in fact, it’s the profile photo for all Azov’s social media accounts.

The whitewashing of neo-Nazi history extends even to Biletsky, who had been so toxic that even Azov’s defenders refused to normalize him. That didn’t stop the Financial Times from running Biletsky’s quotes about Azov being “patriotic” and “nationalist.” The FT then quoted him praising Stepan Bandera, a Nazi collaborator whose men massacred Jews, as a hero.

A far more dangerous platforming came from Facebook, which had banned Azov in 2019. In February 2022, Facebook loosened the ban in surreal, Dril-esque fashion: The company acknowledged that Azov remained a hate group but decided to allow posts praising it, as long as the praise was about defending Ukraine. It was a “both-sides-ing” of white supremacy, a chilling message that, sometimes, neo-Nazis are heroes.

Meta, Facebook’s parent company, later simplified matters by removing the Azov Regiment from its list of dangerous organizations.

Others, too, said the quiet part out loud. “Finally, it is worth noting that the ‘neo-Nazi Azov regiment’ has never been implicated in any actual extremist acts—with the sole exception of credible reports of human rights violations, including torture of detainees, by Azov fighters in the Donbas in 2015–2016,” wrote The Bulwark.

They may have tortured people, but nobody’s perfect.

By September 2022, as the campaign to transform Azov into paladins of democracy purred along, America rolled out the red carpet.

Azov’s US tour was initially reported by researcher Moss Robeson. The group made stops in Washington, D.C., and in New Jersey, where its soldiers—including a founder of the original battalion—met with Senators Rick Scott and Todd Young and Representatives Pete Sessions, Dan Crenshaw, Adam Schiff, and Michael Waltz, among others.

Then came Stanford University, which welcomed Azov even though seven months earlier its own program for tracking extremism had published an exhaustive study detailing Azov’s Nazi ties. The event was attended by Michael McFaul, a former US ambassador to Russia and an adherent of the “Azov has been denazified” myth, who stood in front of a projection of its Wolfsangel insignia.

It sometimes seems that we’re witnessing an experiment in America’s willingness to ignore what’s in front of our own eyes. In February, an employee of the federal government’s US Helsinki Commission giddily tweeted out photos of himself posing with the Azov Wolfsangel and wearing a patch with a picture of a Ukrainian Nazi collaborator; the employee continued defending the tweets, even as he eventually deleted them. It’s hard to imagine this being tolerated with other Holocaust perpetrators (see the media storms surrounding similar collaborators).

Or take Azov’s press officer, Dmytro Kozatsky, who was paraded around Congress, MSNBC, Vogue, and a Manhattan film festival. As Robeson reported, Kozatsky’s Twitter account was a Whitman’s Sampler of white supremacy, including the “1488” neo-Nazi code, Waffen-SS insignia, a swastika, and myriad “likes” for images such as a Totenkopf, Adolf Hitler, Nazi murderer Amon Goeth, the KKK, and graffiti reading “Death to Kikes.”

THE CHOICE

As Azov’s defenders in Washington love to point out, the brigade and its offshoots are merely a tiny fraction of Ukraine’s armed forces. Why focus on them? they intone. That’s what Putin does!

The saddest thing about this logic—aside from stating that a battle-hardened neo-Nazi formation in an unstable, war-torn country isn’t a big deal—is that it’s true.

Azov is a small fraction of those fighting to save Ukraine. For every feat attributed to Azov units, there were many more accomplished by others. Even the legendary siege of Mariupol last year that made Azov famous involved Ukrainian marines who suffered and held out just as bravely. We could have honored them. Instead, we went out of our way to glorify Azov.

Nobody forced us to. It’s been a choice, and considering that Googling Azov’s name yields hit after hit about white supremacy, it’s a conscious, informed one.

Putin isn’t the only one obsessed with Azov. We can’t get enough of them. They’re our neo-Nazis.