Nazi Azov Black Sun Wolfsangel Battalion Get ISRAELI Weapons

[TonyGosling]

EXPOSED! ‘Nazi’ Azov Battalion Receives Armaments From ISRAEL
This explains Azov's continued presence on 'anti-hate' Social Media
By Raphael Machado Last updated Aug 12, 2018
https://www.fort-russ.com/2018/08/exposed-nazi-azov-battalion-receives -armaments-from-israel/

New Resistance, Brazil – An investigation into Ukrainian and Israeli armaments show a deep connection between the Zionist entity and the Nazi-Banderist Battalion, that is also now part of the police forces of the oligarchic and pro-Atlanticist regime of Kiev.

Israeli armaments are being sent to the Ukrainian Nazi-Banderist Azov Battalion that is part of the security forces of the post-Maidan oligarchic-Zionist government (ally of the West and enemy of Russia).

Even Azov’s online advertisement does not hide the connection, as they does not shy away from exposing photographs of militiamen carrying Tavor rifles , weapons licensed by Israel.

That’s probably why they’re still allowed on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and more, while normal, healthy, radical dissent of the left, right, and center are now routinely banned from the – yes – Zionist loyal online multi-media platform complex. – ed JF

On the Battalion’s own Youtube channel, for example, a video review shows copies of two locally produced Israeli Tavor rifles, as can be seen below:

A photo on Azov’s website also shows a Tavor at the hands of one of the militia police.

Tavor rifles are produced under license from Israel Weapon Industries and as such were manufactured and exported authorized by Israeli government bodies.

IWI markets Tavor under the umbrella of the Israeli Special Forces’ “primary weapon,” and Fort, a Ukrainian state-owned arms company, owns a page on Tavor on its official website (the Israel Weapon Industries logo , bottom of the site in the company’s partner section ) .

The Battalion, which rose to power alongside the Western-orchestrated coup, in close collaboration with NGOs linked to George Soros (as the International Renaissance Foundation ), as it consolidated itself as the armed wing of the Kiev Board, increasingly central positions in Ukrainian politics.

Andriy Biletsky, one of the founders of Azov, is now a parliamentarian on the Supreme Council of Ukraine .

Vadym Troyan, former deputy commander of the Battalion, is currently head of the Kiev oblast police – nomination, that is to say, urged by the Ukrainian Minister of Home Affairs, Arsen Avakov, who met with the minister in September 2017 of the Israeli interior, Aryeh Deri, to discuss a “fruitful cooperation” between the two countries.

Arsen Avakov and Aryeh Deri, respectively, interior ministers of Ukraine and Israel, at a meeting to address strategic and security issues.

Analysts and activists claim that Avakov is now the man behind Azov, its most structured institutional arm. In fact, the appointment of a notorious Azovist to a central police post in the capital of the country is enough to establish the connection between him and the infamous Battalion.

[TonyGosling]

The US is Arming and Assisting Neo-Nazis in Ukraine, While Congress Debates Prohibition
https://thegrayzone.com/2018/04/07/the-us-is-arming-and-assisting-neo- nazis-in-ukraine-while-congress-debates-prohibition/

Known as a bastion of neo-Nazism, Ukraine’s Azov Battalion has received teams of American military advisors and high powered US-made weapons.

Last November, an American military inspection team visited the Azov Battalion on the front lines of the Ukrainian civil war to discuss logistics and deepening cooperation. Images of the encounter showed American army officers poring over maps with their Ukrainian counterparts, palling around and ignoring the Nazi-inspired Wolfangel patches emblazoned on their sleeves.

Azov is a militia that has been incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard, and is considered one of the most effective units in the field against pro-Russian separatists. But it also widely known as a bastion of neo-Nazism within the ranks of the Ukrainian military that has been criticized by international human rights groups, tied to an international fascist network and even a major terror plot.

According to Lower Class Magazine, a leftist German publication, Azov maintains a semi-underground outfit called the “Misanthropic Division” that recruits heavily among the ranks of neo-Nazi youth in France, Germany and Scandinavia. Foreign fighters are promised training with heavy weapons, including tanks, at Ukrainian camps filled with fascist fellow travelers. They even include military veterans like Mikael Skillit, a Swedish former army sniper turned neo-Nazi volunteer for Azov. “After World War Two, the victors wrote their history,” Skillit told the BBC. “They decided that it’s always a bad thing to say I am white and I am proud.”

Foreign Azov volunteers are driven by the call of the “Reconquista,” or the mission to place eastern European nations under the control of a white supremacist dictatorship modeled after the Nazi Reichskommissariat dictatorship that ruled Ukraine during World War II. The mission is promoted effusively by Azov’s chief ideologue, Andriy Biletsky, a veteran fascist organizer who leads the Social National Assembly in Ukraine’s parliament. Biletsky’s assembly has pledged to outlaw interracial contacts and vowed “to prepare Ukraine for further expansion and to struggle for the liberation of the entire White Race from the domination of the internationalist speculative capital.”

Perhaps the most notorious of the racist European youth drawn to the military training camps of Ukraine was a 25-year-old French farm worker named Gregoire Montaux. In June 2016, Moutaux was arrested on Ukraine’s border by the country’s SBU security services with a staggering arsenal of assault rifles, thousands of rounds of ammunition and 125kg of TNT explosives. He had even managed to gain possession of two anti-tank grenade launchers.

Driven by hardcore neo-Nazi ideology, Moutaux planned to blow up “a Muslim mosque, a Jewish synagogue, tax collection organizations, police patrol units,” and attack the Euro 2016 soccer championship. According to the SBU, the would-be terrorist had been in communication “with military units fighting in Donbas” — the eastern Ukrainian area where Azov maintains its training camps.

While mobilizing racist youth across Europe, Azov leadership has also managed to foster a warm relationship with the American military. In one photo posted to Azov’s website last November, an American military officer can be seen shaking hands with an Azov officer whose uniform was emblazoned with the Nazi-inspired Wolfsangel patch that serves as the militia’s symbol. The images highlighted a burgeoning relationship that has been largely conducted in secret, but whose disturbing details are slowly emerging.

