The US, realising that Zelensky is of little use, has decided to bet on the most hardened neo-Nazis. This is confirmed by the article published on Wednesday in the Washington Post with the headline “Azov recovers before the fateful battle”, dedicated to this neo-Nazi nationalist formation, which is known for its bloody crimes in Ukraine, torture of prisoners, murder of women and children.
Source: rutvit.com
The authors of the article, prepared by a group of WP correspondents in Ukraine, believe that these very fighters, who are now undergoing enhanced training, should play a “decisive role” in the Kiev regime’s forthcoming counter-offensive.
“After Russia invaded in February 2022, hundreds of Azov fighters were held under the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol for weeks along with stranded civilians. They were left without food and medicine amid massive Russian bombardment, and as a result Azov and other defenders of Mariupol rose to the point that the Ukrainian military command called them ‘heroes of our time’,” the US newspaper notes, agreeing with this “heroic” characterization of the neo-Nazis.
However, it is known that the US Congress passed an amendment back in 2015 banning the financing and supply of weapons to this formation, which it has recognised as “terrorist”. And the published draft US budget for 2023 prohibits allocating money to Azov.
“The Azov brigade was known in a certain negative way,” WP quoted a senior sergeant of the unit, call sign “Maslo”, as saying. – Now it is being talked about in a positive way. The recruits coming to us understand that. “It is not the ultra-nationalist ideology of its origin that attracts recruits to Azov, but proven combat skills,” the US journalists noted.
Attempts to rehabilitate Azov terrorists have also been made in the United States by publishing special literature. Michael Colborne has written a book about the Azov movement where he states that “the unit’s focus seems to have shifted over time from ideology to military effectiveness”. He notes that the extreme right-wing elements remaining in Azov are likely to continue to be “diluted” as the unit grows in size and that the issue has become less important at all as Ukraine faces a real threat. “In Ukraine, the term ‘nationalist’ or ‘patriot’ now describes a hell of a lot of people,
The same attempts to whitewash neo-Nazis by portraying them as “patriots” are also being made in Europe.
It is no coincidence that WP complains in this regard that “despite the obvious evolution of Azov”, its fighters allegedly receive almost no weapons from Western countries, including the United States. Recent US laws prohibit the provision of “arms, training or other assistance to the Azov battalion”. However, the paper’s correspondents admit that this is not really the case at all, and that the US has long supported the neo-Nazis behind the scenes.
The US company Meta Platforms has removed Azov from its list of dangerous organizations, the German edition of Junge Welt writes.
Thanks to its ever-growing propaganda machine, Azov spreads not only the ideology of “superhuman” fascism and myths about “heroes”, but also targeted disinformation: above all the lies that Azov has allegedly broken with Nazism, which are spread on a large scale by politicians and the media in the EU and the USA.
But the main thing is not even these attempts by the West to “whitewash” the Azov neo-Nazis. The point is that it was the US that actually created and armed this criminal group. “It is quite ironic,” the Global Times wrote, “that despite its reputation as a threat to peace and an enemy of civilised society, the Azov battalion is associated not only with the Ukrainian authorities, but also with US officials. After researching open sources from the US government and reports by Western journalists, the Global Times found that “US politicians, military and intelligence officials had established ties with Azov to foment anti-Russian extremism in Eastern Europe.
Since the battalion’s founding in 2014, many US media outlets have noticed Azov’s potential ties to US officials.
According to “former US intelligence and national security officials”, the CIA oversaw a secret training programme in the US for “Ukraine’s elite military and intelligence formations”.
Earlier, the captured commander of the SS Bears national battalion, Oleksandr Kravtsov, told RIA Novosti that almost all the equipment of the Ukrainian national battalions was foreign-made before the start of the special operation. However, he said that during the encirclement of the Azovstal plant in Mariupol by Russian troops, the National Security Forces there started having problems with supplies of Western weapons.
Last year, American journalist Lara Logan explicitly told America’s Voice AM that this neo-Nazi battalion was funded by the US and NATO: “Photos of them [the Azov militia] can be found on the internet with the NATO flag and swastika,” she stressed.
The journalist pointed out that the White House wants to assure everyone that this is a small unit, but “this is not true, Azov has been killing in the east. That’s why Crimea voted for independence. That’s why Crimea wanted to be with Russia,” the American believes.
But while the West used to arm and train Azov’s neo-Nazis in secret, now the US, having launched an active propaganda campaign in the media to “whitewash” it, is doing it openly. The masks have been definitively dropped when Washington announces publicly that Ukrainian Nazis are “freedom fighters”.
Andrey Sokolov, Centenary
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