Utilisateur:Lyrono/Azov Irregular Armed Groups notes

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3 MEILLEURS SOURCES sur Azov

Andreas Umland: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341966641_The_Far_Right_in_Pre-_and_Post-Euromaidan_Ukraine_From_Ultra-Nationalist_Party_Politics_to_Ethno-Centric_Uncivil_Society

et https://www.academia.edu/38533829/Irregular_Militias_and_Radical_Nationalism_in_Post_Euromaydan_Ukraine_The_Prehistory_and_Emergence_of_the_Azov_Battalion_in_2014 et https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354960512_Unexpected_Friendships_Cooperation_of_Ukrainian_Ultra-Nationalists_with_Russian_and_Pro-Kremlin_Actors

   * Andreas Umland travaille pour https://www.researchgate.net/institution/National_University_of_Kyiv-Mohyla_Academy et atlantic council

Adrien Nonjon https://theconversation.com/les-deux-visages-de-lextreme-droite-ukrainienne-160632
Michael Colborne, avec son livre dédié à l'analyse de mouvement Azov https://cup.columbia.edu/book/from-the-fires-of-war/9783838215082

Sources sur les IAGs (Irregular Armed Groups)

IAGs (and a bit about the Azov movement and regiment/battalion and history):

   * https://phavi.umcs.pl/at/attachments/2021/0923/121101-prace-cew-ak.pdf
   * À VOIR: In 2016, Malyarenko and Galbreath had concluded their paper on the IAGs – one of the first longer scholarly publications on the topic – with the juxtaposition that “[f]or the pro-Ukrainian paramilitaries, they may prove to be both Ukraine’s saving grace in the war and its greatest threat to national security in the subsequent peace”211 -> Ref: Malyarenko and Galbreath, “Paramilitary Motivation in Ukraine”.
   * https://www.academia.edu/38533829/Irregular_Militias_and_Radical_Nationalism_in_Post_Euromaydan_Ukraine_The_Prehistory_and_Emergence_of_the_Azov_Battalion_in_2014

Autres sources

Régiment Azov entraine militairement des enfants 6-18 ans au maniement des armes à feu et à l'endoctrination de guerre ("tuer des russkov"): https://www.lemonde.fr/m-actu/article/2016/08/19/au-camp-d-entrainement-des-petits-soldats-d-ukraine_4984763_4497186.html

   * Oui, en cache sur google search + reportage sur le même sujet par L'Effet Papillon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX5IDBI4HxY
   * Vidéo de Le Monde: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4oh8nj
   * Le camp s'appelle "azovets".
   * Attention, Azovets est aussi le nom d'un tank que la section d'ingénierie d'Azov a créé: https://militaryland.net/ukraine/the-story-of-azovets/
   * article dédié en 2017 (donc le camp a continué d'exister plusieurs années, depuis sa création en 2015): https://lactualite.com/monde/enfants-de-la-patrie/
       * Un autre en anglais: https://nypost.com/2017/08/04/inside-ukraines-paramilitary-camp-for-children/
       * un point de vue biaisé mais rappelle pertinemment les chartes et droit international humanitaire sur les enfants soldats: https://www.opindia.com/2022/03/russia-ukraine-conflict-media-lionises-child-soldiers-carrying-assault-weapons/ - original ref: https://childrenandarmedconflict.un.org/six-grave-violations/child-soldiers/
   * en février 2022 après l'invasion c'est encore pire, ça commence à 4 ans: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10479957/Ukrainian-children-young-four-paces-military-training-camp.html
   * NBC news vidéo de 2017 https://m.facebook.com/NBCNews/posts/meet-the-azov-battalion-the-hyper-nationalist-ukrainian-militia-running-a-summer/1901157239904297/?_rdr and https://www.nbcnews.com/leftfield/video/the-ukrainian-military-summer-camp-for-kids-994030659665
   * Opened in 2015 https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-azov-regiment-military/27355932.html or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9foJFFSwOc
   * académiques: Même monographe, auteurs d'articles différents
       * https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74788-6_8
       * https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74788-6_10
   * no new pictures since 2017 - WRONG https://ph.news.yahoo.com/photos-show-scenes-youth-paramilitary-094721451.html or https://factcheck.afp.com/doc.afp.com.324788T
       * ""Kids at this summer camp aren’t just playing soldiers – they’re getting actual military training from soldiers who have fought on the front line in Russia’s war against Ukraine," it said."
           * Original ref: "Azov fighters give military training to children, foster patriotism at Kyiv summer camp" https://www.kyivpost.com/multimedia/photo/azovets-patriotic-camp-for-children-396138
           * Trained kids as young as 7 years old, officially from 9 to 18. Azov oversees it, including the summer camp around Kyiv.
           * "Biletsky founded a neo-Nazi group in Ukraine called the Social-National Assembly, and there certainly are neo-Nazis among the battalion’s ranks, some sporting Nazi tattoos. Some media have reported that up to 20 percent of Azov’s fighters are neo-Nazis, though the battalion’s press officers are always at pains to emphasize that Azov, as a military formation, does not share the ideology of its founder Biletsky, or indeed have any ideology other than fervent patriotism.
           One of its most famous foreign members, a Swedish sniper called Mikael Skillt, has admitted his past far-right leanings, although he says he has since rejected neo-Nazi ideology. But others in the battalion haven’t."
           * "Azov spokesman Stepan Badai said that the children are not taught songs that call for the killing of Russians or anybody else. “The children sometimes change lyrics when they sing, but they are taught traditional folk or patriotic songs,” Badai said by phone."
           * https://apimagesblog.com/blog/2017/8/4/children-in-war-torn-ukraine-learn-the-art-of-war
       * 2016  https://www.thenationalnews.com/arts/not-your-typical-summer-camp-how-children-in-ukraine-are-playing-soldiers-for-real-1.233374
           * "The children say they are willing to die for their country. “Yes, I can imagine that”, says Smolny. “It is an honour to be deserving of it.”"
       * Biased but some good refs: https://www.vikendi.net/2022/03/06/heaviest-abuse-in-nazi-childrens-training-camps-long-known-to-the-mainstream/
   * New articles in 2018:
       * https://apnews.com/article/ap-top-news-kiev-international-news-ukraine-europe-94fe1c68205a43ca96fcc89c88a7cc9f -- endoctrination
           * "Among those challenges: LGBT rights, which lecturers denounce as a sign of Western decadence."
           * "The nationalists have been accused of violence and racism, but they have played a central, volunteer role in Ukraine’s conflict with Russia — and they have maintained links with the government. Earlier this year, the Ministry of Youth and Sports earmarked 4 million hryvnias (about $150,000) to fund “youth and patriotic education,” some of which went to youth camps. There is no evidence that the one visited by the AP was among them."
           * "During a break in training, a teenager played a nationalist march on his guitar. It was decorated with a sticker showing white bombs hitting a mosque, under the motto, “White Europe is Our Goal.”"
       * https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/photography-special-the-ukrainian-children-learning-battlefield-skills-at-summer-camp-ddgd6lv2j
   * Nouvel article en 2022 mais basé sur d'anciens autres articles: https://www.tf1info.fr/international/guerre-en-ukraine-quel-est-ce-regiment-azov-de-l-armee-ukrainienne-accuse-d-etre-neonazi-2211759.html
       * "D’après le journaliste américain, qui raconte de l’intérieur, si les camps d’été sont fréquents en Ukraine, celui-ci a la particularité d’être "bien plus extrême"."
   * Enseignement militaro-patriotique des enfants promulguée par l'État en 2019 sur base d'une stratégie gouvernementale proposée en 2015: (vise une "formation militaire parfaite"):  https://zakon.rada.gov.ua/rada/show/v0641729-15#Text= et https://zakon.rada.gov.ua/rada/show/286/2019#n15=
   * À voir mais je n'arrive pas à avoir accès: http://features.foreignpolicy.com/campfire-songs-kalashnikovs-azov-battalion-summer-camp-eastern-ukraine/
   * Camps d'été encore là au moins en 2021:
       * https://books.google.be/books?id=kiBZEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA69&lpg=PA69&dq=azov+children+training+camp&ots=MhNYe_GTsF&sig=ACfU3U2xta4bP8M1rVfNwuSJtT_86H5kAQ&hl=fr#v=onepage&q=azov%20children%20training%20camp&f=false
       * https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74788-6_8
   * Camps d'été et formation militaro-patriotique existe des deux côtés depuis 2014 et même avant mais ça s'est empiré: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74788-6_10
       * On peut tracer l'origine à l'éducation militaro-patrio

Extraits en vrac

Intégration rapide en régiment de la Garde Nationale n'a fait que réduire son impact politique, mais il reste indépendant et libre de ses idéologies, plus que d'autres groupes. https://phavi.umcs.pl/at/attachments/2021/0923/121101-prace-cew-ak.pdf

hate group for usa https://www.rferl.org/a/far-right-figures-across-eastern-europe-applaud-us-capitol-violence/31038085.html

   "Serhiy Korotkikh, a leader of Ukraine's Azov movement, which has been labeled a "nationalist hate group" by the U.S. State Department, welcomed the U.S. unrest in openly racist terms."

viewed as an inspiratiom for neonazis all around the world, they go there to meet azov leaders "De par sa grande liberté de parole et sa capacité à multiplier ses branches (militaire, politique…), Azov a également bénéficié d’une forte popularité au sein des mouvements d’ultradroite occidentaux. Des néonazis américains, norvégiens et même français se sont ainsi rendus en Ukraine pour rencontrer ses membres." https://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2022/03/23/qui-sont-les-soldats-du-regiment-azov-accuses-d-etre-les-neonazis-de-l-armee-ukrainienne_6118771_4355770.html "De nombreux volontaires s’engagent dans le régiment Azov sans pour autant être militants d’extrême droite. « [Le] rejoindre (…) n’était qu’un moyen de se battre pour leur pays de la façon qu’ils jugeaient la plus efficace, écrivait, en 2016, Viatcheslav Likhatchev, historien et expert en sciences politiques, dans une note de l’Institut français des relations internationales. Cependant, toutes les nouvelles recrues étaient endoctrinées aux idées d’extrême droite, souvent xénophobes. »" https://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2022/03/23/qui-sont-les-soldats-du-regiment-azov-accuses-d-etre-les-neonazis-de-l-armee-ukrainienne_6118771_4355770.html "From its roots in revolution and war, Ukraine’s Azov movement has grown from a militia of fringe far-right figures and football hooligans fending off Russian-backed forces into a multipronged social movement that has become the envy of the global far right." https://cup.columbia.edu/book/from-the-fires-of-war/9783838215082 "Contacté par CheckNews, Viatcheslav Likhatchev, historien ukrainien dont les recherches portent sur le radicalisme de droite en Russie et en Ukraine, revient sur les débuts du bataillon : «Azov a été créé en partie par des personnes ayant un passé néonazi, en partie issu des hooligans de football. Bien qu’au printemps et à l’été 2014, la plupart des recrues soient allées à Azov attirées par sa bonne image d’unité de combat, les personnes ayant des opinions radicales de droite constituaient une masse critique dans Azov, le noyau disons. Les nouvelles recrues étaient endoctrinées.»" https://www.liberation.fr/checknews/quelle-est-limportance-du-regiment-azov-cette-unite-ukrainienne-fondee-par-des-proches-de-la-mouvance-neonazie-20220308_6UPAODEHPVCCBA5Z5BQ2QQZKTQ/

corps national est le mouvement politique issu d'Azov https://www.bfmtv.com/international/qu-est-ce-que-le-regiment-d-azov-ces-neonazis-de-l-armee-ukrainienne-que-moscou-pointe-du-doigt_AV-202203100430.html

AFP: "En 2014, ce bataillon avait effectivement un fond d'extrême droite. Mais le régiment s'est ensuite +dé-idéologisé+, il est devenu une unité régulière", explique Andreas Umland, expert au Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies. https://www.lalibre.be/dernieres-depeches/afp/2022/03/26/le-regiment-azov-au-coeur-de-la-guerre-de-propagande-russo-ukrainienne-ZDZKENJ6K5C6HLFH6QN5YFV4GY/?outputType=amp

"Le régiment Azov, fort de 2.000 à 3.000 hommes selon son estimation, a aussi gardé le même emblème, en mémoire de la victoire de Marioupol de 2014, semant la confusion sur ses liens avec son passé." "Mais en Ukraine, ce symbole n'a "pas la connotation d'un symbole fasciste", relève Andreas Umland. Et pour les Ukrainiens, "ce sont des combattants héroïques comme les autres", renchérit Viatcheslav Likhatchev." "Mais les forces politiques ultranationalistes sont en constante diminution en Ukraine depuis 2014 (..) C'est aussi parce que le nationalisme soft, nourri par l'agression russe, est devenu +mainstream+" (le courant principal), relève Anna Colin Lebedev, enseignante-chercheuse à l'université de Nanterre, sur Twitter.

Le fondateur d’Azov, Andreï Biletsky, originaire du Kharkiv russophone, a fait partie de groupes hooligans et de l’organisation paramilitaire ultranationaliste Patriotes d’Ukraine. Dans un texte titré «Nationalisme social racial ukrainien» publié en 2007, Biletsky énonce parmi les missions de son organisation «la purification raciale de la nation». Placé en détention pour agression armée en 2011, il est relâché en 2014 à l’occasion d’une loi sur la libération des prisonniers politiques voté par la Rada, le parlement ukrainien. Dans le cadre du conflit russo-ukrainien, il fonde le bataillon Azov, dont le logo renvoie clairement à l’iconographie nazie.

Inspiré de l’emblème de la division SS Das Reich, le logo d’Azov reprend la rune Wolfsangel renversée. L’ancien emblème, toujours utilisé par une large partie de ses membres, était encore plus explicite, avec la présence d’un soleil noir, symbole de la mystique nazie. Biletsky et les membres d’Azov réfutent ces références, arguant s’inspirer plutôt de la mythologie nordique, un argument récurrent dans les groupes néonazis. Quant au blason, il s’agirait d’une combinaison des lettres I et N pour «Idées de la Nation», toujours selon ces derniers.

Si les membres d’Azov sont quasi systématiquement étiquetés «néonazis», l’historien Viatcheslav Likhatchev pointe néanmoins une composition plus hétéroclite qu’il n’y paraît. «Même à l’été 2014 tous les combattants d’Azov n’étaient pas d’ultra-droite. J’ai personnellement connu un anarchiste qui a servi dans Azov, ainsi qu’un ancien participant à Anti-Maidan [mouvement contre la révolution ukrainienne de 2014, ndlr], pour qui l’agression russe était devenue inappropriée» se souvient-il.