Though Washington has not embarked on anything in Ukraine like the billion dollar train-and-equip program it implemented in Syria to promote regime change through a proxy force of so-called “moderate rebels,” there are clear and disturbing similarities between the two projects. Just as heavy weapons ostensibly intended for the CIA-backed Free Syrian Army went straight into the hands of Salafi-jihadi insurgent forces, including ISIS, American weapons in Ukraine are flowing directly to the extremists of Azov. And once again, in its single minded determination to turn up the heat on Russia, Washington seems willing to ignore the unsettling political orientations of its front line proxies.

In recent months, a wide spectrum of observers of the Ukrainian civil war have documented the transfer of heavy weapons made in the USA to the Azov Battalion, and right under the nose of the US State Department.


This photo of an Azov soldier testing a US-made PSRL-1 grenade launcher posted to Azov’s website in June 2017 was recently removed
Made in Texas, tested by Azov
The story of how American arms began flowing towards the Nazi-inspired militia began in October 2016, when the Texas-based AirTronic company announced a contract to deliver $5.5 million dollars worth of PSRL-1 rocket propelled grenade launchers to “an Allied European military customer.” In June 2017, photos turned up on Azov’s website showing its fighters testing PSRL-1 grenade launchers in the field. The images raised questions about whether Ukraine was AirTronic’s unnamed “customer.”

Two months later, the pro-Russian military analysis site Southfront published a leaked contract indicating that 100 PSRL-1 Launchers worth $554,575 — about 1/10th of the total deal — had been produced in partnership with a Ukrainian arms company for distribution to the country’s fighting units.

In an interview last December with the US-backed Voice of America, AirTronic Chief Operating Officer Richard Vandiver emphasized that the sale of grenade launchers was authorized through “very close coordination with the U.S. Embassy, with the U.S. State Department, with the U.S. Pentagon and with the Ukrainian government.”

Finally, this January, the transfer of the lethal weapons to Azov was confirmed by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRL). Aric Toler, a DFRL researcher, asserted that “the US Embassy did absolutely help facilitate this transfer, and I’m not sure if they were aware that Azov would be the first to train with them.”

As NATO’s de facto lobbyist in Washington, and one of the most fervent advocates in Washington for arming the Ukrainian military, the Atlantic Council was an extremely unlikely source for such a disclosure. While the think tank’s motives for exposing Azov’s use of American arms remains unclear, its researchers wound up highlighting a truly scandalous episode of semi-covert American support for neo-Nazis.

A day after the Atlantic Council reported on Azov’s acquisition of American arms, the Ukrainian National Guard insisted in an official statement that the grenade launchers were no longer in Azov’s possession. Meanwhile, the heightened scrutiny prompted Azov to delete all photos of its soldiers testing the weapons.

When the House of Representatives passed its Defense Appropriations act last September, it included a provision ensuring that “none of the funds made available by this Act may be used to provide arms, training, or other assistance to the Azov Battalion.” But the provision has yet to be authorized. Back in 2015, pressure from the Pentagon prompted Congress to strip out a similar restriction, and questions remain about whether it will ever be enforced.

In the meantime, Azov officers like Sgt. Ivan Kharkiv have revealed to American reporters that “U.S. trainers and U.S. volunteers” have been working closely with his battalion. And as the photographs posted in November on Azov’s website indicated, US officers have met with Azov commanders two months to provide them with “training, or other assistance” that is explicitly forbidden by the congressional provision.


The CIA smuggled former Nazi collaborator Mykola Lebed (above) into the US under an assumed name
“Your struggle is our struggle”
The American government’s collaboration with committed Nazi ideologues to undercut Russian geopolitical goals is not new, nor has it been a particularly well-kept secret. In his 1988 book length expose, “Blowback,” investigative journalist Christopher Simpson lifted the cover off the CIA’s program of rehabilitating former assets of Nazi Germany, including documented war criminals, and revealed how it employed them counter the spread of communism in Europe.

According to Simpson, the CIA recruited Mykola Lebed, a Gestapo-trained leader of the Ukrainian OUN militia who oversaw the torture and slaughter of Jews in Krakow, to help bolster West Germany’s intelligence services in 1947. Two years later, the CIA smuggled Lebed into the US under a false name. He was promptly hired by the Pentagon and dispatched on widely promoted speaking tours that rallied support for Ukrainian guerillas. For the next several decades, Lebed advanced the anti-communist cause through the Prolog Research Corporation, a New York City-based publishing house that was eventually revealed as a CIA front.

In his 1991 book, “Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party, journalist Russ Bellant provided a new layer of disturbing detail to the history of US collaboration with former Ukrainian Nazis. Bellant documented how the Ukrainian OUN-B militia reconstituted under the banner of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA), an umbrella organization comprised of “complete OUN-B fronts.” The Reagan administration was honeycombed with UCCA members, with the group’s chairman Lev Dobriansky, serving as ambassador to the Bahamas, and his daughter, Paula, sitting on the National Security Council. Reagan even welcomed Jaroslav Stetsko, a Banderist leader who oversaw the massacre of 7000 Jews in Lviv, into the White House in 1983.

“Your struggle is our struggle,” Reagan told the former Nazi collaborator. “Your dream is our dream.”


Torchlit rallies celebrating Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera have become a ritual in Kiev
The “imaginary Nazis” come to life
The relationship came full circle after the corrupt but democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in the 2014 coup known as Euro-Maidan. From the ranks of the neo-fascist street toughs that waged a pitched battle against national riot police in Kiev’s Maidan Square, the Azov Battalion was formed to do battle with pro-Russian separatists in the country’s east. The militia’s commander, Andriy Biletsky, had earned his stripes as a leader of the fascist group, Patriot of Ukraine. And he made no secret of his Nazism, proclaiming that his mission was to “lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival… against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”

At the time, supporters of the NATO-inspired coup painted any and all reports of the presence of neo-Nazis in post-Maidan Ukraine as Kremlin propaganda. Jamie Kirchick, a neoconservative operative, made the most obtuse attempt at spinning the fascist surge in Ukraine, erasing militias like Azov as “Putin’s Imaginary Nazis.” Liberal historian Timothy Snyder also dismissed the problem of neo-Nazism in Ukraine, defending the Maidan putsch as “a classic popular revolution.”

