Four soldiers from Ukraine’s popular Third Assault Brigade kicked off their meet-and-greets in the Polish capital on Sunday, home to large numbers of Ukrainian refugees, more than two years into the conflict,” reported Agence France Presse in an article picked up by the French state media’s Radio France Internationale (RFI.
Popular?” Really? That’s the only defining characteristic that came to mind when describing the Ukrainian Army faction created in 2022 from what was left of the Azov Battalion in the wake of the battle of Mariupol.
A little digging in the French press itself would have revealed that, when this same Brigade was being trained here in France last year, a leaked report prompted the French investigative outlet, Mediapart, to describe one member as having a Nazi SS logo tattooed on his head, while a photo of the same guy showed him with a swastika flag.
When Mediapart started digging around online for details on some of the other members who were training in central France, at the La Courtine camp, they hit a social media jackpot of ‘Heil Hitler’ salutes, Hitler art, and a potpourri of various Nazi SS division emblems like they were some kind of Hitlerized stamp collection.
And those were just the half-dozen or so attendees who were dumb enough to post it all over social media when this rebranded Azov Batallion had gone to all the trouble of hiring a 12-person, full-time media team, including a cameraman, press officers, and editors, according to the European Center for Policy Analysis.
A Ukrainian showman and comedian who was also a member had been doing some vlogging to promote the Third Assault Brigade, according to the think tank. All this industrial-grade whitewashing and here these trainee members were, all over social media, Naziing it up.
Guess the Azov brand was too tarnished. Too closely associated with neo-Nazism. And with losing to Russia. So here’s the rebranding. They should have to take out an ad in the newspapers announcing a name change like anyone else. Especially since it’s pretty clear that the Western press isn’t going to take the initiative and investigate in the hope that the media would never find out, as the Ottawa Citizen reported. But the State Department said they all retired? Guess those were the ones who got bored with their reconversion to competitive dog grooming.
While the Western establishment treats anti-establishment right-wingers in their own countries as the enemy, they’re celebrating actual neo-Nazi groups as cool and heroic badasses. Perhaps – just maybe – it has everything to do with the masters that each serves.