CheckNews a consulté des groupes de communications officiels du régiment, ainsi que différents canaux de groupes territoriaux, dédiés à l’échange ou au recrutement. Dans les photos partagées par les relais institutionnalisés, les combattants sont plus discrets sur leurs patchs ou leurs tatouages. On peut néanmoins en voir plusieurs arborer ostensiblement des soleils noirs nazis sur la crosse de leurs fusils ou sur leurs gilets balistiques. Dans certains canaux d’échanges, où ne sont pas seulement présents des membres d’Azov mais aussi des sympathisants d’autres pays, la parole est parfois plus libérée : «Heil Hitler», «Sieg Heil».

Azov demeure par ailleurs toujours perçu comme un eldorado par certains suprémacistes blancs occidentaux. D’après une enquête de Bellingcat, des partisans des organisations néonazies américaines Atomwaffen Division ou encore Rise Above Movement (RAM) cherchent à intégrer les rangs d’Azov pour se former au combat en vue d’une prochaine guerre raciale. Plusieurs figures radicales d’extrême droite de l’Occident ont ainsi défilé dans un podcast Azov FM, inactif depuis cinq ans. Bellingcat révèle aussi que Joachim Furholm, un «révolutionnaire national-socialiste» norvégien soupçonné d’avoir essayé d’enrôler des volontaires suprémacistes blancs américains pour les rangs du régiment Azov, était lié au parti politique Corps national, comme en atteste sa présence lors d’un rassemblement politique. Le régiment Azov et Corps national ont respectivement nié cette allégation.

S’il y a encore indéniablement des néonazis au sein d’Azov, l’appartenance idéologique n’est néanmoins pas le seul moteur d’adhésion au groupe. Ce qui est certain, c’est que généraliser cette idéologie, bien réelle au sein du régiment, à l’armée (qui compte plusieurs centaines de milliers d’hommes) ou la société ukrainienne, comme certains canaux pro-Kremlin peuvent le faire, n’a guère de sens.

Adrien Nonjon rappelle que la population ukrainienne nourrit un sentiment ambivalent vis-à-vis du régiment Azov : «D’un côté, les Ukrainiens reconnaissent leur bravoure parce qu’ils ont défendu des villes clés malgré les convictions néonazies de certains de leurs membres. Mais d’un autre côté, il y a une certaine suspicion à leur égard, notamment sur les liens qu’entretiennent les têtes pensantes du bataillon initial avec Arsen Avakov, l’ancien ministre de l’Intérieur, au pouvoir lorsque les volontaires d’Azov ont accepté d’être intégrés à la garde nationale. On les a dès lors soupçonnés d’être des marionnettes aux mains des puissants.» La défiance des Ukrainiens est grande envers le très influent Avakov, soupçonné de corruption et dont les liens avec le parti ultranationaliste Corps national d’Andreï Biletsky sont connus.

L’Ukraine connaît néanmoins un certain regain de nationalisme depuis une dizaine d’années, notamment par le biais de politiques mémorielles. «Mais attention, le terme n’a pas, en Ukraine, les connotations péjoratives qu’il a en France», avertit le chercheur Adrien Nonjon. Il poursuit : «Depuis 2014, les Ukrainiens ont eu une prise de conscience sur ce que c’est qu’être ukrainien. Avant, les identités locales prévalaient. Avec la révolution Maïdan et la guerre en 2014, les choses ont changé. On essaye de bâtir une nouvelle nation. C’est cela qui prévaut aujourd’hui.» D’où la réhabilitation de la figure controversée de Stepan Bandera, en l’élevant au titre de «héros de l’Ukraine», pour son rôle dans la lutte pour l’indépendance de l’Ukraine contre l’URSS. A noter que Bandera était l’un des dirigeants de l’Armée insurrectionnelle ukrainienne (UPA) qui a collaboré avec l’Allemagne nazie et participé aux massacres de Juifs pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale.

Pour Adrien Nonjon, l’Ukraine est «un pays très jeune, qui a moins de trente ans. Son statut d’ancienne colonie de la Russie fait que cette influence étrangère l’a empêché de se concevoir sur le plan culturel et national. A l’indépendance, il a fallu trouver un symbole pour mettre en avant la résistance ukrainienne sur le long terme.» Le spécialiste de l’Ukraine se permet une comparaison «schématique d’un point de vue politique et mémoriel» entre l’Ukraine actuelle et la France des années 1960 «quand on commençait à comprendre le rôle de Vichy et donc de la collaboration des Français sous l’Occupation» : «Il faudra à l’Ukraine un immense recul, un travail conséquent de la part des historiens pour pouvoir lever le voile sur certaines périodes charnières et le problème lié au nationalisme.» https://www.liberation.fr/checknews/quelle-est-limportance-du-regiment-azov-cette-unite-ukrainienne-fondee-par-des-proches-de-la-mouvance-neonazie-20220308_6UPAODEHPVCCBA5Z5BQ2QQZKTQ/

"Yet from the perspective of Ukraine's fledgling democracy, the most dangerous such phenomenon may not be S14, Svoboda or the now thoroughly marginalized Right Sector, but instead the multi-faceted Azov movement, with its regular National Guard regiment and its links to the leadership of the Ministry of the Interior, the all-Ukrainian party National Corps, and the unarmed vigilante wing National Fellowship. While it would be going too far to classify the Azov Regiment as a terrorist organization, its various political and "uncivil" spin-off associations arguably represent the largest long-term domestic right-wing extremist threat to Ukraine's democracy. Unlike previous Ukrainian far-right projects, the Azov movement has managed to create a multi-dimensional and distinctly modern (and even post-modern) identity that has particular appeal to the young and is not regionally limited. It cooperates closely with like-minded groups abroad, including certain Russian neo-Nazi groups. [...] Azov is a dynamic uncivil movement that is actively advancing on different domestic fronts and strengthening its foreign contacts. It has become a visible part of the international groupuscular right, and maintains links to uncivil (mainly racist) organizations in the United States, the European Union, and the Russian Federation, among others."

page 265 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341966641_The_Far_Right_in_Pre-_and_Post-Euromaidan_Ukraine_From_Ultra-Nationalist_Party_Politics_to_Ethno-Centric_Uncivil_Society

"Contrary to some observers' fears or defamatory remarks, there is no Ukrainian equivalent of the German Freikorps phenomenon during the Weimar Republic, not to mention any serious threat of fascist takeover."

"Yet there are at least four features of -- and developments in -- Ukraine's post-Euromaidan ultra-nationalist milieu that give reason for pause. First, as a result of Russia's war against Ukraine, there is growing public tolerance for radical nationalist organizations, actions, and individuals. Second, since 2014, certain far right organizations have received permanent access to guns and even heavy weapons by founding volunteer units. Some still control minor irregular armed groups, such as Right Sector's Volunteer Ukrainian Corps and the Statesman's Initiative's Ukrainian Volunteer Army -- although the terms "corps" and "army" are hyperbolic for these marginal para-military units. Third, far-right organizations maintain a presence on the landscape of Ukraine's extra-parliamentary party politics, its NGO sector, its cultural life, local affairs, and (in some cases) foreign relations. Since Svoboda had cut most of its ties to European far-right parties by 2014, the latter refers primarily to the international connections of the Azov movement and other, smaller far-right groups. Fourth, as a result of Ukrainian society's increased permissiveness vis-à-vis the far right, there have been repeated incidents of cooperation between certain governmental institutions -- such as the Security Service or Veterans oMinistry of Ukraine -- and parts of the far right. Overall, the continued electoral frailty of far-right parties and their correspondingly low influence on policymaking in Kyiv make Ukraine a positive exception to the European trend of increasingly powerful far-right parties. Yet since the Revolution of Dignity, uncivil society has become increasingly prevalent in Ukrainian communal, associational, and cultural life, while the differentiation of the nationalist organizational and intellectual spectrums has continued. This, combined with growing public respect for historical Ukrainian ultra-nationalism -- in particular the Bandera faction of the Second World War-era Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists -- has given Ukrainian public affairs distinct new characteristics. These and other politically disruptive tendencies are closely connected to, if not largely a result of, Russian's ongoing hybrid war against Ukraine since 2014. They constitute domestically divisive, internationally problematic, and potentially destabilizing features of post-Euromaidan Ukraine."

"The older Svobody party remains, to be sure, electorally and organizationally stronger than Azov. Yet Svoboda is only an important political force in Galicia. Right Sector, for its part, lost its post-Euromaidan dynamism after 2014. It has been a shell of its former self since the departure of its most prominent founder, Iarosh, to found the so-called "Statesman Initiative" (which he has not yet managed to turn into a notable political organization). In contrast, Azov's National Corps -- an ultra-nationalist party whose predecessor comes originally from Kharkiv -- is more or less evenly distributed around the contry. Although it has gone through periods of internal disarray, it seems not to have suffered from any major splits. Azov is a dynamic uncivil movement that is actively advancing on different domestic fronts and strengthening its foreign contacts. It has become a visible part of the international groupuscular right, and maintains links to uncivil (mainly racist) organizations in the United States, the European Union, and the Russian Federation, among others."

page 18: openly neo-Nazi grouplet S14 gradually included in Ukraine's mainstream, still in January 2019!

"The active participation of many far-right activists as volunteer fighters against Russia-led forces in Eastern Ukraine has reduced their isolation, stigmatization, and rejection in mainstream Ukrainian society, including Ukraine's political and cultural establishment. To be sure, segments of Ukraine's political elite were willing to cooperate with the far right even before 2014, as evidence by the collaborations of moderate and radical nationalists in the 7th Verkhovna Rada, during the Revolution of Dignity, and in the post-Euromaidan interim government. Yet these alliances were situational and strategic rather than permanent and ideational.

The longer Ukraine's aremd conflict with Russia goes on, the easier it becomes for even fringe groups -- like the notorious neo-Nazi S14 (or C14) -- to integrate into Ukrainian society and public affairs. Not only politically and socially, but also culturally and mentally, the distance between mainstream and extreme politics, civil and uncivil society, moderate patriotic and ultra-nationalist groups, is shrinking. In light of daily reports from the front lines and weekly tallies of war victims, Ukrainian official political rhetoric, mass media discourse, cultural policies and memory affairs have become more militant and nationalistic. As a result, far-right ideas, leaders and organizations that were previously marginalized have become tolerated, if not liked, by society

In Western democracies, the main political divide line today is between advocates and opponents of cultural and social liberalism. In Ukraine, by contrast, the main political questions center around an individual's or group's attitudes toward Ukraine's national independence, war with Russia, and the corrupt oligarchic system, as well as they foreign orientation -- with this last being understood as a geopolitical direction rather than a normative affinity. Insofar as ultranationalists and ethnocentrists answers are similar to those of Ukrainian liberals and conservatives, the former groups are becoming, with every passing year of war, more accepted by the latter."

"In spite of the ultra-nationalists' weakness in national polls, close monitoring and partial containment of far-right activities remain on the agenda for non-governmental watchdogs and governmental law-enforcement agencies. Despite being electorally impotent, Ukraine's far-right activist community has remained numerically, organizationally, and tactically potent since the Euromaidan and is still present on Ukraine's streets. Largely excluded from national politics, many ultra-nationalists have taken up projects within Ukrainian "uncivil society," in fields ranging from memory affairs and anti-LGBT activism to urgent ecological issues and animal protection. Far-right groups have even managed to garner governmental support for certain sucerity, veterans, and education programs."

Carpenter, one suspects, does not mention these and similar topics because he does not read Ukrainian. Judging from the contents of his two articles, he may not have even read much of the freely available English-language scholarly literature on post-Euromaidan Ukraine. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357223262_Misrepresenting_Ukraine's_Democracy_Misguiding_US_Foreign_Affairs_Afterthoughts_on_a_Debate_in_Washington_and_Nuclear_Non-Proliferation

"pro-Putinists arguments" LMAO, clairement c'est pas un pro-poutiniste lui! Et aussi: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352554511_The_Dangers_of_Echoing_Russian_Disinformation_on_Ukraine pro-otan et pro-intégration de l'Ukraine dans l'OTAN Umland finit sur une attaque personnelle...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354960512_Unexpected_Friendships_Cooperation_of_Ukrainian_Ultra-Nationalists_with_Russian_and_Pro-Kremlin_Actors

1er co auteur est à atlanticcouncil p18, C14 combien de membres et quand fondé (en 2009) et ou (à Kiev) par Evhen Karas born in 1987. anti-lgbtq+ attacks it's them in 2015 and 2018.

p13-14 Azov and Centuria is an off-shoot! and particularly active to recruit foreigners, including russians! Et plein d'autres! C'est un véritable incubateur! Et Biletsy est toujours considéré comme le leader non officiel de tous ces offshoots! Et ils collaborent très conjointement entre eux. C'est pour ça qu'on parle de mouvement Azov! operating under NATO standards now since 2015?

"The Azov movement has its roots in a little known and initially Russian-speaking Kharkiv groupuscule called "Patriot of Ukraine." This initially minuscule circle emerged from the SNPU's group, Andriy Bilets'kyy (b. 1979), as well as some other members of the "Patriot of Ukraine" were imprisoned in 2011-2012 for various reasons, including alleged robbery, beatings, terrorism, and assaults. Partly, these accusations were overdrawn and referred to political rather than criminal episodes. The locked-up ultra-nationalists were released after the toppling of Viktor Yanukovych in early 2014.

In spring 2014 in eastern Ukraine, Bilets'kyy and his followers organized small paramilitary units called "little black men" -- an obvious reference to the nickname, "little green men," given to Russian regular army forces who wore no identification marks while occupying Crimea in late February and early March 2014. As the confrontation with pro-Russian groups in the Donets' Basin (Donbas) and Kharkiv g, Bilets'kyy's once minor grouping grew rapidly. In May 2014, it formed the semi-regular volunteer battalion "Azov" under the auspices of the Ministry of Interior. In summer 2014, the Azov battalion played a central role in the liberation of the important Donbas industrial city of Mariupol from Russia-led separatists.