But it was not long before the wave of Nazi nostalgia and anti-Semitism sweeping across the country became impossible to deny. In Ukraine’s parliament, the veteran fascist Social-National Party founder Andriy Parubiy has risen to the role of Speaker. Vadym Troyan, a leader of Biletsky’s neo-Nazi Patriot of Ukraine organization who served as a deputy commander of Azov, was appointed police chief of the province of Kiev.

Massive torchlit rallies pour out into the streets of Kiev on regular occasions, showcasing columns of Azov members marching beneath the Nazi-inspired Wolfsangel banner that serves as the militia’s symbol. Author and columnist Lev Golinkin noted that the neo-Nazis who violently paraded through Charlottesville, Virginia last year bore flags emblazoned with the another symbol displayed by Azov: the Sonnengrad, or Nazi SS-inspired black sun.

Across Ukraine, Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera have been celebrated with memorials and rallies proclaiming them as national heroes. Bandera was the commander of the wartime militia the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B), which fought alongside Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union. Despite his OUN-B militia’s role in the massacre of Jews and ethnic Poles during the war, including a pogrom that left 7,000 Jews dead in Lviv, a major boulevard in Kiev has been named for Bandera. In today’s Ukraine, even mainstream nationalists revere Bandera as a freedom fighter.

Last May, Azov supporters held a torchlit rally in Lviv, in honor of General Roman Shukhevych, the late commander of the UPA insurgent militia that helped massacre thousands of Jews in Lviv. (Ironically, the massacre has been documented in detail by Timothy Snyder, the historian-turned-apologist for Ukraine’s government).

Two months later — on the anniversary of the pogrom — the city of Lviv held “Shukhevychfest,” celebrating the blood stained general as a “successful musician, an athlete, a businessman.” During the festival, neo-Nazis tossed a molotov cocktail into a local synagogue and vandalized the Jewish house of worship with graffiti reading, “Yids, remember July 1 [the date of the Lviv massacre].”

The explosion of pro-Nazi memorials across Ukraine has provoked harsh condemnation from the World Jewish Congress and prompted anti-Nazi activist Efraim Zuroff to openly lament that “Ukraine has more statues for killers of Jews than any other country.” But even as Ukraine’s Jewish community reels at the developments in horror, the US government has been mostly silent.

American reporters who visited Azov in the field have had a much harder time denying the uncomfortable reality of Nazi mobilization, however. When USA Today’s Oren Dorell toured an Azov training camp, he met a drill sergeant named Alex who “admitted he is a Nazi and said with a laugh that no more than half his comrades are fellow Nazis.” The Azov soldier also told Dorell he “supports strong leadership for Ukraine, like Germany during World War II.”

“[Alex] vowed that when the war ends, his comrades will march on the capital, Kiev, to oust a government they consider corrupt,” Dorell reported. Another Azov volunteer told the Guardian that Ukraine needs “a junta that will restrict civil rights for a while but help bring order and unite the country.”

While the hapless liberal-oligarchic government in Kiev struggles for legitimacy, the neo-Nazis of Azov yearn for the “Reconquista.” Until their dream is realized, however, the militia is likely to be bogged down in an intractable conflict with pro-Russian forces and hoping that an influx of American weapons can turn the tide.


Max Blumenthal
Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day War, and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.

thegrayzone.com


Israeli and American deep state actors have been supplying arms to the Azov gang/Black Sun. Ref. YT: The Grayzone.

[TonyGosling]

Blowback: How US-Funded Fascists in Ukraine Mentor US White Supremacists
https://thegrayzone.com/2018/11/15/blowback-how-us-funded-fascists-in- ukraine-mentor-us-white-supremacists/

Not only are white supremacists from across the West flocking to Ukraine to learn from the combat experience of their fascist brothers-in-arms, they are doing so openly, under the nose of a shrugging law enforcement — chronicling their experiences on social media before they bring their lessons back home.
By Max Blumenthal


Last month, an unsealed FBI indictment of four American white supremacists from the Rise Above Movement (RAM) declared that the defendants had trained with Ukraine’s Azov Battalion, a neo-Nazi militia officially incorporated into the country’s national guard. The training took place after the white supremacist gang participated in violent riots in Huntington Beach and Berkeley, California and Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.

The indictment stated that the Azov Battalion “is believed to have participated in training and radicalizing United States-based white supremacy organizations.”

After a wave of racist violence across America that culminated in the massacre of twelve Jewish worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue, the revelation that violent white supremacists have been traveling abroad for training and ideological indoctrination with a well-armed neo-Nazi militia should cause extreme alarm.

Not only are white supremacists from across the West flocking to Ukraine to learn from the combat experience of their fascist brothers-in-arms, they are doing so openly — chronicling their experiences on social media before they bring their lessons back home. But U.S. law enforcement has done nothing so far to restrict the flow of right-wing American extremists to Azov’s bases.


There is one likely explanation for the U.S. government’s hands-off approach to Azov recruitment: the extremist militia is fighting pro-Russian separatists as a front-line proxy of Washington. In fact, the United States has directly armed the Azov Battalion, forking over anti-tank rocket launchers and even sending a team of Army officers to meet in the field with Azov commanders in 2017.

Though Congress passed legislation this year forbidding military aid to Azov on the grounds of its white supremacist ideology, the Trump administration’s authorization of $200 million in offensive weaponry and aid to the Ukrainian military makes it likely new stores of weapons will wind up the extremist regiment’s hands. When queried by reporters about evidence of American military training of Azov personnel, multiple U.S. army spokespersons admitted there was no mechanism in place to prevent that from happening.

