PICTURED: Azov Battalion members inspect NATO-made weaponry. PC: NEXTA, retrieved from Twitter.
As WaL reported recently, persistent accusations of neo-Nazism in Ukraine have been ignored largely from Western mainstream media barring a March report from Al Jazeera.
Photos leaked by a Belarussian opposition news agency, and reprinted at Declassified UK shows members of the notorious Azov Battalion taking a class on the use of a UK-made NLAW anti-tank rocket launcher. The symbol seen on the sleeve of the man standing on the far right is the “Wolfsangel” which was used extensively among Nazi military regiments.
A shipment of NLAW grenade launchers and instructors from #NATO countries arrived in #Kharkiv. The Azov regiment was the first to learn about new weaponry pic.twitter.com/CCzjN40rW7
— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) March 8, 2022
Declassified details that Britain has sent thousands of these NLAW rocket launchers to Ukraine, in direct contradiction to MPs who have said they will not fall into the hands of extremist far-right militias, specifically mentioning Azov.
In 2010, the battalion’s founder, Andriy Biletsky, said that Ukraine should “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen [subhumans].”
Azov’s members have been filmed and celebrated on Twitter dipping their bullets in pig lard, hoping, in their own words, to use against the “Kadyrov orcs” referring to Russian Muslim soldiers, whose faith forbids them from eating pork.
Disturbingly, if one sees the Twitter disclaimer, the social media platform famous for its censorship “has determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain accessible,” despite the fact that it “violated” the terms of service.
American legislators have, as Buzzfeed reports, tried on several occasions to sanction Azov and designate it as a proper terrorist organization, but efforts from NATO’s de-factor think tank the Atlantic Council have run several fluff pieces papering over their human rights violations, deliberate neo-Nazi beliefs, and extremist recruiting efforts, and no doubt contributing to such legislation never coming to pass.
Libertarian Institute, a non-profit that reports on little-known war affairs, details that hundreds of foreign fighters from across Europe have been joining the Azov Battalion, and that large numbers of recruits in their Telegram channel are expressing their own ultranationalist, white-supremacist, racial-purist, or neo-Nazi (select your own terminology) beliefs.
One former UK veteran said it was a good occasion to “kill extra Jews.” He later noted he had formed a group of other UK nationals to join him. Azov remains an official part of the Ukrainian National Guard.
Recently NATO deleted a tweet celebrating International Women’s Day, after complaints it featured a Ukrainian soldier wearing a ‘Black Sun’ Nazi symbol on her uniform.
A NATO official told Declassified: “As part of an International Women Day collage for social media, we posted an image from stock footage of an international agency. The post was removed when we realized it contained a symbol that we could not verify as official”.