By autumn 2014, the battalion had become a well-known professional military unit and was transformed into the fully regular "Azov" Regiment of the National Guard under the Ministry of Interior of Ukraine. It has since been considered one of Ukraine's most capable armed formations. The regiment's commanders claim it is now operating according to NATO standards."

BEST CRITICAL AZOV MOVEMENT DEFINITION: "In winter 2015, veterans and volunteers of the regiment created the Azov Civil Corps and thereby started to expand their political grouping into a multi-faceted social movement. In 2016, Bilets'kyy formed the political party National Corps, drawing membership from the Azov Civil Corps and veterans of the Azov Battalion and Regiment. In January 2018, an offshoot of the Azov movement, the unarmed vigilante organization National Squads, became a Ukrainian media sensation after it held a visually impressive public torch march. Further sub-organizations and branches of the Azov movement have emerged since 2014. They include entities such as the Engineering Corps, Cossack House, Plomin (Flame) Literary Club, Orden (Order) circle, Youth Corps, Intermarium Support Group, and others. While being partly independent, the fronts and subunits of the Azov movement share basic stances on certain political issues, closely cooperate with each other, and accept Bilets'kyy as the unofficial leader of the entire coalition. As a result, Azov is now a multi-dimensional socio-political movement that is developing in a variety of directions."

--> Including NGOs as seen before in the other article.

"Despite officially allying itself with Svobody and others since 2016, the Azov movement remains an ideologically and institutionally specific phenomenon within Ukraine's ultra-nationalist political spectrum and contains branches that profess views untypical to the traditional Ukrainian far right. For example, some Azov members espouse not a Christian-Orthtodox outlook, but an interest in paganism."

Link with this source on the same topic: https://violence-marker.org.ua/blog/2021/11/04/naczyhid-yak-rosijski-naczysty-opynylys-v-ukrayini/

4 novembre 2021 NAZI. COMMENT LES NAZIS RUSSES SE SONT RETROUVÉS EN UKRAINE "Les événements de 2014 - l'Euromaïdan et d'autres actions armées dans l'est de l'Ukraine - ont conduit à la division de l'extrême droite russe. Les impérialistes et les nationalistes russes ont choisi les républiques autoproclamées du Donbass, tandis que leurs anciens homologues, les nazis radicaux, sont entrés en guerre aux côtés de l'Ukraine."

Nazis russes chez Azov:

""Tous les nazis n'ont pas choisi l'Ukraine. De l'autre côté, nous avons vu des gens d'exactement le même parti, comme Milchakov et Jan Petrovsky . Selon Milchakov, ce sont ces personnes qui, en 2013-2014, ont décidé de quel côté elles seraient dans ce conflit. Milchakov est venu au Maidan et a parlé à des amis qui sont restés en Ukraine et ont rejoint Azov. Milchakov a décidé de rester du côté impérial russe ", a déclaré à Marker Leonid Ragozin, un journaliste indépendant basé à Riga.

Selon l'expert, le choix de la partie dans ce conflit était une question de goût pour les nazis. En 2015, il y avait une discussion en cours sur Radio Azov avec Milchakov et un néo-nazi de Kirov , Denis Vikhorev , qui s'est retrouvé en Ukraine et a contacté l'organisation nazie WotanJugend (qui a également déménagé à Kiev ). C'était une conversation de deux heures à caractère académique, extrêmement respectueuse, où les gens des deux côtés du front discutaient de la place du nationaliste russe. Tout le monde a prouvé son point. Vikhorev a déclaré que la Russie avait un régime communiste russophobe, et Milchakov a déclaré que la Russie était un peu plus proche de leurs idéaux de jeunesse, du Reich sous une forme ou une autre. Ce sont des choses purement de bon goût, même en matière de géopolitique », a déclaré Ragozine."

"Je ne diviserais pas beaucoup les nazis russes et ukrainiens, car il s'agit d'un environnement commun qui a migré vers Maidan en toute liberté à travers la frontière et a échangé des idées. Par exemple, Olena Semenyaka du mouvement Azov a communiqué avec les habitants de Dugin et a assisté aux séminaires de Dugin près de Moscou. Quant aux nazis eux-mêmes, il y avait beaucoup de mouvements mutuels vers le Maidan, qui étaient principalement liés à des concerts de groupes d'extrême droite ou à des matchs de football. Dans le milieu du football, le partenariat entre les supporters des équipes ukrainienne et russe, qui ont toujours été en binôme, est très important. Ce sont le CSKA-Kyiv et le CSKA-Moscou, ainsi que le Metalist Kharkiv et le Spartak de Moscou. C'est-à-dire que ces groupes de fans néonazis qui existaient en Russie, en règle générale, avaient leur paire en Ukraine et s'opposaient aux mêmes couples de fans russo-ukrainiens ", a déclaré Leonid Ragozin.

"Je peux citer Roman Zheleznov comme exemple(pseudonyme "Zuchel" - éd.), avec qui j'ai parlé. Il a affirmé qu'il n'était pas un fan de football et que sa communication avec les Ukrainiens était liée à l'environnement musical et aux concerts à Kharkiv, où le «mouvement Azov» appelé «Black Men» s'est formé à ses débuts. Dès le début, les nazis russes y ont joué un rôle clé », Leonid Ragozin en est convaincu."

Interview de Michael Colborne encore:

"Le secret de l'attrait de l'Ukraine pour les nazis étrangers est aussi sa capacité à réaliser la propension à la violence qui est au cœur de l'idée d'extrême droite.

"Pour l'extrême droite, le conflit est en grande partie le sens de l'existence. Ce sont des gens qui sont simplement intéressés par le conflit, donc ils ne se soucient généralement pas de quel côté combattre - Ukrainien ou Russe. Parce que les nazis russes se considéraient comme opposés au régime de Poutine, beaucoup ont choisi l'Ukraine. Ils qualifient le régime de Poutine d'ennemi et visent à libérer la Russie d'un régime qui n'est tout simplement pas considéré comme russe », a déclaré Leonid Ragozin.

Après le début de la guerre en 2014 et la formation du bataillon Azov, les étrangers d'extrême droite, notamment russes, ont réalisé que le rôle de l'extrême droite en Ukraine et leur position dans la société avaient changé : ils ont cessé d'être critiqués et contrôlés. par la société. . Ainsi, un environnement ouvert a été créé en Ukraine pour l'extrême droite du monde entier, et les nazis de diverses organisations se sont précipités pour en profiter . Au début - des volontaires au front, puis dans le "Azov" pour acquérir de l'expérience dans la construction d'un réseau organisationnel.

"Beaucoup d'étrangers d'extrême droite se font encore des illusions sur l'Ukraine. Ils pensent que n'importe quel nazi peut venir ici, traîner, manifester ouvertement sa position politique, ce qu'il ne peut pas se permettre chez lui, puis se retrouver comme par magie au front. En 2017-2019, le Corps national a activement développé les relations internationales. J'ai vu tous ces Allemands, Russes, Suédois, Américains, Croates, qui sont venus ici et qui ont admiré : "Cool, tu peux faire tellement de choses, et tu peux le faire !". C'est vrai dans une certaine mesure, ce qui, bien sûr, est un problème, mais ils ont une vision déformée selon laquelle la situation en 2014-2015 est toujours valable. Ils regardent l'Ukraine et Azov avec respect, bien qu'en réalité l'ampleur des réalisations d'Azov soit grandement exagérée. C'est de la publicité vide, un mélange de mythe et de réalité », a déclaré Colborn.

Les membres du mouvement Azov eux-mêmes ont beaucoup contribué à la création de ce mythe, invitant activement l'extrême droite occidentale à visiter l'Ukraine. Étant donné que de nombreuses organisations d'extrême droite en Europe se concentrent sur la Russie, les membres du Corps national s'efforcent de persuader leurs collègues de commencer à soutenir l'Ukraine."

--> GENESE DU MOUVEMENT AZOV et liens avec les nazis russes (encore d'après Colborne) "Le bataillon Azov (aujourd'hui le régiment Azov de la Garde nationale d'Ukraine) a été créé en 2014 sur la base de volontaires, membres de l'Assemblée nationale sociale d'extrême droite. Au fil du temps, le nombre d'Azov a augmenté, tout comme son rôle et sa position. En 2015, le Corps civique d'Azov a été créé sur la base d'Azov, et en 2016, un parti politique à part entière du Corps national a été créé. Le mouvement Azov est au centre du mouvement d'extrême droite en Ukraine, disent les experts.

"Grâce au Maïdan, des structures patriotiques ukrainiennes stables ont émergé, majoritairement russophones. Et le plus brillant d'entre eux est le "mouvement Azov", créé par des gens de Kharkiv, c'est-à-dire des gens d'origine russophone. Et les nazis, venus de Russie, y jouent un rôle très important: à la fois idéologique - dans le cas d'Alexei Levkin de WotanJugend et en partie du Boatswain, et économique - dans ce cas la figure du Boatswain en tant que principal capitaliste de le mouvement Azov prend le devant de la scène. Ici, il joue le même rôle qu'il a joué dans la RNU biélorusse (Unité nationale russe) et la NSO russe (Société nationale socialiste). Je dirais que le personnage central est Serhiy Korotkykh , et tous les autres sont d'importance secondaire », a déclaré Leonid Ragozin.

Après la défaite de l'ONG "Boatsman", il s'enfuit en Ukraine et rejoint le bataillon Azov en tant qu'instructeur puis commandant du détachement de reconnaissance. En quelques mois seulement, il a reçu un passeport du président de l'époque, Petro Porochenko. En Ukraine, le maître d'équipage trouva un puissant mécène en la personne du ministre de l'Intérieur Arsen Avakov et s'enrichit.

À bien des égards, il a réussi grâce à un réseautage efficace. Selon Colborn, le maître d'équipage a construit un réseau de personnes qui lui sont fidèles, affiliées à l'extrême droite. Depuis que j'ai commencé à écrire sur Azov il y a trois ans, le rôle du maître d'équipage et ses activités ont considérablement changé. J'ai remarqué qu'en 2020-2021, des gens comme Oleksiy Lyovkin ont été intégrés dans l'orbite du Boatswain. Il s'entoure d'une équipe de nazis russes qui se cachent en Ukraine, comme Mikhail Shalankevich », a expliqué le journaliste canadien.

Le maître d'équipage a une sinistre réputation : il est lié aux assassinats très médiatisés du journaliste Pavel Sheremet et d'un autre dirigeant d'Azov, Yaroslav Babych, ainsi qu'au racket, aux enlèvements, aux vols et à la contrebande. En août 2021, le comité d'enquête de Russie a accusé Korotky d'une série de meurtres pour cause de haine nationale et l'a arrêté par contumace, mais le maître d'équipage n'a pas répondu de ses actes devant la loi. Leonid Ragozin utilise le terme d'État mafieux pour décrire l'impunité des nazis qui ont reçu l'immunité de poursuites. Dans son livre, Michael Colborn décrit également l'extrême droite en Ukraine comme une mafia :

Azov est une famille nombreuse et puissante. Si vous voulez faire des affaires, vous devez vous coordonner d'une manière ou d'une autre avec elle, ce qui signifie tomber sous son influence. Si vous êtes d'extrême droite et que vous souhaitez agir dans votre propre créneau, vous devez toujours tenir compte d'Azov. Si vous êtes d'extrême droite et que vous voulez vous opposer à Azov, vous perdrez définitivement.

Dans le monde post-soviétique, le crime organisé et les oligarques opèrent sur la même scène. Il est possible que les liens de l'extrême droite en Ukraine avec ces groupes soient temporaires et éphémères. Par exemple, ils agissent comme fantassins, gardes ou voyous mercenaires. Il est évident que les nazis russes en Ukraine sont soutenus par une force qui leur donne de l'argent, mais c'est un lien opaque, c'est une fenêtre avec le rideau baissé. Nous voulons l'approcher et regarder; peut-être verrons-nous quelques ombres s'insinuer ici et là ; on peut même deviner à quelles figures ils peuvent appartenir. Mais la vérité est que nous ne le savons pas.""

"La principale vague de migration de nazis russes vers l'Ukraine s'est produite en 2014-2015. Le dernier cas très médiatisé s'est produit à l'automne 2020, lorsque le collègue de Tesak, Andriy Chuenkov , membre de WotanJugend, s'est enfui en Ukraine . Selon le groupe de réflexion Sova, il y a actuellement environ 100 militants d'extrême droite russes en Ukraine. Les experts interrogés par Marker citent des chiffres similaires. La plupart de ceux qui ont pris part aux combats ont quitté l'est de l'Ukraine après la phase chaude du conflit."

--> Zelensky compose avec les paramilitaires ukrainiens, y compris les nazis russes

""Les nazis russes vivent dans la zone grise. Beaucoup d'entre eux vivent illégalement en Ukraine, mais il est peu probable qu'ils soient expulsés. Les anciens combattants d'Azov tentent depuis des années d'obtenir une loi sur la citoyenneté pour les volontaires. Le combattant d'extrême droite Nikita Makeyev a obtenu la nationalité ukrainienne grâce au décret de Zelensky. Avant cela, il devait sauter sur la voiture de Porochenko. Je ne suis pas sûr que Zelensky soit prêt à une réaction internationale, qui pourrait survenir si un passeport était délivré à des gens comme Levkin ou Denis Kapustin, qui ne sont même pas des vétérans. Eh bien, les vétérans russes de "Azov" attendront indéfiniment ", - Michael Colborn en est sûr."

"Selon Leonid Ragozin, la situation politique autour du conflit entre la Russie et l'Ukraine s'est gelée, de sorte que le statu quo des nazis russes en Ukraine restera le même. Et cette situation convient parfaitement aux autorités ukrainiennes - ainsi qu'à la situation de l'extrême droite en général. La démission du ministre de l'Intérieur Arsen Avakov en juillet 2021 aurait pu modifier les processus politiques en Ukraine et priver les nazis de leur immunité contre les poursuites, mais les forces de sécurité ont interrompu leurs arrestations en août et septembre 2021.

Après l'assassinat de Vitaliy Shyshov, chef de la Maison biélorusse en Ukraine, en août, on a eu le sentiment que le SBU tentait d'attaquer le mouvement Azov. Une vague d'arrestations de personnalités très importantes a eu lieu à Kharkiv, la patrie du "mouvement Azov", qui a d'abord touché la base économique du mouvement. Mais il n'y avait rien d'autre derrière, car tout le monde attendait ce qui arriverait au maître d'équipage, mais rien ne lui arriva. Et cela témoigne de sa force et de son influence sur les structures de l'État et du pouvoir en Ukraine ", Leonid Ragozin en est sûr."