Today, Azov boasts combat experience, unlimited access to light weapons, and supporters honeycombed throughout the upper echelons of Ukraine’s military and government. No longer just a militia, the organization has developed into a political juggernaut that can overpower Ukraine’s government. Two years ago, the group flexed its muscle on the streets of Kiev, bringing out 10,000 supporters to demand that the government bend to their will or face a coup.

“With its military experience and weapons, Azov has the ability to blackmail the government and defend themselves politically against any opposition. They openly say that if the government will not advance an ideology similar to theirs, they will overthrow it,” Ivan Katchanovski, a professor of political science at the University of Ottawa and leading expert on Ukraine’s far-right, commented to me.

Katchanovski continued, explaining: “Currently the organizations that are fascist are stronger in Ukraine than in any other country in the world. But this fact is not reported by Western media because they see these organizations as supportive of the geopolitical agenda against Russia. So condemnations are limited to violence or human rights abuses.”

The revelations of collaboration between violent American white supremacists and a neo-Nazi militia armed by the Pentagon add another scandalous chapter to a long history of blowback that dates back to the 1950’s, when the CIA rehabilitated several Ukrainian Nazi collaborators as anti-communist assets in the Cold War.

The almost unbelievable story exposes an axis of fascism that stretches across the Atlantic, from the Ukrainian capital of Kiev to the sun-washed suburbs of Southern California, where some of the most rabid modern white supremacist gangs were born.

The white nationalist Fight Club
This October, four members of the RAM gang — Robert Rundo, Benjamin Drake Daley, Michael Paul Mirelis, and Aaron Eason — were arrested by FBI agents. They were accused of “using the internet to encourage, promote, participate in, and carry out riots” from Huntington Beach to Berkeley, California. Four other members had been arrested in connection with their participation in the white supremacist riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a counter-protester, Heather Heyer, was killed in a vehicular homicide by a white supremacist.

RAM first appeared in the national limelight during a celebration of Donald Trump’s election victory in Huntington Beach in March 2017. As about one hundred far-right activists marched along the beach donned in red “Make America Great Again” caps and waving Trump flags, they were confronted by a small group of masked anti-racist counter-demonstrators. When a melee ensued, RAM members assaulted their outnumbered opponents, pummeling them into submission and even attacking a local reporter. Afterwards, Orange County police arrested several anti-racist demonstrators, but the RAM gang walked free.

RAM markets itself as a self-defense organization that protects the free speech of white Americans against an onslaught of “Cultural Marxism,” a classic anti-Semitic trope. Its founders emphasize a vaguely anti-consumerist Fight Club mentality along with a rigorous dedication to mixed martial arts. Its co-founder, Rundo, operates an online clothing and apparel company, Right Brand Clothing, that hawks slickly designed t-shirts promoting “European Brotherhood,” stickers emphasizing a straight-edge “nationalist lifestyle,” and ethically sourced designer “Demagogue pants” (yes, white supremacists apparently care about sweatshops). RAM members can be seen at the site modeling their gear with a clean-cut “fashy” look that contrasts sharply with the stereotypical image of skinheads in jackboots.

RAM’s careful attention to its public image has not stopped its members from putting their crude neo-Nazi ideology on display at rallies, however. During the Huntington Beach riot, for example, RAM’s Robert Boman was seen waving a sign reading “Da Goyim Know.” This alt-right slogan refers to the white nationalist understanding of the supposed Jewish plot to dominate the world.

Rise Above Movement | Da Goyim Know

Above: Rise Above Movement in Huntington Beach, California

“I’m a big supporter of the Fourteen, I’ll say that,” RAM’s Rundo proclaimed into a camera in Huntington Beach. The gang leader was referring to the notorious 14-word slogan coined by convicted white supremacist terrorist David Lane, which has become a rallying cry for fascists across the globe: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

Two months after the violence in Huntington Beach, two RAM members were photographed in the same spot dousing literature they dubbed as “Cultural Marxist” with lighter fluid and setting it ablaze. Among the volumes they torched were “The Diary of Anne Frank,” “The 9/11 Commission Report,” and “Schindler’s List.” Besides evoking memories of the early days of Nazi Germany, the spectacle cast the group’s purported devotion to free speech in an extremely ironic light.

Rise Above Movement

Above: Rise Above Movement book burning at Huntington Beach, California

Following RAM’s highly publicized street battles, the group became the subject of intense media scrutiny. In October 2017, the investigative outlet ProPublica produced a video that exposed the identities of RAM’s core membership and wondered why they had not been investigated by law enforcement for their violent actions in Huntington Beach and elsewhere.

But the media coverage of RAM glossed over the group’s attraction to a burgeoning trans-Atlantic conglomeration of white supremacists that centered on U.S.-allied Ukraine as the base for a fascist reconquest of Europe. By the Spring of 2018, RAM leadership was barnstorming through Germany and Italy and heading east to meet fascist cohorts from across the West at a conference in Kiev.

RAM’s Ukrainian hate-cation
Buried in the FBI indictment of RAM members are details of their meetings with one of the key figures in Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion militia.

In August, according to the indictment, RAM members published photos on Instagram showing themselves meeting with Olena Semanyaka, the leader of the international department of the Ukrainian National Corps, which functions as a civilian arm of the Azov Battalion:

Rise Above Movement | Ukraine

The indictment also referenced a video of RAM co-founder Benjamin Drake Daley performing a crossed-forearm salute to the Southern California-based white supremacist Hammerskin gang while in Ukraine:

Rise Above Movement | Ukraine

RAM’s Gab account provides additional details of the group’s foray through Ukraine this May. The trip centered around the Paneuropa conference, an event that brings together fascists from across the West to encourage international collaboration. It is hosted at the Reconquista Club in Kiev, and included an MMA competition.

“One of our guys has had the honor to be the first American to compete in the pan european organization Reconquista in Ukraine!” RAM declared on its Gab account. “This was a great experience meeting nationalist[s] that came [sic] as far as Portugal and Switzerland to take part.”

