Azov: the neoNazi brigade playing a PR game in the Ukraine war
WHILE most of Ukraine’s armed forces have been quietly engaged in the grind of a gruelling tug-of-war with Russia, one battalion has been busy putting out slick videos and images trumpeting its own achievements.
In a photograph released this week, a burly man in dark blue uniform lies unconscious on the snow-covered ground, his right side caked in blood.
“Azov has eliminated a major general! And by thy sword shalt thou live!” reads the caption. The unnamed officer was reportedly the fourth Russian general to have been killed. His killers? The extreme Right-wing Azov Battalion.
A long-time focus of Kremlin propaganda attempts to smear all Ukrainians as neo-Nazis, the unit has been making headlines once again after Moscow claimed that it staged a false flag operation to blow up a theatre full of civilians in the besieged city of Mariupol. The truth was more mundane: yet more Russian shelling.
But Azov has been active in the past month. Its well-oiled PR machine has been producing Ukraine’s arguably bestquality war videos with camera drones perfectly capturing the attacks as they happen in real time. Ukraine’s armed forces have happily used Azov’s videos as visual proof of the country’s counterattacks on the invading army.
Russian tanks were seen blown up in pieces, spurting plumes of smoke as aerial footage showed the attacks with a video-game-like precision.
Ukraine has since claimed a fifth Russian general, Andrei Mordvichev, died this weekend – killed after an artillery strike in the Ukrainian town of Chernobayevka.
Azov rose to prominence at the start of the separatist insurgency in Ukraine in 2014. It never held much sway in Ukraine’s politics but videos of its occasional torch-lit marches have helped to feed the false Kremlin narrative of Ukrainians being neo-Nazis.
Ukraine’s crumbling armed forces were taken by surprise in spring 2014 when Russian-backed separatists began to take over swaths of Ukraine’s industrial heartland in the east.
As Ukraine’s regular troops were woefully unprepared to wage a war, citizens of all stripes took up arms and travelled to the east.
Azov Battalion was one of several volunteer forces that took the job of fighting the separatists that the army seemingly did not want to do.
Months later, prominent rights advocacies such as Human Rights Watch reported “credible allegations of torture and other egregious abuses” by Azov and other volunteer battalions.
Several members of other volunteer battalions have been tried and convicted of rights abuse during their time in the east but no one from Azov was reportedly convicted.
Azov was founded by Andriy Biletsky, an ultra-nationalist political figure who had had run-ins with the law and had been involved in various groups that toyed with Nazi symbols.
The battalion that attracted football ultras and far-Right activists made no secret of its roots by adopting the Nazi Wolfsangel as its emblem, saying that it views it as a stylised version of the letters N and I standing for “national idea”.
The 44-year-old activist won a seat in parliament as an independent candidate in the autumn of 2014, clearly capitalising on his battalion’s success in fighting the separatists, but he was not re-elected five years later.
Azov, which takes its name from the Azov Sea, first joined the fight against separatists around the city of Mariupol and has been based in the port city since then.