"Michael Colborn est également convaincu que rien ne changera après la démission d'Arsen Avakov : "L'extrême droite sera tenue responsable de la violence dans certains cas - mais il n'y aura pas de campagne à grande échelle contre elle. Il n'y aura pas de dispersion de l'extrême droite en Ukraine. » Les nazis russes qui ont fui vers l'Ukraine étaient piégés dans leur propre idée. Le chemin du retour est fermé - il y a une prison. Il est difficile de légaliser et d'obtenir la citoyenneté en Ukraine - cela nécessite des relations et du patronage. La Reconquista et la guerre de libération n'ont jamais eu lieu : la phase chaude du conflit était terminée. L'émigration russe, à l'exception de quelques personnes, s'est retrouvée dans le "rôle de mercenaires bon marché, et même de soi-disant idiots utiles" - admet amèrementIvan Mikheïev. Ainsi, dans des conditions d'indulgence totale de la part des autorités et d'incapacité à gagner sa vie, privé des liens sociaux habituels et enfermé à l'étranger, le nazi russe est contraint de faire ce qu'il fait le mieux : la violence et le crime."

https://zeitschrift-osteuropa.de/hefte/2015/1-2/der-fall-azov/english

"Volunteer battalions are a response to Russia’s covert invasion of Ukraine. While most of the formations can be considered as a war-related version of civil society within post-revolutionary Ukraine, there are volunteer formations that bear the marks of “uncivil society”. Among them is the Azov Battalion. Its history is sketchy, its leadership and symbolism are fascist. But Azov, which has been upgraded to a national guard regiment, is atypical."

Près de quatre ans après la Révolution de la dignité, il convient de noter que l’environnement politique et médiatique reste pluraliste. Lénine n’a pas été remplacé partout par Stepan Bandera. Mais la « bandérisation partielle » relevée par Andreas Umland s’impose dans de nombreuses situations. Elle légitime aussi l’utilisation de l’outil historiographique par certains mouvements nationalistes, acteurs incontournables, bien que minoritaires, de la scène politique ukrainienne. Le très controversé bataillon Azov, dont certains membres sont ouvertement néonazis, a ainsi recours à des symboles historiques pour établir sa légitimité dans le jeu politique. Son jeune parti, Natsionalniy Korpus (« Corpus National »), et sa milice citoyenne, les Natsionalniy Druzhyny (« Brigades nationales ») s’inscrivent dans la tradition des combattants pour l’indépendance, et revendiquent un héritage nationaliste allant du royaume médiéval de la Rous’ de Kiev à l’UPA. « Un peuple sans histoire n’a pas de raison de se battre », assène ainsi le chef d’Azov, Andrij Bilezkyj. La redécouverte et l’instrumentalisation de thématiques historiques semblent justifier, dans les propos d’Azov, l’érection d’un ordre nouveau et une militarisation permanente de la société. De manière directe ou indirecte, un tel projet trouve un terreau fertile dans les troubles des dernières années et dans les polémiques liées au virage historiographique entretenu par l’IMN.

https://www.cairn.info/revue-etudes-2018-5-page-19.htm

https://bitterwinter.org/nazism-in-ukraine-5-enter-the-azov-battalion/

"As the main academic scholar of the Azov Battalion, Andreas Umland, has noted, the pre-2014 activities of Bilets’kyy and the Patriots are both understudied and controversial. Vyacheslav Likhachev, a well-known investigator of post-Soviet antisemitism, in 2014 collected statements by Bilets’kyy dating back to these years and expressing a racist position calling to violent actions against immigrants and other “enemies of the white race.” Bilets’kyy in 2015 claimed that the statements were false and had been fabricated by Russian propaganda. Umland tends to believe that most statements are true, and that by 2015 Bilets’kyy was trying to “cover his pre-Euromaidan political biography.”"

In March, the office was assaulted by separatists, and on March 14 Bilets’kyy associates killed two separatists in Kharkiv. They were the first pro-Russian victims of right-wing nationalists, and as Likhachev writes, served the Russian propaganda as “the only remotely real basis for creating the image of a threat from ‘Bandera hit squads.’”

The Kharkiv police, on the other hand, did not have a negative view of the Bilets’kyy group. In April, it thanked it for its assistance in patrolling the city and repressing pro-Russian and separatist activities. Since Russia had infiltrated in Ukrainian territory masked soldiers in unmarked green uniforms who were called the “little green men,” Bilets’kyy’s Patriots called themselves the “little black men.” They also used the name “Right Sector of the East.”

In May 2014, some 80 activists from the group connected with Bilets’kyy at the Kozats’kiy Hotel in Kiev went to Berdyansk, a port city on the Azov Sea, to train on a shooting range there. This episode is connected with the official date of foundation of the Azov Battalion, May 5, 2014, although in fact it might have been founded some weeks earlier. The Battalion’s backbone consisted of Bilets’kyy’s Patriots, but it also included members of Bratsvo and of Mosiychuk’s group, and had the blessing and the economic support of Liashko, who believed that associating with anti-Russian voluntary fighters would pay an electoral dividend.

Even before the official foundation date of May 5, the Azov Battalion marched to the city of Mariupol, where the pro-Russian separatists had taken several government buildings, and expelled them after a bloody battle that made “Azov Battalion” a household name in Ukraine.

Most Ukrainians were thankful to the Battalion for their deeds in Mariupol, and glossed over the extreme right origins of the founders. They left a visual trace, as the Azov Battalion adopted as its symbol the logo of the old SNPU party, which had also been used by the Patriots of Ukraine and the SNA. It features a letter I partially covered by a letter N, whose stated meaning is “Idea of a Nation.” The logo is not identical with, but is a mirror image of sort, of the Wolfsangel (wolf’s hook), an old German symbol that existed before Nazism but was adopted both by some divisions of the SS and by later neo-Nazi movements across Europe.

The symbol also evidenced a significant difference between the Azov Battalion, or a part of its original members, and the old Ukrainian nationalism associated with the name of Bandera. While Bandera and his associates, many of them Catholics from Western Ukraine, presented themselves as defenders of Christianity, some of Azov’s first members were neo-Pagan and dreamed of restoring a pre-Christian Ukrainian religion, in parallel with the ideas of some right-wing extremists in other countries.

The original numbers of the Azov Battalion should not be exaggerated. In the summer of 2014, it had between 400 and 450 members. It was because of its bravery in Mariupol that it was incorporated by the government into the National Guard and its members grew to 800, and later perhaps to 2,500.

Both before and after the 2022 war started, Umland, as the most prominent scholar who has studied the Azov Battalion, has been interviewed by several media. He insists that the Azov Battalion (now the Azov Regiment) “is not Nazi,” while “some of its founders and members are.”

The same, Umland and other scholars believe, is true for those who joined the Azov Battalion after the initial 2014 events. Most of them, in Umland’s terms. are “militant patriots” rather than “right-wing extremists.” Most Ukrainians today perceive Azov just as an elite regiment, and would not even know of its origins if not for the Russian propaganda. Yet, there are Nazis within the Azov Battalion, including among the foreign fighters who came to help from abroad. They are a minority but, as Umland stated, they are the only one who are interviewed by some foreign reporters, and mistakenly presented as “average” or “typical.”

https://bitterwinter.org/about/

Il n'est pas fiable, il réduit l'implication de Bandera, il reprend la rhétorique des bandéristes. Bandera n'a jamais désavoué l'idéologie nazie, et ce n'est pas juste quelques membres de l'OUN et l'UPA qui ont collaboré mais les unités entières, et ont même été si brutaux qu'ils ont impressioné les allemands! Donc dire que Bandera n'était pas un collaborateur mais plutôt un "allié nazi" est archi-faux, c'est du révisionnisme historique. https://bitterwinter.org/nazism-in-ukraine-2-nazi-germany-stepan-bandera/ --> Oui en fait le "militant patriotic" c'est un détournement de la source...

Petliura not a nazi but did pogroms of jews in 1917-1920 https://bitterwinter.org/nazism-in-ukraine-1-nationalism-and-antisemitism/

Probable source de l'affirmation que les nouveaux membres ne sont pas aussi radicaux que les leaders: c'est une supposition qui nécessite davantage de recherche (les termes de l'article de Umland, pas les miens) + "a significant number" != majorité, il ne dit cela en aucun cas:

"My impression from multiple conversations, occasional observations, and other anecdotal evidence in Kyiv in 2014 was that, at least, some volunteers signing up to the new irregular units did not pay much attention to these formations’ ideological background and to the political views of their leaders. Many volunteers were apparently instead driven by other motives to join this or that unit. How intensely and how successfully the far right groups standing behind certain volunteer battalions conduct ideological propaganda among their soldiers has not been researched so far. A significant number of the men and women who joined the new battalions created by ultra-nationalist activists and who did not come from the political groups behind their initial foundation may have to be classified as militant patriots rather than right-wing extremists—a hypothesis that awaits confirmation, modification, or rejection in future polls and in-depth interviews revealing the mind-set of these fighters."

"Reasons such as these, alongside the below outlined ambiguous past of some of Azov’s founders, mean that the exact role, degree, and kind of narrowly understood right-wing extremist—and not merely liberationist-nationalist—motives for the Azov regiment’s staff remain to be established. They can not—in spite of the seemingly clear evidence on Azov’s leadership presented below—be simply taken for granted. For example, fieldwork undertaken by Alina Polyakova (Brookings Institution, Washington, DC) in Kyiv and Western Ukraine between 2009–2012 revealed significant differences between the views and degree of radicalization of the leadership of Svoboda, on the one hand, and the ordinary members of the party, on the other.27 It is possible that the situation is similar in Azov. One can also not exclude that the political views of Azov’s once clearly racist leaders have, over the last years, evolved, and that their racism has become less exclusive and radical than documented below. As in the case of other units founded by radical nationalists, only future sociological investigation will be able to provide satisfactory answers to what the actual political outlooks of the soldiers and officers in Azov amount to."

Il est particulièrement raciste meme comparé à d'autres groupes ultranationalistes + pas anti-russe, ils parlent russe principalement + difficile d'appliquer une seule orientation politique. https://www.academia.edu/38533829/Irregular_Militias_and_Radical_Nationalism_in_Post_Euromaydan_Ukraine_The_Prehistory_and_Emergence_of_the_Azov_Battalion_in_2014

"In the foreign media, particularly the Russian propaganda outlets, but at times also in Western reporting, Azov is sometimes presented as the archetypical example of Ukraine’s voluntary battalions. Well-informed observers, some of whom are quoted below, in contrast, have highlighted the peculiarity of Azov as well as the difficulty of applying, in general, a single over-arching political classification and interpretation to the volunteers movement. For example, following some journalistic research, Shaun Walker concluded: “The Azov [fighters] are a minority among the Ukrainian forces, and even they, however unpleasant their views may be, are not anti-Russian; in fact the lingua franca of the battalion is Russian, and most have Russian as their first language.” 32 Some details listed hereinafter illustrate further how unusual the track records and racist views of the regiment’s leadership are compared to representatives of other battalions, even to those with ultra-nationalist tendencies."

"In 2008–2009, the SNA/PU had become notorious for its involvement in provocative political campaigns alongside Dmytro Korchyns’kyy’s Bratstvo (Brotherhood) and Yuriy Zbitnev’s Nova Syla (New Strength) party.49 These still understudied episodes are important not only for a better understanding of Azov, but also for a more in-depth interpretation of the Euromaydan as a whole.50 In particular, a protesters’ brawl with the police, initiated by Bratstvo and the SNA/PU at the Ukrainian Secret Service building on October 18, 2008, could be seen as a prologue to the infamous clashes as Kyiv’s Bankova Street—i. e., in front of the office of the Presidential Administration—on December 1, 2013 which crucially intensified escalation of violence between the Euromaydan protesters and the Yanukovich regime.51 On December 1, 2013, various mainly masked Euromaydan protesters, amongst whom many were bearing the SNA/PU emblem (a mirror image of the wolf crook, on which more below), attempted to seize the empty Ukrainian Presidential Administration building"

Researcher into post-Soviet right-wing extremism Anton Shekhovtsov (Institute for Human Sciences at Vienna), citing an eyewitness, reports how: The storm of the administrative building was, according to one Right Sector member, instigated by several “men in their forties” who “were egging them on saying, ‘Come on guys, don’t be afraid! Now, we’ll destroy them! Come on, attack!’ These people were not known to any of the nationalists and incidentally these men did not take part in the fighting itself.” This incident was almost an exact repeat of what had happened on 9th March 2001 when, on the very same Bankova Street, a group of unknown individuals had instigated clashes with the Berkut special police force, which had then been used, by the authorities as a pretext, to arrest several leading members of the “Ukraine without Kuchma” campaign.5

Il cite beaucoup Likhachev.

From the “black little men” to the National Guard

"The Azov battalion, together with more than 30 other voluntary divisions of the police, the National Guard and the Ukrainian Armed Forces, became another building block in the foundation of a new, independent of Russia, Ukrainian Nation [sic]!88"

LOL emblem nobel prize excuse: "Azov’s initial emblem was similar to the former symbol of the Social-National Party of Ukraine and the official logo of the SNA/PU, made up of the Latin letters “I” and “N” arranged on top of one another, symbolizing the phrase “Idea of the Nation.” The emblem is also a mirror image of the so-called “wolf hook” (Wolfsangel in German), which was used by, amongst others, the SS division “Das Reich” and the Dutch SS division “Landstorm Nederland” during the Second World War, as well as a range of neo-fascist organizations after 1945.89 The symbol is illustrated below: In response to criticism about the symbol, the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs alleged that the National Guard’s Azov logo is also the Nobel Foundation’s emblem."

"Yet, the symbol of the “Idea of the Nation,”with its occult Black Sun image in the background, has an obvious connection to the pre-history, quoted statements, international links, and political behavior of Azov’s leaders. Azov’s wolf hook has a more than coincidental semblance with far-right symbols of other countries and from other eras. The early Azov emblem’s significance is an indication of continuity between the early battalion and SNA/PU. This was also illustrated in an interview conducted by Tetyana Bezruk with volunteers who supported Azov in summer 2014 in Kyiv and who responded that ideology had a place within the unit’s communication.91 After Azov’s creation in 2014, Bilets’kyy himself admitted that: “We have not moved away from what we are. Everything that is behind ‘Azov’s’ soul comes from our right-wing ideology, from the heritage of the Patriot of Ukraine.”"

