Kiev: The Neo-Nazi Influence Stands Exposed!

President Putin has repeatedly stressed that the “de-nazification” of Ukraine is a primary goal of the Russia’s “special operation”. But the importance of that statement has been consistently played down (or even denied) by Western propaganda. Nonetheless, there have been a few exceptions to that unspoken rule. For example:

* The Gray Zone and Consortium News ran an article on March 5 by Max Blumenthal and Alex Rubinstein titled “How Zelenskyy Made Peace With Neo-Nazis”. They describe the visit three years ago to the Donbas battle lines by newly elected President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who had campaigned on a pro-peace agenda.

Once there to argue for disengagement from the front lines, he was confronted by “the hardened veterans of extreme right paramilitary units”, fighting the separatists a few miles away. “In a face-to-face confrontation with militants from the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion who had launched a campaign to sabotage the peace initiative called ‘No to Capitulation,’ Zelenskyy encountered a wall of obstinacy,” they write “Andriy Biletsky, the proudly fascist Azov Battalion leader who once pledged to ‘lead the white races of the world in a final crusade…against Semite-led Untermenschen,’ vowed to bring thousands of fighters to Zolote if Zelenskyy pressed any further.”

* On March 2, Al Jazeera published an article under the headline “Profile: Who Are Ukraine’s Far-Right Azov Regiment?” which reported: “The far-right neo-Nazi group has expanded to become part of Ukraine’s armed forces, a street militia and a political party… Azov is a far-right all-volunteer infantry military unit whose members — estimated at 900 — are ultra-nationalists and accused of harboring neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideology.“

* Yevhen Karas, the leader of another neo-nazi group, C14, was even more outspoken at a recent Ukrainian panel, boasting that they had “been given so much weaponry… because we perform the tasks set by the West, because we are the only ones who are ready to do them. Because we have fun, we have fun killing and we have fun fighting….” The C14 was founded by Oleh Tyahnybok in 2010 as the youth group of the far-right Swoboda party, and has now received government funding for “national-patriotic education projects”, while the Kiev municipal government has hired them to police the streets. Karas explained that the nationalists, although a minority, were the key factor in the success of the Maidan coup in 2014. “If not for nationalists, that whole thing would have turned into a gay parade.”