Rise Above Movement | Ukraine MMA

Robert Rundo, left, of the Rise Above Movement competes at Azov’s Reconquista Club in Kiev, Ukraine. Photo | Gab

The visit, which followed on the heels of meetings with white supremacists in Germany and with Italy’s fascist CasaPound party, highlighted the centrality of Ukraine to international fascist organizing. Further, the Paneuropa conference, where fascists build connections across national borders, revealed the Azov Battalion as much more than a militia fighting for control of a sliver of contested territory in eastern Ukraine.

Semanyaka did not respond to an interview request delivered through Facebook messenger; however, she told Radio Free Europe’sChristopher Miller that RAM “came to learn our ways” and showed interest in learning how to create youth forces in the way Azov has.

Today, Azov leaders openly acknowledge that were it not for the U.S.-backed coup that unfolded in Kiev’s Maidan Square in 2014, their organization would never have developed into the powerhouse it is. As Semanyaka said this year, according to a summary:

The Ukrainian nationalist movement would have never reached such a level of development unless the war with Russia had begun. For the first time since the Second World War, nationalist formations have managed to create their own military wings, the brightest example being the Azov regime of the National Guard of Ukraine.”

The right-wing revolution on the Maidan
The 2013-14 Maidan revolt was the cataclysmic event that Ukraine’s already potent ultra-nationalist camp had been waiting for. The protests erupted in Kiev’s Maidan Square after the democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych refused to sign an economic association agreement with the EU. Celebrated in the West as a pro-Western movement guided by tech-savvy middle-class youth, EuroMaidan depended heavily for its success on phalanxes of black-masked hardmen from Right Sector (see appendix at bottom), an ultra-nationalist party that did battle with the government’s Berkut riot police.

Along with Right Sector, the leadership of the far-right Svoboda Party assumed a prominent role at the Maidan, dubbing the protests a “Revolution of Dignity.” Svoboda co-founder Oleh Tyahnybok — who had once demanded an investigation of the “Jewish-Muscovite mafia” that he saw controlling Ukraine — appeared on stage at the square beside U.S. Senators John McCain and Chris Murphy when they arrived to encourage the protesters.

Another key figure in Ukraine’s neo-Nazi scene was Andriy Biletsky. A university Ph.D. who stressed physical violence as a means to revolutionary change, Biletsky led the Patriot of Ukraine militia, an early forerunner of Azov that attacked migrant camps and menaced foreigners. In a manifesto published during the height of the Maidan clashes, Biletsky outlined his post-revolutionary agenda: “The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival,” he wrote. “A crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”

Ukaine | Right Sector

Above: Members of the Right Sector practice street fighting in central Kiev, Ukraine, Feb. 3, 2014. Darko Bandic | AP

In May 2014, Right Sector and an assortment of far-right forces banded together to massacre their opponents in Odessa, attacking a pro-separatist protest camp with iron pipes then burning the fleeing protesters alive after they took shelter in a local trade union building. Over 40 pro-separatist Ukrainian citizens were consumed in the flames. The U.S. and EU studiously looked the other way, legitimizing the violence and setting the stage for more.

Behind the scenes, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt were carefully stage managingthe opposition, positioning the pliable Arseniy Yatsenyuk as the future leader of a U.S. client-state. Meanwhile, billionaire-backed U.S. soft-power entities like the Omidyar Network and Open Society Foundation plowed money into the opposition, providing it with high-tech organizing capacity and establishing new media outlet Hromadske overnight.

Given the amount of U.S. investment in regime change in Ukraine, it was necessary for American pundits who cheered on the operation to downplay or simply deny the central role neo-Nazi forces played in making it all possible. In perhaps the most absurd attempt at whitewashing the fascist presence, the neoconservative pundit James Kirchick described Right Sector in an article for Foreign Affairs as “Putin’s imaginary Nazis.” Meanwhile, groups like the Anti-Defamation League — which supposedly exist to battle anti-Semitism — refused to support a congressional effort to ban arms to groups affiliated with Right Sector, because “the focus should be on Russia.”

With all the cover he needed from Washington, Biletsky organized the “imaginary Nazis” of Patriot of Ukraine, Right Sector, and assorted football ultras into a real militia called the Azov Battalion. Together, they fought under the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel symbol, which also happens to be incorporated into the logo of the U.S.-based Aryan Nations.

On the frontlines of eastern Ukrainian flashpoints, Azov did battle with Russian-speaking separatists and set up government-sponsored indoctrination camps for children and teens closer to the country’s interior, instructing ten year olds on marksmanship and the evils of foreigners. Azan was subsequently absorbed into Ukraine’s military as a national guard unit, and began appearing in the field with PSRL-1 rocket launchers supplied under the watch of the U.S. Department of Defense. In November 2017, Azov leadership received a team of U.S. Army officers for training and logistical discussions (see photo below and to the right).

Azov Nazi

Above: Members of the Azov Battalion display the Nazi salute, left. U.S. Army officers visit the Azov Battalion in the field, right.

By the time Congress approved a ban on arms to Azov this year, the Trump administration had already authorized a new shipment of offensive weapons to the Ukrainian military, including advanced Javelin anti-tank missiles. As in Syria — where the CIA-backed Free Syrian Army functioned as a de facto “weapons farm” for jihadist groups, including Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS — any new U.S. arms are likely to wind up in the possession of Azov, the congressional ban notwithstanding.

“It’s very corrupt in Ukraine and money can be stolen — the same as in Syria where extremist fighters got guns from U.S.-backed units,” said Katchanovski. “Azov can just establish new political fronts so they can circumvent the U.S. prohibitions.”

Foreign fighters for fascism
The Azov Battalion has received not only U.S. weapons, but also volunteer American military veterans like Brian Boyenger. “It’s not illegal,” Boyenger told a Ukraine Today interviewer of his presence in an Azov camp. “From a U.S. perspective, as long as you’re not fighting with a terrorist group or committing war crimes or things like that. It is legal — mostly I’ve been serving as kind of like an advisor.”