"By the end of summer 2014, the Azov battalion comprised between 400 and 450 people.100 On September 17, 2014, on an order from the Minister of Internal Affairs Avakov, the battalion was upgraded to a regiment.101 On November 12, 2014, Azov was integrated, as a so-called Special Purpose Regiment, into the National Guard of Ukraine, with a staff of 800 soldiers.102 In this format, Azov has continued to exist and grow in size"

Minister of Interior Avavkov later commented on the establishment of Azov as a fully regular armed unit, under his ministry, and its inclusion of ultra-nationalists, the following way: Many political leaders were afraid of the whole volunteer movement. It is very complicated, for me too. There are issues [with that]. In Azov, there are more of them than in other [volunteer units]. This concerns the religious views [i.e. paganism] of various people, and the right-wing radicals. But would it be better, if the right-wing radicals were on the streets and destroying vitrines [of shops]? Or [isn’t it better that they] feel responsibility for this country and fight a little bit for it? This is my logic.1

The emergence of the Azov regiment and political rise of its leader was thus—at least, initially—not an expression of exploding right-wing extremism, but a component of a larger wave of armed and non-armed societal activism generated by the specifically post-revolutionary Ukrainian circumstances after the Euromaydan, and by the peculiarly hybrid (i.e., combined military and non-military) war that Russia has been semi-secretly conducting ever since against Ukraine. The combination of unusual traits of the founders of the Azov battalion/ regiment, such as the dubious actions they were involved in before the war, the barely hidden neo-Nazism of the SNA/PU, as well as Bilets’kyy and Co’s collaboration with political provocateurs like Korchyns’kyy and Lyashko109 distinguish Azov somewhat from other new Ukrainian voluntary armed units and even from other battalions with an ultranationalist background.

On the other hand, nationalism within battling post-colonial countries still under the spell and attack of their former imperial centers has a different dimension than nationalism in long-ago settled and securely independent states. Even nationalism’s most militant expressions can, under conditions of an ongoing war for independence, not be easily interpreted as exclusive and unambiguous permutations of right-wing extremism, uncivil society, and anti-democratic politics. For this and similar reasons, Azov’s emergence was, at least within the extraordinary political situation of 2014, a phenomenon that, in spite of some of the evidence presented above, largely falls under the heading of “civic activism in times of armed conflict.” It is later developments connected to Azov following the turning-point of 2014—not dealt with here—that pose serious questions about this phenomenon’s eventual political role within Ukrainian society, and its future impact on Ukraine’s post-revolutionary politics.110 Although Azov itself has become fully integrated into the National Guard and thereby a combat unit of the Ministry of Interior, its creators have recently started a new comprehensive party-political project and non-governmental movement that goes beyond the confines of national security, patriotic mobilization, and military defense. With the creation of the Azov-linked political party Natsional’nyy korpus (National Corps), non-governmental organization Tsyvil’nyy korpus (Civil Corps), and unarmed militias Natsional’nyy druzhyny (National Fellowships) in 2015–2017, the Azov founders may be returning to their roots in the Patriot of Ukraine and Social-National Assembly. Perhaps, these new initiatives are ideologically sufficiently dissimilar from the SNA/PU to be also classified as permutations of neo-Nazism; perhaps, not. Future research will have to show.

Conclusion: Yet, Azov’s transformation into a larger venture combining an armed regiment with a political party and supposedly non-political self-help movement raises concerns. It may mean that the Azov phenomenon will eventually have to be re-evaluated within the framework of uncivil movement as well as right-wing extremism studies, and the peculiar threats that groups falling under these headings pose for the consolidation and development of democracy.11

https://phavi.umcs.pl/at/attachments/2021/0923/121101-prace-cew-ak.pdf

Why did Ukraine’s numerous new irregular dobrovol’chi batal’yony (volunteer battalions) that quickly emerged after the Revolution of Dignity not become major factors in Ukrainian politics? Our paper surveys the interaction between Ukraine’s main political parties after the 2013–2014 Euromaidan uprising, and the new irregular armed groups (IAGs) that sprung up in the springautumn of 2014. It focusses upon the parties’ role in the formation and absorption of individual and collective actors within the armed volunteer movement, and evaluates the presented empirical evidence against the background of some comparative literature on IAGs’ transition to electoral politics.

Some selected volunteer units – most prominently the infamous Azov Regiment10, on which there is more below – kept a part of their staff, identity, symbols and exclusiveness after their incorporation into the troops of the Ministries of Interior or Defense.

Extended citation: Nevertheless, the story about Ukraine’s initially ir- or semiregular armed volunteer movement did not end with its almost full incorporation and partial dispersion into the regular Ukrainian armed forces. A whole number of the initial leaders that shaped and were shaped by the paramilitary units and their civic support groups kept in contact with, or even advanced within, those political, governmental, civil or commercial structures which had initially given birth to, or supported the formation of, the IAGs. Some selected volunteer units – most prominently the infamous Azov Regiment10, on which there is more below – kept a part of their staff, identity, symbols and exclusiveness after their incorporation into the troops of the Ministries of Interior or Defense. A number of decommissioned commanders and privates started to participate, or even became prominent in, the development of post-Maidan Ukrainian politics, government and society.

In the words of one of the key original organisers of the IAGs, Viktor Chavalan, who was, in 2014–2015, Head of the Department for the Organization of the Activities of the Special Tasks Units within the Ministry of Interior of Ukraine, “the people who formed the basis of the volunteer units in 2014 did not disappear, they are still there. Moreover, the informal ties that formed between them and were strengthened during the fights are rather strong. These are relatively powerful communities and these people support each other in peaceful life in the solution social and everyday-life issues. […] That means that, apart from the fact that this is a fighting brotherhood steeled during the war, by joint victories, by joint losses and by joint heroic deeds, there are certain problems that keep this community together”11.

To be sure, the larger segment of the irregular armed groups’ staff had, by 2018, returned to their pre-2014 professional lives. Some are suffering from various post-traumatic syndromes, after their experience of combat, loss, injury, detention, torture etc. Yet, numerous former irregular soldiers have continued to follow the career-paths they started, accelerated, modified or sustained within the early post-Maidan armed volunteer movement. They became military or police men and women, full-time politicians or political activists as well as organisers or leaders of Ukraine’s vibrant civil and uncivil societies12.

The prominence that some activists from the armed volunteer movement have gained in postEuromaidan Ukrainian national politics is, to considerable degree, build on the really or allegedly important role that this movement played or is said to have played during the early war period, especially in the volatile months from approximately April to circa September 2014. In spite of their improvised nature, the first volunteer troops – rather than the regular army, largely dysfunctional at that time – are credited to have, between the late spring and early autumn of 2014, saved Eastern Ukraine from being overrun by Russia-directed hybrid and, in late August – early September 2014, regular forces.

To be sure, the exact degree of the IAGs’ real military relevance is disputed. Yet, a notable impact of the IAGs has been asserted by Ukrainian governmental officials13, claimed by representatives of the involved right-wing groups14, and argued by certain experts alike15. At least, there is thus a widely shared cross-societal perception that the dobrobaty – the abbreviation for dobrovolchii batal’ony (volunteer battalions) – saved Ukraine as a state in mid2014. This real or presumed savior-role of the IAGs, in 2014, elicited then and has since continued to elicit considerable social popularity, public trust and political support for the initially non-state fighters, in particular, as well as for all soldiers employed within Ukraine’s Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO), in general. This was so much so that the majority of competitive parties actively induced former or still active combatants to join their electoral lists for the October 2014 parliamentary and October 2015 local elections. For instance, according to a study by the Committee of Voters of Ukraine, support from and for ATO fighters was one of the most important topics in the electoral campaigns of the parties for the 2015 local elections16.

Right-Wing Parties and their Para-Military Arms Although they continue to form a family of relatively minor Ukrainian political groupings18, such parties as the Right Sector, Svoboda (Freedom) party and National Corps as well as their involvement in the fighting in the Donbas are worth considering here first and foremost19. This is because the organisational connection between them and some new IAGs, as briefly sketch out below, was and partly still is particularly close.

The Right Sector claims to have lost about 60–70 members in combat20, Svoboda over 50 members21, and the Azov Battalion/Regiment 39 members22. Another reason for considering the far-right here at the beginning is that these Ukrainian parties as well as their armed wings were and still are playing a disproportionately large role in the Kremlin’s propaganda campaign against, as well as, to a lesser degree, in Western media reports about, Ukraine.

Finally, it is not inconceivable that this, by mid-2018, still marginal family of parties can, in the future, gain more influence on Ukrainian national-level politics and then warrant more scholarly attention than hitherto. In March 2017, Svoboda, the Right Sector and National Corps signed a joint “National Manifesto”. According to Svoboda leader Oleh Tiahnybok, the parties “will not just coordinate their efforts, they will reach their goals together”23. As a united force, they could shape an entire new camp in Ukrainian politics, after the forthcoming autumn 2019 parliamentary elections. In such a case, the particularly close connections between the far-right and some of the below introduced current and former Ukrainian IAGs would also increase in relevance.

Although the youngest of Ukraine’s three main far-right parties, the Right Sector received especially wide attention throughout 2014. It was initially a loose umbrella movement for various right-wing grouplets and nationalistically inclined individuals participating in the Euromaidan.

While many commentators emphasise the right-wing extremist party-political background of the Azov Battalion85, MP and Azov affiliate Oleh Petrenko, once a football fan club activist from Cherkassy and short-term Right Sector member, has claimed that 50% of the early Azov fighters came out of the ultras movement from all over Ukraine86.

On October 14, 2016, the Azov Civic Corps, during a meeting, adopted the decision to start a new explicitly political project, the National Corps. Rather than legally creating a new party, two already-existing organisations, the Hromadians’kyi rukh “Chesni Spravy” (Civic Movement “Fair Action”) and “Patriot Ukrainy” (“Patriot of Ukraine”), founded in 2005, were merged and renamed89.

The above-mentioned Andrii Bilets’kyi, head of the Azov regiment, was also appointed leader of the National Corps90. Before 2014, he had made racist statement and been known by the nickname “White Leader”91. [Source Umland]

The Azov battalion and later regiment has been using stylised, coded neo-Nazi symbols reminiscent of the Black Sun and Wolf’s Hook, yet publicly denied that they refer to German fascism92. During the last years, Bilets’kyi has repeatedly denied making various earlier biologically racist statements ascribed to him, and even claimed that “if somebody had called me ‘White Leader’ face-to-face, [that person] would have been beaten”. Bilets’kyi still publicly opposes multiculturalism, but admits that “to be a Ukrainian nationalist today is to believe in values, not racial prejudice”, and his new party does not use an ethnic criterion to define who can and cannot be part of the Ukrainian nation93. Nationalist Corps activist Stepan Baida claimed that the “Patriot of Ukraine”, the Khar’kiv groupuscule out of which Azov emerged, had initially been Russian-speaking94.

As a result, Bilets’kyi ran as a formally independent candidate, with only informal support of Iatseniuk’s party. His electoral success was a function of his fame as a capable military commander, and agreed-upon representative of the pro-Euromaidan forces, in this SMD. His right-wing extremist past was not yet widely known in Ukraine in 201496. Stepan Holovko, spokesman for both the Azov regiment and the Social-National Assembly, in contrast to Bilets’kyi, ran as an official Popular Front candidate in a SMD, but he was not successful97.

For a while, the formal head of the Azov Civil Corps was the well-known politician Roman Zvarych – an immigrant to Ukraine from the US, member of the North American Ukrainian diaspora, activist for the Bandera-wing of the OUN, one-time pupil of Yaroslav Stets’ko, deputy of the Verkhovna Rada, and two-time former Minister of Justice of Ukraine. Zvarych joined Azov in June 2014, and played, until his departure in autumn 2015, some role in the formation and education of the Azov battalion, regiment and movement, with regard to both military and political affairs.

While he never made it to the frontline, Zvarych has claimed that he was critically involved in organising combat training for Azov fighters, by Georgian, American, Lithuanian, as well as British instructors, and to have advised Azov to refrain from using symbols and ideas that could be linked to Nazism99. As Zvarych had left Azov before the National Corps party was created, Bilets’kyi denied that Zvarych played any role in the emergence of the new party100. After his engagement with Azov, Zvarych started to criticise in public the political program of the National Corps101.

The Azov Battalion was founded as a police special forces battalion on May 5, 2014, reorganised as a regiment on September 17, 201480, and, on November 11, 2014, made, by an order of the Minister of the Interior, part of the National Guard of Ukraine81. When asked about the Azov Regiment and the far-right activists serving in the National Guard unit, Arsen Avakov replied: “Is it better when the right radicals are out on the streets, crushing shop windows? Or when they feel responsibility and fight for it for some time?” He and Serhii Taruta, an oligarch who served as the Donets’k oblast’ governor in 2014 and later founded his own party called Osnova (Foundation)83, had provided the initial funding for Azov. They claim to have provided the material support for its first and legendary military operation, the liberation of Mariupol’ in the summer of 2014.

Azov movement and links with Azov battalion since the beginning + right-wing extremist and ultranationalist background: "While many commentators emphasise the right-wing extremist party-political background of the Azov Battalion85, MP and Azov affiliate Oleh Petrenko, once a football fan club activist from Cherkassy and short-term Right Sector member, has claimed that 50% of the early Azov fighters came out of the ultras movement from all over Ukraine86. The related Tsyvil’nyi korpus “Azov” (Azov Civil Corps) comprised Azov veterans and other nationalist activists, raised financial and material support for the frontlines, recruited fighters for the Azov regiment, provided, in its own words, “truthful and timely” information about developments in the Donbas, and “created a patriotic environment” via “unification of supporters around the national idea”87. Azov commander Andrii Bilets’kyi has described this structure, “one of the most extended networks of activists in Ukraine”, as the backbone of the National Corps party88."

