It used to be said that politics make strange bedfellows.
What's that old saying? "known by the company they keep".
Besides, there's nothing like a few good, "sig heils" among friends,
to get the day off right.
Carl Jarvis
On 1/19/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The US is Arming and Assisting Neo-Nazis in Ukraine, While Congress Debates
Prohibition
Known as a bastion of neo-Nazism, the Azov Battalion has received teams of
American military advisors and high powered US-made weapons
By Max Blumenthal
Left: Members of the Azov Battalion offer a sig heil salute. Right: US
military advisors meet with Azov commanders in the field in November, 2017.
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 "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.
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."
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
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.
"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.
The CIA smuggled former Nazi collaborator Mykola Lebed (above) into the US
under an assumed name
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."
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.
Torchlit rallies celebrating Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera have
become a ritual in 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.