Azov has also welcomed Islamist fighters from Chechnya to continue their long war against Russia in a new theater. A sniper from Sweden with “typical neo-Nazi views,” Mikael Skillt, has been assigned to oversee an entire Azov regiment. And neo-Nazis from as far away as Brazil have flocked to Ukraine to join the fascist crusade. One foreign fighter from France, a young anti-Semite named Gregoire Moutaux, returned from a Ukrainian militia camp in 2016 “armed to the teeth and ready to strike” synagogues, mosques and the 2016 soccer championships when he was arrested on the Ukrainian border by national police.

To consolidate its political influence over the country, the Azov Battalion established a National Druzhina, or street patrol unit. A slickly produced recruitment video released in 2017 featured drone footage of National Druzhina members marching in formation into Kiev as Biletsky, their ideological guide, impelled them to “restore Ukrainian order” to a corrupted society. The street patrol was openly backed by Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, a powerful patron of Azov who belongs to the ruling party of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.

This year, the National Druzhina and state-funded neo-Nazi militias like C14 (the “14” represents the notorious “fourteen words” mantra) staged a series of lethal pogroms against the local Roma population, vandalized the offices of insufficiently pliant politicians, stormed city council meetings, and even sued the Hromadske station that was established with U.S. funding for describing their members as neo-Nazis.

“Their connection to power is why they can commit any crime and they will never be punished,” Katchanovski said of Azov and its various street-muscle brigades. “Because they have the police and senior police members like [Vadym] Troyan, they can intimidate people and intimidate politicians with impunity.” (Once a member of Azov, Troyan now serves as Ukraine’s Deputy Minister of Interior).

The U.S. has not only kept silent about the wave of ultra-nationalist violence sweeping across Ukraine, it has been complicit in legitimizing the perpetrators. This November, America House Kyiv — a U.S. government-funded cultural center — hosted a speechby a uniformed leader of the neo-Nazi C14 gang, Serhiy Bondar. Months earlier, Republican House Majority Leader Paul Ryan and the NATO-funded Atlantic Council hosted Andriy Parubiy, the speaker of the Ukrainian parliament and co-founder of the fascist Social-National party, for a friendly exchange on Capitol Hill.

C14 Ukraine

Above: Serhiy Bondar, a leader of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi C14 militia, is hosted by the U.S.-funded America House in Kiev.

Given the free rein and open acceptance right-wing extremists enjoy in post-Maidan Ukraine, it is no wonder the country has become a haven for fascists from across the West.

The grand Reconquista strategy
As the international secretary of Azov’s National Corps, Olena Semanyaka has emerged as one of the most prolific publicists of Eastern European fascism. With jet black hair and a faintly gothic look, she brands herself as a “traditionalist,” emulating her hero, Julius Evola, the late Italian occultist philosopher who espoused a “racism of the spirit.” Though she has been photographed bearing a Nazi flag and throwing up a sieg heil salute, Semanyaka has also been a welcome guest on Ukrainian nationalist TV to promote her campaign for the release of Ukrainian nationalist activists held by Russia.

Semanya Nazi Ukraine

Above: Semanya, upper left corner of Nazi flag, displays the Nazi salute. On the right, Semanyaka is shown during an appearance on Ukrainian state TV.

In her role with Azov, Semanyaka organizes conferences aimed at popularizing the concept of “the great European Reconquista” — a pan-European fascist-nationalist takeover that begins in the former Soviet satellite states and ultimately sweeps through Western Europe on the strength of anti-foreigner resentment.

Semanyaka laid out the fascist grand strategy in Kiev at a December 2016 gathering of Black Metal fans from across Europe called the “Pact of Steel:”

For the first time [in] a long period, the success of the Right in Western Europe — the rise of the Right because of refugee influx and terror — gives the chance for the realization of our ‘pact of steel’ between East and West, between Western and Eastern European nationalists.”

She continued:

Our main task today is to show to Western nationalists, to inform them that Putin’s Russia is no alternative to the EU of the West and that the only ally for them is an alternative axis of European integration which is being formed now in Kiev, Central and Eastern Europe, as a springboard for the all-European reconquest, for the new Europe between the EU and neo-Soviet neo-Bolshevik Putin’s Russia.”

Semanyaka and other Ukrainian fascist ideologues refer to the regional springboard for the European reconquest as the “Intermarium.” This is a concept originally envisioned after World War One by Polish military leader Jozef Pilsudski, who imagined a confederation of countries from the Baltic to the Black Sea as a counter-weight to German and Russian aggression. Though his idea never materialized, Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the failure of the EU and NATO to prevent it revived interest in the Intermarium. One of the biggest boosters of the alliance, the right-wing Polish President Andrzej Duda, saw it primarily through the prism of regional security. The extreme right in Ukraine, however, understood the Intermarium as an ethnically pure base for exporting their revolution to the rest of Europe.

The first Intermarium conference was held in Kiev in January 2016 under the banner of Azov’s National Corps. Semanyaka headlined the event alongside Biletsky, the Azov founder, welcoming far-right activists from Poland and the Baltic States. Within a year, the concept was promoted at an officially sanctioned event at the Latvian embassy in Kiev. There, the Latvian ambassador welcomed a who’s who of the Ukrainian fascist scene, from Svoboda to National Corps representatives like Semanyaka, for a ceremony honoring Peter Radzins, a Latvian general who advocated for the Intermarium.

Organized by Latvia’s far-right National Alliance party, a member of the country’s governing coalition, the spectacle provided Azov leaders with the sheen of international legitimacy. As Matthew Kott, an academic expert on the European far-right, argued, Latvia’s “membership in the EU and NATO allows it to act as a Trojan horse for increasing the clout of the far-right in the Euro-Atlantic community.”

While historical tensions between the Intermarium nations are still simmering, Semanyaka has pleaded with her international allies to heed the call of the late pro-Hitler British Blackshirt leader Oswald Mosley for a “great act of oblivion…of all our former struggles, conflicts, historical enmity. What we need,” she argued, “is the revival of a sense of the new European aristocracy, a new European unity as a real basis for the union I am talking about.”