On October 14, 2016, the Azov Civic Corps, during a meeting, adopted the decision to start a new explicitly political project, the National Corps. Rather than legally creating a new party, two already-existing organisations, the Hromadians’kyi rukh “Chesni Spravy” (Civic Movement “Fair Action”) and “Patriot Ukrainy” (“Patriot of Ukraine”), founded in 2005, were merged and renamed89. After the Statesman Initiative of Iarosh, created as a result of a split within the Right Sector, the National Corps became the second relevant rightist party launched after the start of, and as a more or less direct result of, the Donbas conflict. While representatives of all rightwing parties attempt to gain political capital by referring to their affiliated military units, the National Corps is a party that dwells even more than its competitors on that particular political capital. Its date of creation alluded both to the Orthodox holiday of Pokrova (Protection of the Mother of God), and to the date of the creation of the nationalistic Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in 1942.

The above-mentioned Andrii Bilets’kyi, head of the Azov regiment, was also appointed leader of the National Corps90. Before 2014, he had made racist statement and been known by the nickname “White Leader”91. The Azov battalion and later regiment has been using stylised, coded neo-Nazi symbols reminiscent of the Black Sun and Wolf’s Hook, yet publicly denied that they refer to German fascism92. During the last years, Bilets’kyi has repeatedly denied making various earlier biologically racist statements ascribed to him, and even claimed that “if somebody had called me ‘White Leader’ face-to-face, [that person] would have been beaten”. Bilets’kyi still publicly opposes multiculturalism, but admits that “to be a Ukrainian nationalist today is to believe in values, not racial prejudice”, and his new party does not use an ethnic criterion to define who can and cannot be part of the Ukrainian nation93. Nationalist Corps activist Stepan Baida claimed that the “Patriot of Ukraine”, the Khar’kiv groupuscule out of which Azov emerged, had initially been Russian-speaking94.

In the summer of 2014, Liashko cooperated closely with the just-created and still relatively small Azov battalion. The Azov Civic Corps site even maintains that Liashko was one of the battalion’s creators140. In an article for the website of the Azov battalion, the famous right-wing journalist Olena Bilozers’ka acknowledged Liashko’s role and stated: “the Patriot of Ukraine and the Social-National Assembly are the backbone of Azov, but not all battalion fighters are nationalist. Moderates [in the battalion] do not have problems with people who have tattoos of runes or inscriptions such as ‘[I am a] 100% racist’. And, if someone does have such problems, he would not admit that, since in Azov, not least thanks to Oleh Liashko, it is possible to fight. Not all units are so lucky”141.

While not having – unlike Azov or the DUK – an ultra-nationalist background, “Donbas” was one of the more radical and politically engaged IAGs as early as 2014.

During the Euromaidan, he had been involved in street fighting. In June 2014, Petrenko joined the Azov Civil Corps, and subsequently became close to Bilets’koi. Nevertheless, he was supported by the BPP “Solidarity” party, and became a member of the Poroshenko Bloc’s parliamentary faction, while preserving his link to the Azov Regiment and entering the National Corps168.

Nevertheless, about two years after the victory of the Euromaidan, if not before, relations between the President and volunteers were becoming increasingly sour. On May 20, 2016, Poroshenko, for instance, accused fighters of the Azov battalion who had burned tires and exploded petards during a march in Kyiv, that they had created “a picture [beneficial] for Russian TV”. The Azov veterans’ protest was targeted against possible elections in the Donbas, after Poroshenko had declared his adherence to the Minsk Agreements which prescribe such elections176. Since then, many volunteer units and their veteran organisations have turned against Poroshenko.

Azov movement, why Azov's National Corps is a part of Azov battalion/regiment and not the opposite: Moreover, several minor parties, such as the Right Sector, UkrOP, Statesman Initiative of Iarosh, and National Corps, are – as illustrated above – especially closely connected to the IAGs. The National Corps, in particular, represents the political arm of a more broadly organised movement that also includes the Azov volunteer regiment of the National Guard, the so-called Natsional’nyi druzhyny (National Militias, unarmed street guards), the Ekolohichnyy korpus (Ecological Corps), and some other subunits. The Right Sector and National Corps may be regarded as belonging, from a comparative perspective, to the class of those “few [irregular armed] organisations whose militant origins remain essential to their identities and platforms as political parties”204.

The multiple transitions of both ultra-nationalist and moderately nationalist IAG commanders to Ukraine’s party politics seems to follow patterns earlier observed with regard to IAGs who emerged in very different situations, but had – like in Ukraine in 2014–2015 – achieved part of their initial aims. Benjamin Costa observed that “whether [an IAG] was initially founded by a political party” or not was not that important for predicting its further development205.

“[P]articular outcome goals and ideologies tend not to alter the likelihood of militant transition”206. Rather, “[c]omplete outcome-goal achievement appears less likely to promote militant transition to party politics than partial success – possibly even reducing the odds of transition. Longstanding political actors establish parties as a new means to achieve an existing political end […]. When organizations accomplish their goals outright – like organizations that achieve military victories that topple adversarial regimes – much of the organizational incentive to transition evaporates. In contrast, achieving some success, though remaining outmatched or a at parity with their adversaries or rivals, might direct organizations to transition in efforts to accomplish the remainder of their outcome goals. As militant organizations that seek transition can use their limited success to convince their constituencies to support a new direction, partial goal achievement may foster transition”207.

In post-Euromaidan Ukraine, a number of IAG members went rather quickly and determinedly through this transition process, after the post-revolutionary Ukrainian state had stabilised, in summer 2014. They did so, as they had succeeded in saving Ukraine from being overrun by Russia-led separatists. Yet, the IAGs had not fully achieved their goal, as the war with Russia continued and continues until today. This partial success promoted, as has happened elsewhere in the world before, militant transition to party politics in Ukraine. In spite of the – here only partly outlined – resulting continuing and multifarious connections between the armed volunteer movement and post-Euromaidan national as well as local politics, the IAGs as such played only a limited or indirect role in shaping political power, actions and decisions in Kyiv. This is in distinction to, for instance, post-war Indonesia were “factional alliances between militias and members of the political elite raised the threat of coups and domestic fragmentation”208. In more general terms, “[t]he loss of the presumed state-held monopoly on violence is commonly identified as a harbinger of anarchy”209. Has that, to any degree, also been the case in post-Euromaidan Ukraine?

As Ilmari Käihikö observed, “[i]n the end the volunteer phenomenon only lasted for about a year, before they were turned from independent militias into state-controlled paramilitary forces. Yet years later, they continue to influence the Ukrainian nation and politics because of their proximity to the nation”210. Such background influence has remained present until 2019, and may have materialised, for instance, through various public protest actions of IAG-related political activists. Only occasionally and only with regard to certain policy issues, however, did some IAGs or their veterans, as organised entities of volunteers, exert noticeable impact on central and local decision-making – above all with regard to Ukraine’s policies vis-à-vis Crimea and the Donbas.

In 2016, Malyarenko and Galbreath had concluded their paper on the IAGs – one of the first longer scholarly publications on the topic – with the juxtaposition that “[f]or the pro-Ukrainian paramilitaries, they may prove to be both Ukraine’s saving grace in the war and its greatest threat to national security in the subsequent peace”211. This was a warning that made sense back then, and was in line with earlier findings from comparative research into the IAGs. One researcher with no connection to Ukraine had, for instance, concluded his broad cross-cultural study, several years before the Donbas War, with the warning that “factional alliances between militias and members of the political elite raised the threat of coups and domestic fragmentation”212.

Yet, the Ukrainian paramilitary formations – whatever their particular ideological orientation and degree of political ambition – had, by 2018, not (yet) become such threats. One of the most revolutionary inclined party-IAG alliances, the Right Sector and its DUK, split, as mentioned, in November 2015. Its, by far, most widely known leader, Iarosh, left, with a large group of his followers, both the party and Corps. Iarosh created his own party and volunteer unit whose rhetoric and political stance have been much less anti-systemic than of that of the Right Sector and the DUK. The Azov Regiment, in turn, had already become a regular part of the National Guard subordinated to the Ministry of Interior in late 2014. It is true that the initial Azov battalion has, between 2014–2018, given birth to a politically prolific and publicly visible movement that includes, among others, a party, a veterans’ organisation and an unarmed militia. The popularity of these organisations builds on, among other things, the real or perceived military victories of Azov. Yet, there has, so far, never been an indication that the (un)civil organisations that sprang out of Azov did or will resort to using the weapons of the eponymous National Guard regiment.

--> Pas de coup d'état ni de controle direct sur la politique de Kiev, mais une influence politique et culturelle tout de même certaine: Our above survey indicates, to be sure, that many of the armed volunteer movement’s graduates did not hide their political ambitions, made political careers, and have come to influence Ukrainian political affairs, in one or another way. Yet, the IAGs or their successor volunteer units within the regular forces did not seem to have shaped, to a notable degree, Kyiv’s domestic policies, the Ukrainian polity and national-level politics of post-Euromaidan Ukraine, with the exception of decisions taken in relation to the conflict with Russia. Neither in the period of 2014–2015, when the IAGs had been more or less independent, nor afterwards, when most of them were integrated into the troops of the Ministries of Interior or Defense, did the volunteer units as such exert a clearly identifiable and relevant impact on the President’s, government’s or parliament’s decision-making, with regard to – narrowly defined – domestic political matters.

--> Interconnexion IAGs (au dela de Azov movement): Our above survey indicates considerable interpenetration between political parties and IAGs in Kyiv since 2014. Nevertheless, Huseyn Aliev’s recent assertion that the post-Euromaidan volunteer troops are “informal power-holders” in Ukraine is fundamentally misleading, and has no empirical grounding. The power of certain figures once or still linked to the IAGs and their successor units in Ukraine’s regular armed forces is due to the political posts that they occupy. It has little or nothing to do with their potential access to firearms and heavy weapons, or to their links to serving soldiers who could use such weaponry within the context of domestic politics213.

One of the structural reasons for the, at least until 2019, relatively low internal political salience of the Ukrainian IAGs regarding issues other than the Donbas conflict itself, as well as for the largely smooth transition of its former commanders to civilian politics, is the putatively civil character of the war in Eastern Ukraine214. Unlike numerous other paramilitaries around the world over the last few decades, the Ukrainian IAGs emerged within the context of a proxy and hybrid war between two already more or less established states: Russia and Ukraine. Contrary to the assertion of some observers215, the war in the Donbas was not primarily the result of an internal political rift within one and the same state216. The outbreak of the war was, to be sure, shaped by a number of Ukrainian domestic conditions that eased the Kremlin’s active meddling in the Donbas more so than in other regions where such attempts – as the so-called Glazyev Tapes documented217 – were also made218. Yet, the war in the Donets Basin would not have broken out in 2014 without the Russian factor219.

--> À VOIR: GLAZYEV TAPES (refs 217 et 218 et 219)

217 Brian Whitmore, “How To Manufacture A War”, The Power Vertical, 26 August 2016, www.rferl.org/a/how-tomanufacture-a-war/27947359.html (accessed: 9 September 2018); Halya Coynash, “Odesa Smoking Gun Leads Directly to

Moscow”, Human Rights in Ukraine, 20 September 2016, khpg.org/en/index.php?id=1473972066 (accessed: 9 September 2018).

218 Sergiy Kudelia, “Domestic Sources of the Donbas Insurgency”, PONARS Eurasia Policy Memos, no. 351 (2014),

www.ponarseurasia.org/memo/domestic-sources-donbas-insurgency (accessed: 9 September 2018); Ivan Katchanovski, “The Separatist War in Donbas: A Violent Break-up of Ukraine?” European Politics and Society, vol. 17, no. 4 (2016), pp. 473– 489; Serhiy Kudelia, “The Donbas Rift”, Russian Politics and Law, vol. 54, no. 1 (2016), pp. 5–27; Gwendolyn Sasse and Alice Lackner, “War and Identity: The Case of the Donbas in Ukraine”, Post-Soviet Affairs, vol. 34, nos. 2–3 (2018), pp. 139–157; Elise Giuliano, “Who Supported Separatism in Donbas? Ethnicity and Popular Opinion at the Start of the Ukraine Crisis”, PostSoviet Affairs, vol. 34, nos. 2–3 (2018), pp. 158–178.

219 Nikolai Mitrokhin, “Grubye liudi: kak russkie natsionalisty sprovotsirovali grazhdanskuiu voinu v Ukraine”, Forum noveishei

vostochnoevropeiskoi istorii i kul’tury, vol. 11, no. 2 (2014), pp. 53–74; Anton Shekhovtsov, “How Alexander Dugin’s NeoEurasianists Geared up for the Russian-Ukrainian War in 2005–2013”, Euromaidan Press, 26 January 2016, euromaidanpress.com/2016/01/26/how-alexander-dugins-neo-eurasianists-geared-up-for-the-russian-ukrainian-war-in-2005- 2013/ (accessed: 15 September 2018); Andrew Wilson, “The Donbas in 2014: Explaining Civil Conflict Perhaps, but not Civil War”, Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 68, no. 4 (2016), pp. 631–652; Andreas Umland, “The Glazyev Tapes, Origins of the Donbas Conflict, and Minsk Agreements”, Foreign Policy Association, 13 September 2018, foreignpolicyblogs.com/2018/09/13/theglazyev-tapes-origins-of-the-donbas-conflict-and-minsk-agreements/ (accessed: 15 September 2018).

--> Azov est anti-système? D'où les préoccupations de sa régulation future (Umland 2021)? With the partial exception of such units as the DUK and Azov, most of the groups in the Ukrainian armed volunteer movement thus fall into the category of “within-system” organisations. “Whereas ‘anti-system’ organizations aim to collapse, overthrow, or replace political systems, ‘within-system’ organizations pursue outcome goals that do not fundamentally conflict with the target’s political system. This divide implies that organizations with ‘anti-system’ goals are less likely to transition, as they have little to gain by working with a given political system”220.

--> Il nous faut un article sur les IAGs, ce n'est pas limité à l'Ukraine The Ukrainian case since 2014 seems to lend support to a larger previous re-assessment of IAGs in a broad cross-cultural study, with no relation but partly applicable to Ukraine. Ariel Ahram asserted in 2011, in the concluding remarks of a seminal monograph, that his “book shows how the dynamics of competition between various domestic and international forces provides an incentive for states to rely on nonstate actors instead of maximizing control over violence. State weakness and the emergence of militias do not constitute an aberration, dysfunction, or result of failure of will. Contrary to David Clare’s contention that militias ‘usually seek to eliminate all the vestiges of central government within their area of operations,’ the case studies [i.e. Indonesia, Iraq and Iran] show how militias and state officials routinely cooperate with and mutually reinforce one another”221.

Comparative explorations of the Ukrainian case that would juxtapose the East European experiences, with Latin American, Central African, Middle Eastern or East Asian developments are so far missing. In fact, it may, by 2019, still be too early to do them. Considerable empirical research, descriptive analysis, and ideographic interpretation remains to be done, before crosscultural comparison with other cases will make sense222. Yet, conclusions from earlier crosscultural studies, such as the above-quoted, already indicate that the emergence of IAGs in Ukraine in 2014, their subsequent inclusion into state-structures, and their commanders’ transition to electoral politics, may constitute less exceptional phenomena than sometimes assumed. They may be more easily explicable and interpretable with reference to earlier similar phenomena in other regions of the world than our above descriptive survey by itself suggests.

The shortlived Ukrainian armed volunteer movement and its interactions with electoral politics, in some regards, did and, in other regards, did not fit patterns observed in previous case studies and cross-cultural research of IAGs. The distinctly short life of the Ukrainian IAGs as more or less independent actors, and the swift integration of most of them into Ukraine’s regular forces, was unusual. This was one of the reasons for the relatively low political impact of the IAGs as such – a repercussion somewhat in contrast to the impressive political careers of some IAG commanders since 2014.

Many of the armed volunteer movement’s graduates did not hide their political ambitions, made political careers, and came to influence Ukrainian political affairs in one or another way. Yet, the IAGs or their successor volunteer units within the regular forces did not seem to have shaped, to a notable degree, Kyiv’s domestic policies, the Ukrainian polity and national-level politics of post-Euromaidan Ukraine, with the exception of decisions taken in relation to the conflict with Russia. Neither in the period 2014–2015, when the IAGs had been more or less independent, nor afterwards, when most of them were integrated into the troops of the Ministries of Interior or Defense, did the volunteer units as such exert a clearly identifiable and relevant impact on the President’s, government’s or parliament’s decision-making with regard to – narrowly defined – domestic political matters.

Our paper indicates that one of the reasons that this did not happen may have been that the politicians who came out and were linked to the IAGs acquired, as MPs on various levels or executive officials with different functions, new opportunities to exert political impact. To be sure, the mere existence of IAGs may have, as a background condition, had some repercussions for these new politicians’ social standing, and for the public conduct of the President, government, parliament and parties. Yet, there has, so far, never been a situation in which a direct threat of a military or para-military group to use its arms, determined an, in the narrow sense, major domestic decision, i.e. principally shaped a course of action, appointment of personnel, or choice between alternative options not directly related to the war with Russia – the latter being a matter where, of course, the IAGs and their regular successor units exerted considerable influence.

Background Umland:

He lives in Kyiv, and teaches as an Associate Professor of Politics at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.

Travaille aussi régulièrement pour Atlantic Council (publie des articles et billets de blog en collaboration et chez eux). Certains posts sont militants (avec attaques perso).

In February 2014, Andreas Umland was the initiator and author of an open letter from experts on Ukrainian nationalism, urging Western commentators not to emphasize the participation of the far-right in the Maidan, as this could be used by Russian propaganda.

Andreas Umland was the initiator and author of the text of an open letter of more than a hundred German-speaking experts on Eastern Europe dated 11 December 2014, in which the authors of the open letter of 60 German, mostly former politicians, which from pro-Russian positions called for "to prevent a new large-scale war in Europe".[19][20][21] Umland's joint statement by a hundred experts and scholars, entitled "Protect Peace, Not Encourage Expansion," makes it clear that Russia is clearly acting as an aggressor in the Ukrainian conflict.

In 2015, Andreas Umland was among scholars from around the world who called on Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Verkhovna Rada Speaker Volodymyr Groysman not to sign bills on the legal status and commemoration of Ukraine's independence fighters in the twentieth century (№2538-1 ) and "On the condemnation of the communist and National Socialist (Nazi) totalitarian regimes in Ukraine and the prohibition of propaganda of their symbols" (№2558).[22] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Umland https://www.researchgate.net/institution/National_University_of_Kyiv-Mohyla_Academy

Glazyev tapes and Surkov Leaks: https://www.academia.edu/29715803/The_Glazyev_Tapes_and_the_Minsk_Agreements_Response_to_Andreas_Umland_docx

What does this mean exactly? That the half-formed new regime in Kiev already possessed the physical power to prevent or deter anti-Maidan activists throughout the country from complying with the Kremlin’s wishes? That would be not just ‘surprising’ but a veritable miracle!

Yes, even under the chaotic conditions that prevailed in early 2014 Ukraine did prove strong enough to resist the Russian assault. But this strength must be understood in a different sense. Ukraine was strong because not only its Ukrainian speakers but also the great majority of its Russian speakers (except for a small minority of Russian nationalists and the special case of Crimea) wanted to remain in an independent Ukraine. They sought to protect their interests within the framework of the Ukrainian state, not by joining Russia. They had their own ideas of what sort of state Ukraine should be, but they too were Ukrainian patriots. Only this can explain why they were so reluctant to call for Russian ‘help’ – for had they been willing to do so no one would have been in a position to stop them.

The period that we are considering – February and March 2014 – was before the events of May 2, 2014, when Ukrainian ultra-nationalists murdered scores of anti-Maidan protestors in and around Odessa’s House of Trade Unions, burning many of them alive.2 This atrocity naturally heightened fears of the post-Maidan political order among Ukraine’s Russian speakers. Still there was no ‘call for help’ that the Kremlin could use as a pretext for military intervention. Not even from Odessa itself.

Umland’s interpretation of the situation leads him to recommend that the European Union and the West in general should not insist ‘on Ukraine quickly fulfilling the political aspects of the Minsk Agreements’ but place sole emphasis on the demand for Russia to return occupied territory to Ukraine. The ‘political aspects’ to which he alludes provide for special regimes of autonomous local self-government in the Donbas and constitutional reform to decentralize power at the national level.

Umland justifies his recommendation as follows (I abridge somewhat but try adequately to convey the gist):

The social rationale for far-reaching new political rules in the Donbas, as envisaged in the Minsk Agreements, is slim. A popular Western interpretation of the concessions to the separatists in these Agreements had been that the fact of a grass-roots insurgency in the Donbas should be reflected in its future status. Yet ... the East Ukrainian ‘Russian Spring’ was, from the beginning, not as popular a phenomenon as it had seemed. If one acknowledges ... the imperial rather than local dimension of the uprising, then it becomes clear that the Minsk Agreements need to be revisited... There is no reason why the West should support a sellout deal designed to undermine the sovereignty of the Ukrainian state in the Donbas.

The main weakness in this line of argument is that it relies wholly on one particular interpretation of the concessions made. Another interpretation is possible and leads to quite different policy recommendations. Specifically, the ‘concessions to the separatists’ might equally well be viewed as concessions to the Russian speakers of eastern and southern Ukraine, most of whom are loyal citizens of Ukraine but who have legitimate economic and security interests that could be protected through the decentralization of power (whether by establishing a federal structure or by other means). While Russia may support such provisions in the hope that they will undermine Ukrainian sovereignty, what matters is their actual effect – and there is every reason to expect that by eliminating conditions that invite Russian meddling they will in fact strengthen rather than weaken the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine.

J'ai compris... Umland dans AFP et articles anglais. Par "dé-idéologisé", il entend le nazisme et racisme, que Biletsky et autres leaders d'Azov essayent maintenant de démentir (même les déclarations et actes xénophobes passés qui sont pourtant bien attestés). Néanmoins, l'idéologie nazi et la xénophobie sont toujours tolérés dans le régiment et le mouvement, c'est juste qu'il n'est plus "ouvertement" xénophobe ou néo-nazi comme il avait pu l'être avant. Il continue néanmoins d'avoir des liens étroits avec d'autres groupes paramilitaires et politiques néonazis nationaux et internationaux. Et il reste "far-right" et ultranationaliste. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2022/03/26/world/azov-battalion-ukraine-russia/

DÉTOURNEMENT DE SOURCE: en français les reprises de l'AFP coupent la citation de Umland, qui est plus complète en anglais (chez l'AFP aussi mais version anglophone!)

“In 2014 this battalion had indeed a far-right background, these were far-right racists that founded the battalion,” said Andreas Umland at the Stockholm Center for Eastern European Studies.

But it had since become “de-ideologized” and a regular fighting unit, he said.

--> Donc clairement il parle de l'idéologie nazie, pas du "far-right". Mais même ça c'est dubious étant donné que c'est un hub d'entrainement militaire pour les néo-nazis du monde entier (voir plus bas). Mais c'est déjà plus correct et en ligne avec ce qu'il écrit dans ses ouvrages au moins, alors que la version française détourne franchement. Cela confirme mon interprétation. Mais par contre il reste le problème qu'il ne couvre pas les liens de Azov contemporain à l'international.

IAGs autre point de vue, par professeur Ivan Katchanovski, chercheur à Ottawa, Canada originaire de Loutsk, Ukraine:

https://books.google.pl/books?id=N_aEDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA250&dq=azov+nazi&hl=pl#v=onepage&q=azov%20nazi&f=false

"The new government of Ukraine -- Professor Ivan Katchanovski affirmed -- emerged broadly as a result of the deception around the massacre, and the Ukrainian media contributed by misrepresenting the mass killing of demonstrators and police officers. The research conducted by Professor Ivan Katchanovski concluded that "the far right played a key role in the violent overthrow of the government in Ukraine."

[...]

"Ukraine under its neo-Nazi government was left quite vulnerable." --> WHAT? Ok source pas fiable. Le livre, je ne sais pas pour le prof.

Il est ciblé par des gens louches: https://i-katchanovski.livejournal.com/

Rapport de 2018 du Center for Countering Digital Hate https://252f2edd-1c8b-49f5-9bb2-cb57bb47e4ba.filesusr.com/ugd/f4d9b9_55b47be4de914daf866cfa1810cc56c5.pdf

Many elements of this network are connected to two Ukrainian groups aiming to spread their farright extremism worldwide: Azov Battalion and Misanthropic Division.

Azov Battalion is a Ukrainian nationalist paramilitary that promotes a neo-Nazi ideology that is known to have fostered links with neo-Nazi groups in the US and other countries.

Misanthropic Division is a smaller group now largely incorporated into Azov Battalion that promotes a nihilistic form of neo-Nazism known to have influenced farright extremists charged with terror offences in the US and UK.

The most influential element of the network is Walknvt, a retailer of neo-Nazi clothing that was first identified and flagged to Facebook by the Counter Extremism Project (CEP) in November 2018, but is still operating a number of accounts on both Instagram and Facebook today.

This is part of a wider failure on Facebook’s part: there are another three far-right groups identified by the CEP still operating on the platform.

Originally a volunteer militia, Azov Battalion was officially incorporated into the National Guard of Ukraine during Russia’s annexation of Crimea.4 Fighting against pro-Russian forces, some of which also possess a neo-Nazi ideology, Azov views itself as a successor to a historical Ukrainian nationalist movement that allied with the Nazis to fight the Soviets. The Azov Battallion is known to promotea neo-Nazi ideology, and has adopted the “Wolfsangel” and “Black Sun” symbols used by the Nazi SS as elements of its official insignia.5

The regiment's first commander was the far-right nationalist Andriy Biletsky, who led neo-Nazi organisations Social-National Assembly and Patriot of Ukraine.6 Like a number of other actors in the region, not least pro-Russian forces carrying out an illegal occupation, the Azov Battalion has been accused of war crimes. Reports published by the Office of the UNited Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) have connected the regiment to mass looting, unlawful detention and torture.7 Drawing on the history of the Spanish Civil War and the slick propaganda videos of extremist groups like ISIS, Azov Battalion has actively recruited “foreign fighters” that share its ideology.8 The Soufan Center estimates that fifteen foreign fighters serving with Ukrainian forces travelled from the US, while ten travelled from the UK. In total, the Center estimates 3,879 foreign fighters have joined the Ukrainian side in the conflict, primarily from Russia and other Eastern European countries.9 An investigation by Bellingcat found that Azov had actively promoted participation in Ukraine’s war with Russia as “an opportunity for American right-wingers to acquire combat and other practical experience to be deployed later within the United States after returning home."10 Concerns over Azov’s role in recruiting and training far-right extremists led Congress to ban US arms from reaching the group in 2018.11

About MD: Misanthropic Division’s leading members are reported to have formed part of the “Right Sector” of the Euromaidan protests against the government of the time’s decision to pursue closer ties with Russia instead of the European Union.18 Following the annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of civil war with proRussian separatists within Ukraine, members of Misanthropic Division formed a close relationship with the Azov Battalion. Misanthropic Division’s 2015 manifesto states that its “main purpose” is “immediate support” for the military actions of Azov, and the group’s Telegram channel has posted a series of military engagements it claims to have taken part in during Russia’s annexation of Crimea.19 At least one member of Misanthropic Division has claimed to operate a network of cells throughout Europe, cooperating with “like-minded” groups.20 This is corroborated by research from the UK anti-fascist organisation Hope Not Hate, which established that the Italian fascist Francesco Fontana was actively recruiting members of the UK far-right for the group, estimating that two or three had gone to fight alongside neo-Nazi forces in Ukraine.21

[...]

Now deleted messages from the Misanthropic Division Telegram channel claim that the group is no longer involved in paramilitary operations and is “just [an] on-line Telegram channel”, but other recent messages show serving paramilitaries wearing Misanthropic Division symbols.25 Recent arrests of extremists possessing Misanthropic Division material and the activity outlined in this report show it is still influencing far-right activists and raising funds.

Nouveau rapport de Novembre 2020 référencé par: https://time.com/5926750/azov-far-right-movement-facebook/

Similar subject (social networks use of Azov and other neonazi groups) + international Azov movement + defines Azov as a "militant group that has trained and inspired white supremacists from around the world" (Time Magazine, 2021) https://time.com/5926750/azov-far-right-movement-facebook/

Its fighters resemble the other para-military units—and there are dozens of them—that have helped defend Ukraine against the Russian military over the past six years. But Azov is much more than a militia. It has its own political party; two publishing houses; summer camps for children; and a vigilante force known as the National Militia, which patrols the streets of Ukrainian cities alongside the police. Unlike its ideological peers in the U.S. and Europe, it also has a military wing with at least two training bases and a vast arsenal of weapons, from drones and armored vehicles to artillery pieces.