There are no historical grievances between American white supremacists and their cohorts in Ukraine. After all, the U.S. government has made itself the main guarantor of Ukraine’s security, going as far as directly arming Azov in its bid to bleed Russia. And decades before the U.S. backed extremists in contemporary Ukraine, the CIA ran a program to rehabilitate former Nazi collaborators from the country as anti-communist intelligence assets. Backing Ukrainian fascists is a grand American tradition, indeed.

This November, during the latest Paneuropa conference organized by Semanyaka as a safe space for fascists from across the West, she played host to one of the most prominent self-styled intellectuals of America’s white nationalist movement, Greg Johnson.

Azov Nazi Ukraine

Above: Gregory Johnson promotes his “White Nationalist Manifesto” at Azov’s Reconquista Club in Kiev, Nov. 2018.

“I think that what’s happening in Ukraine is a model and an inspiration for nationalists of all white nations and I wanted to learn as much as possible about what you’re doing here and see as much as possible,” Johnson told his rapt audience. “And I’m enormously impressed and I’m taking notes.”

Johnson is a highbrow racist who publishes a journal, Counter-Currents, that advances what he calls “white identity politics.” Like the Rise Above Movement leaders before him, he was clearly inspired by his visit to Kiev. “I’m already planning to come back,” Johnson exclaimed during a break-out session. “I’m very impressed with what I’ve seen here. I want to come back and learn more.”

Help the Grayzone Project produce more original investigative work like this by donating to us at Patreon.

APPENDIX

Svoboda Party: Originally called the Social-National Party of Ukraine, a Ukrainian political party with long history of anti-Semitism. Led by Oleh Tyahnybok, Svoboda played a prominent role in the 2013-2014 Maidan uprising, where Tyahnybok shared the stage with U.S. Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Chris Murphy (D-CT). Andriy Parubiy, who had co-founded the Social-National Party of Ukraine, is now Speaker of Parliament.

Azov Battalion: 3,000-member neo-Nazi formation in Ukraine’s National Guard. Azov began as a paramilitary, originally formed out of the Patriot of Ukraine neo-Nazi gang led by Andriy Biletsky, and is now a Ukrainian National Guard unit. The battalion’s logo incorporates the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel and black sun symbols. Biletsky is now a member of Ukrainian Parliament. Vadim Troyan, another Azov veteran, is now Deputy Interior Minister.

Ukrainian National Corps: Azov’s civilian arm, responsible, among other things, for coordinating with and recruiting neo-Nazis and white supremacists from around the world. The international outreach is led by Olena Semanyka, who’s been photographed with a swastika flag.

National Druzhina: Azov’s street patrol organization, established in January 2018 with the aim of “restoring Ukrainian order” to the streets. The National Druzhina — whose members pledge personal loyalty to Biletsky — has been involved in pogroms against the Roma, LGBT, and other activists.

Right Sector: Loose formation of neo-Nazis and football ultras, which supplied street muscle to the 2013-2014 Maidan uprising. Later involved in lethal suppression of anti-Maidan movements in places like Odessa.

C14: Ukrainian neo-Nazi gang that receives government funding and has been responsible for some of the lethal Roma pogroms as well as anti-LGBT violence. The 14 is a reference to the Fourteen Word slogan of white supremacy. Led by Serhiy Bondar, who spoke at America House, a cultural center funded by the U.S. government.


Max Blumenthal
Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day War, and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.

[TonyGosling]

Cold Wars and Profit 125
July 20, 2020 in Uncategorized by craig | View Comments
The Guardian carried a very strange piece yesterday under the heading “Stamps celebrating Ukrainian resistance in pictures”. This was the first image shown:
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/07/cold-wars-and-profit/



The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was, without any shadow of a doubt, responsible for the slaughter of at least 200,000 Polish civilians; they liquidated whole Polish communities in Volhynia and Galicia, including the women and children. The current Polish government, which is as anti-Russian and pro-NATO as they come, nevertheless has declared this a genocide. It certainly was an extremely brutal ethnic cleansing. There is no doubt either that at times between 1942 and 1944 the UPA collaborated with the Nazis and collaborated in the destruction of Jews and Gypsies. It is simplistic to describe the UPA as fascist or an extension of the Nazi regime; at times they fought the Nazis, though they collaborated more often. There is a real sense in which they operated at the level of medieval peasants, simply seizing local opportunities to exterminate rural populations and seize their land and assets, be they Polish, Jew or Gypsy. But on balance any reasonable person would have to conclude that the UPA was an utterly deplorable phenomenon. To publish a celebration of it, disguised as a graphic art piece, without any of this context, is no more defensible than a display of Nazi art with no context.

In fact the Guardian’s very brief text is still worse than no context.

Ukrainian photographer Oleksandr Kosmach collects 20th-century stamps issued by Ukrainian groups in exile during the Soviet era.

Artists and exiles around the world would use stamps to communicate the horrors of Soviet oppression. “These stamps show us the ideas and values of these people, who they really were and what they were fighting for,” Kosmach says.

That is so misleadingly partial as a description of the art glorifying the UPA movement as to be deeply reprehensible. It does however fit with the anything goes stoking of Russophobia, which is the mainstay of government and media discourse at the moment. Even at the height of the Cold War, we never saw such a barrage of unprovable accusations leveled at Russia through the media by “security service sources”.

A whole slew of these were rehearsed by Andrew Marr on his flagship BBC1 morning show. The latest is the accusation that Russia is responsible for a cyber attack on Covid-19 vaccination research. This is another totally evidence free accusation. But it misses the point anyway. The alleged cyber attack, if it happened, was a hack not an attack – the allegation is that there was an effort to obtain the results of research, not to disrupt research. It is appalling that the UK is trying to keep its research results secret rather than share them freely with the world scientific community. As I have reported before, the UK and the USA have been preventing the WHO from implementing a common research and common vaccine solution for Covid-19, insisting instead on a profit driven approach to benefit the big pharmaceutical companies (and disadvantage the global poor).

What makes the accusation that Russia tried to hack the research even more dubious is the fact that Russia had just bought the very research specified. You don’t steal things you already own.

If anybody had indeed hacked the research, we all know it is impossible to trace with certainty the whereabouts of hackers. My VPN’s are habitually set to India, Australia or South Africa depending on where I am trying to watch the cricket, dodging broadcasting restrictions. More pertinently, Wikileaks Vault 7 release of CIA material showed the specific programmes for the CIA in how to leave clues to make a leak look like it came from Russia. This irrefutable evidence that the CIA do computer hacks with apparent Russian “fingerprints” deliberately left, like little bits of Cyrillic script, is an absolutely classic example of a fact that everybody working in the mainstream media knows to be true, but which they all contrive never to mention.

Thus when last week’s “Russian hacking” story was briefed by the security services, that Jeremy Corbyn deployed secret documents on UK/US trade talks which had been posted on Reddit, after being stolen by an evil Russian who left his name of Grigor in his Reddit handle, there was no questioning in the media of this narrative. Instead, we had another round of McCarthyite witch-hunt aimed at the rather tired looking Jeremy Corbyn.

Personally, if the Russians had been responsible for revealing that the Tories are prepared to open up the NHS “market” to big American companies, including ending or raising caps on pharmaceutical prices, I should be very grateful to the Russians for telling us. Just as the world would owe the Russians a favour if it were indeed them who leaked just how systematically the DNC rigged the 2016 primaries against Bernie Sanders. But as it happens, it was not the Russians. The latter case was a leak by a disgusted insider, and I very much suspect the NHS US trade deal link was also from a disgusted insider.

When governments do appalling things, very often somebody manages to blow the whistle.

If you can delay even the most startling truth for several years, it loses much of its political bite. If you can announce it during a health crisis, it loses still more. The world therefore did not shudder to a halt when the CEO of Crowdstrike admitted there had never been any evidence of a Russian hack of the DNC servers.



You will recall the near incredible fact that, even through the Mueller investigation, the FBI never inspected the DNC servers themselves but simply relied on a technical report from Crowdstrike, the Clinton related IT security consultant for the DNC. And now know for sure that Crowdstrike had been peddling fake news for Hillary. In fact Crowdstrike had no record of any internet hack at all. There was no evidence of the email material being exported over the internet. What they claimed did exist was evidence that the files had been organised preparatory to export.

Remember the entire “Russian hacking” story was based ONLY on Crowdstrike’s say so. There is literally no other evidence of Russian involvement in the DNC emails, which is unsurprising as I have been telling you for four years from my own direct sources that Russia was not involved. Yet finally declassified Congressional testimony revealed that Shawn Henry stated on oath that “we did not have concrete evidence” and “There’s circumstantial evidence , but no evidence they were actually exfiltrated.”

This testimony fits with what I was told by Bill Binney, former Technical Director of the National Security Agency (NSA), who told me that it was impossible that any large amount of data should be moved across the internet from the USA, without the NSA both seeing it happen in real time and recording it. If there really had been a Russian hack, the NSA would have been able to give the time of it to a millisecond. That the NSA did not have that information was proof the transfer had never happened, according to Binney. What had happened, Binney deduced, was that the files had been downloaded locally, probably to a thumb drive.

So arguably the biggest news story of the past four years, the claim that Putin effectively interfered to have Trump elected, turns out indeed to be utterly baseless. Has the mainstream media, acting on security service behest, done anything to row back from the false impression it created? No it has doubled down.

The “Russian hacking” theme keeps being brought back related to whatever is the big story of the day.
Brexit? Russian hacking.
UK General election 2019? Russian hacking
Covid-19 vaccine? Russian hacking.

Then we have those continual security service briefings. Two weeks ago we had unnamed security service sources telling the New York Times that Russia had offered the Taliban a bounty for killing American soldiers. This information had allegedly come from interrogation of captured Taliban in Afghanistan, which would almost certainly mean was obtained under torture.

It is a wildly improbable tale. The Afghans have never needed that kind of incentivisation to kill foreign invaders on their soil. It is also a fascinating throwback of an accusation – the British did indeed offer Afghans money for, quite literally, the heads of Afghan resistance leaders during the first Afghan War in 1841, as I detail in my book Sikunder Burnes.

You do not have to look back that far to realise the gross hypocrisy of the accusation. In the 1980’s the West was quite openly paying, arming and training the Taliban -including Osama Bin Laden – to kill Russian and other Soviet conscripts in their thousands. That is just one example of the hypocrisy. The US and UK security services both cultivate and bribe senior political and other figures abroad in order to influence policy all of the time. We work to manipulate the result of elections – I have done it personally in my role as a UK diplomat. A great deal of the behaviour over which western governments and media are creating this new McCarthyite anti-Russian witch hunt, is standard diplomatic practice.

My own view is that there are malign Russian forces attempting to act on government in the UK and the USA, but they are not nearly as powerful as the malign British and American forces acting on their own governments. The truth is that the world is under the increasing control of a global elite of billionaires, to whom nationality is irrelevant and national governments are tools to be manipulated. Russia is not attempting to buy corrupt political influence on behalf of the Russian people, who are decent folk every bit as exploited by the ultra wealthy as you or I. Russian billionaires are, just like billionaires everywhere, attempting to game global political, commercial and social structures in their personal interest.

The other extreme point of hypocrisy lies in human rights. So many western media commentators are suddenly interested in China and the Uighurs or in restrictions on the LBGT community in Russia, yet turn a completely blind eye to the abuse in western “allies” such as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. As somebody who was campaigning about the human rights of both the Uighurs and of gay people in Russia a good decade before it became fashionable, I am disgusted by how the term “human rights” has become weaponised for deployment only against those countries designated as enemy by the western elite.

Finally, do not forget that there is a massive armaments industry and a massive security industry all dependent on having an “enemy”. Powerful people make money from this Russophobia. Expect much more of it. There is money in a Cold War.