Outside Ukraine, Azov occupies a central role in a network of extremist groups stretching from California across Europe to New Zealand, according to law enforcement officials on three continents. And it acts as a magnet for young men eager for combat experience. Ali Soufan, a security consultant and former FBI agent who has studied Azov, estimates that more than 17,000 foreign fighters have come to Ukraine over the past six years from 50 countries.

The vast majority have no apparent links to far-right ideology. But as Soufan looked into the recruitment methods of Ukraine’s more radical militias, he found an alarming pattern. It reminded him of Afghanistan in the 1990s, after Soviet forces withdrew and the U.S. failed to fill the security vacuum. “Pretty soon the extremists took over. The Taliban was in charge. And we did not wake up until 9/11,” Soufan tells TIME. “This is the parallel now with Ukraine.”

At a hearing of the House Committee on Homeland Security in September 2019, Soufan urged lawmakers to take the threat more seriously. The following month, 40 members of Congress signed a letter calling—unsuccessfully—for the U.S. State Department to designate Azov a foreign terrorist organization. “Azov has been recruiting, radicalizing, and training American citizens for years,” the letter said. Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI, later confirmed in testimony to the U.S. Senate that American white supremacists are “actually traveling overseas to train.”

The hearings on Capitol Hill glossed over a crucial question: How did Azov, an obscure militia started in 2014 with only a few dozen members, become so influential in the global web of far-right extremism? TIME, in more than a dozen interviews with Azov’s leaders and recruits, found that the key to its international growth has been its pervasive use of social media, especially Facebook, which has struggled to keep the group off its platform. “Facebook is the main channel,” says Furholm, the recruiter.

[...]

New recruits take part in basic training at one of Azov's bases near the frontline city of Mariupol in eastern Ukraine in August 2019.

[...]

Yet its attempts to crack down have been far from fully effective. While Facebook first designated the Azov Battalion a “dangerous organization” in 2016, pages linked to the group continued to spread propaganda and advertise merchandise on the platform in 2020, according to research by the Center for Countering Digital Hate published in November. Even in December, the Azov movement’s political wing, the National Corps, and its youth wing maintained at least a dozen pages on Facebook. Some began disappearing after TIME posed questions about Azov to Facebook.

[...]

That online game of catch and delete, which Facebook says is central to its counter-extremism strategy, will hardly address the deeper problem posed by Azov and its allies. Apart from offering a place for foreign radicals to study the tricks and tools of war, the Azov movement, through its online propaganda, has fueled a global ideology of hate that now inspires more terrorist attacks in the U.S. than Islamic extremism does and is a growing threat throughout the Western world.

[...]

In their letter to the State Department in 2019, U.S. lawmakers noted that “the link between Azov and acts of terror in America is clear.” The Ukrainian authorities have also taken notice. In October, they deported two members of the Atomwaffen Division, a U.S.-based neo-Nazi group, who were trying to work with Azov to gain “combat experience,” according to a report in BuzzFeed News that cited two Ukrainian security officials.

Among Azov’s closest American allies has been the Rise Above Movement, or RAM, a far-right gang, some of whose members have been charged by the FBI with a series of violent attacks in California. The group’s leader, Robert Rundo, has said his idea for RAM came from Ukraine’s far-right scene. “This is always my whole inspiration for everything,” he told a right-wing podcast in September 2017, referring to Azov as “the future.” “They really have the culture out there,” he said. “They have their own clubs. They have their own bars. They have their own dress style.”

[...]

The main recruitment center for Azov, known as the Cossack House, stands in the center of Kyiv, a four-story brick building on loan from Ukraine’s Defense Ministry. In the courtyard is a cinema and a boxing club. The top floor hosts a lecture hall and a library, full of books by authors who supported German fascism, like Ezra Pound and Martin Heidegger, or whose works were co-opted by Nazi propaganda, like Friedrich Nietzsche and Ernst Jünger. On the ground floor is a shop called Militant Zone, which sells clothes and key chains with stylized swastikas and other neo-Nazi merchandise.

“It could be described as a small state within a state,” says Olena Semenyaka, the head of international outreach for the Azov movement. On a tour of the Cossack House in 2019, she told TIME that Azov’s mission was to form a coalition of far-right groups across the Western world, with the ultimate aim of taking power throughout Europe.

It might seem ironic for this hub of white nationalists to be situated in Ukraine. At one point in 2019, it was the only nation in the world, apart from Israel, to have a Jewish President and a Jewish Prime Minister. Far-right politicians failed to win a single seat in parliament in the most recent elections. But in the context of the white-supremacist movement globally, Azov has no rivals on two important fronts: its access to weapons and its recruiting power.

The movement arose as a product of the revolution that swept Ukraine in 2014. In one of their first official acts, the revolution leaders granted amnesty to 23 prisoners, including several prominent far-right agitators. They included Andriy Biletsky, who had spent the previous two years in jail on charges of attempted murder. He maintained that the case against him was politically motivated, part of an unfair crackdown on local nationalists.

Ukrainian police had long treated his organization, Patriot of Ukraine, as a neo-Nazi terrorist group. Biletsky’s nickname within the group was Bely Vozhd, or White Ruler, and his manifesto seemed to pluck its narrative straight from Nazi ideology. Ukrainian nationalists, it said, must “lead the white nations of the world in a final crusade for their survival, a crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen,” a German term for “subhumans” with roots in Nazi propaganda.

Within days of his release, Biletsky set out to assemble a far-right militia. “That was our rise to the surface after a long period underground,” Biletsky told TIME in an interview that winter in Ukraine. The insignia he chose for the militia combined two symbols—the “black sun” and the “wolf’s hook”—both of which were used by the German Nazis during World War II.

Azov Regiment veterans, whose banners carry an emblem derived from a Nazi symbol, the Wolfsangel, march in Kyiv in 2019.

[...]

Biletsky’s group proved a particularly effective example, beginning its rapid rise as the Azov Battalion. The name was derived from the Sea of Azov coast, where it first saw major combat.

Among the militias that formed to resist the Russian forces, Biletsky’s followers turned out to be among the most disciplined and battle-ready. “They held the line even after everybody left,” says Serhiy Taruta, a metals magnate and former governor of the frontline region of Donetsk who helped finance and equip Azov in the early months of the war. For their bravery on the battlefield, Biletsky and other Azov commanders were lauded as national heroes. “These are our best warriors,” then President Petro Poroshenko said at an award ceremony in 2014. “Our best volunteers.”

From across Europe and the U.S., dozens of fighters came to join Azov that year, many of them bearing tattoos and rap sheets earned in the neo-Nazi underground back home. The Ukrainian authorities welcomed many of them, and in some cases granted them citizenship. Within the war’s first year, Biletsky’s militia was officially absorbed into the National Guard, becoming a regiment within Ukraine’s armed forces.

That status came with an arsenal that no other far-right militia in the world could claim, including crates of explosives and battle gear for up to 1,000 troops. On prime-time talk shows in Ukraine, Biletsky and his lieutenants were treated as warrior-celebrities, and they used their fame as a springboard into politics. Biletsky won a seat in parliament in late 2014, during the first legislative elections that followed the revolution. His ambitions soon grew beyond Ukraine. Through speeches and propaganda videos posted on YouTube and widely shared on Facebook, the Azov movement began to cultivate an online profile and a distinctive aesthetic. The clips often featured torchlit marches and scenes of war, showing off the movement’s access to heavy artillery.

They were not the only extremists to embrace social media in 2014. When the Islamic State declared a caliphate in the Middle East that year, it began posting propaganda on social networks—mashing together memes, religious verses and scenes of gratuitous violence. The approach took the platforms by surprise, and for a time the caliphate was able to lure a class of disaffected young Muslims to fight. But by 2017, both Facebook and YouTube had developed algorithms to detect Islamic extremist material, after facing significant pressure from Western governments to act.

No government, least of all that of the U.S., put similar pressure on social media platforms to stamp out white supremacy. One legacy of the 9/11 attacks was that many counter-terrorism agencies equated terrorism with Islamic extremism, allowing white supremacy to fly under the radar just as social media platforms like Facebook were giving the movement access to a bigger audience than ever before. “In a way, Facebook tracked the failed counter-terrorism policies of the Western world,” says Heidi Beirich, the director of an advocacy group called the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.

In its statement to TIME, Facebook said it began using its algorithms to detect Azov content after designating it a dangerous organization in 2016. But well after that date, members of white-supremacist groups, including Azov, were still able to evangelize on the platform.

In some cases, Facebook’s algorithms actually nudged users into joining these groups. In an internal presentation in 2016, its analysts looked at the German political groups on the platform where racist content was thriving. They found that within this segment of Facebook, 64% of the people joining extremist groups were finding them through the platform’s own recommendation tools. “Our recommendation systems grow the problem,” the analysis states, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal that cited the internal document. In its statement to TIME, Facebook said the report was limited in scope and suggested the findings were misleading. It said it had adjusted its algorithms to stop pushing people toward known extremist groups.

Facebook groups were a stalking ground for recruiters like Furholm, the Norwegian with the swastika tattoo. At the height of his efforts in 2018, he belonged to 34 groups devoted to neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic and other far-right subjects, according to the database compiled by Megan Squire, a professor of computer science at Elon University in North Carolina who studies online extremism. Among the names of the groups that Furholm frequented were “Understanding National Socialism,” “Fascist New Man of Third Millennium” and “National Socialist News.” Twenty-seven of them, including those three, have disappeared from Facebook, but seven remain. One describes itself as “pro–white identity” and displays as its main image a black sun with an eagle atop it—overtly Nazi imagery. Another, reviewed by TIME in December, contains reams of anti-Semitic and racist posts. TIME made Facebook aware of the groups still online, and the company said it was completing a review of the content.

As Furholm scrolled through the posts and comments in these groups, he would look for young men who were, as he puts it, “the type”—mature enough to see the risks in joining a militant group like Azov but reckless enough to take them anyway.

[...]

To prove it, Azov tightened its standards for foreign fighters, accepting only those with enough weapons training and expertise to serve as military instructors. But the shift did not obviate the need for Furholm’s brand of online recruitment. On the contrary, in the summer of 2018, Azov’s political wing allowed him to use one of its cottages outside Kyiv as a hostel for foreign fighters. Those who did not make the cut were channeled into one of Ukraine’s other militia groups, or in some cases, the regular Ukrainian military.

Fuller fell into the latter group. After the Azov Regiment turned him down because of lack of experience, some of the friends he’d made in the movement helped the American sign a contract with Ukraine’s marine corps, which sent him to the front. When TIME first interviewed him in 2019, he was in Mariupol, recovering from injuries sustained in a drunken street fight. But he seemed happy to have made it as a foreign fighter in Ukraine.

When Facebook deleted his profile in 2019 in a purge of far-right accounts, Fuller stayed in touch with friends in the far-right movement through other social networks. He doesn’t like to think of himself as a recruiter but says he offers advice to Americans and Europeans who contact him online asking how they can follow in his footsteps.

Judging by some of his posts on VK, a social network that has grown in popularity among the far right as Facebook has cracked down on their accounts, Fuller’s views have become a lot more radical since he left his Texas hometown. In one screed posted to VK in May, he blamed the British for starting World War II and cast Adolf Hitler as a veritable peacenik. One of the accounts Fuller follows on that social network belongs to Azov’s military wing. Its VK page has more than 100,000 subscribers, hailing from around the world.

Old news but shows that Azov was not fighting for Europe either before: https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/08/30/preparing-for-war-with-ukraines-fascist-defenders-of-freedom/

https://eeradicalization.com/ukraine-could-become-a-training-ground-for-neo-nazi-groups/

"Olena Semenyak, the head of international outreach for Azov, told Time in 2019 that “Azov’s mission was to form a coalition of far-Right groups across the Western world, with the ultimate aim of taking power throughout Europe.”"

Childhoods in Peace and Conflict publié par J. Marshall Beier, Jana Tabak, Springer Nature, 26 sept. 2021

https://books.google.be/books?id=Dd9EEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA153&lpg=PA153&dq=azov+children+training+camp&ots=RaHH2PTm7I&sig=ACfU3U0qfWmkloNXo8cMBipW2z7HgIMuQg&hl=fr#v=onepage&q=azov%20children%20training%20camp&f=false or: https://doi.org/10.1080/21594937.2022.2026274 or specific chapter: Militarizing Citizenship in Ukraine: “Strategy for the National-Patriotic Education of Children and Youth” in Social Context, Vita Yakovlyeva, 2021: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74788-6_8

faisant référence à ces sources primaires: Enseignement militaro-patriotique des enfants promulguée par l'État en 2019 sur base d'une stratégie gouvernementale proposée en 2015: (vise une "formation militaire parfaite"): https://zakon.rada.gov.ua/rada/show/v0641729-15#Text= et https://zakon.rada.gov.ua/rada/show/286/2019#n15=

On "military-patriotic youth camps phenomenon":

"there were 27 such camps operating in Ukraine, four of which were based in the non-government-controlled territory; together, they were serving roughly 730 children within the government-controlled territories and approximately 415 children in the non-government-controlled territories (Burov et al. 2016). Examples of the training provided to children and youth at the military-patriotic camps (e.g. assembly and disassembly of machine gun), firearms training (eg.g pneumatic and low caliber gun shooting, and occasionally shooting military weapons, such as AK and AVD), and physical training (e.g. hand-to-hand combat or obstacle courses). The report concludes that the development and implementation of a military-patriotic education has been identical in the east of the country, controlled by the rebels, and the rest of government-controlled Ukraine. Since 2016, the number of military-patriotic camps and children's involvement in them has only grown."

[...]

"In response to the negative publicity, Ukrainian journalists conducted their own investigation into the camps, reporting that they accept children 7-18, and that the demobilized participants of the war whose real names are unknown train children, though every person is assigned a nickname. In one report, an organizer of a military-patriotic competition is introduced by his name, as an "Anti-Terrorist Operation" Zone veteran with three years of experience in intelligence, who said that "his work with children was a form of post-war rehabilitation" (Sanduliak 2018). Not all of the camps are government-operated. In fact, the majority are private ..."

"or run by NGOs. However, and as indicated in the Strategy, they are mostly funded by the Ministries. The Ukrainian journalist’s investigation references the warning issued by the Coalition of Human Rights Organizations that “building within the organization of the relations, which fully copy statutory military relations (vertical hierarchical subordination, ranks, discipline, system of rewards and punishment, etc.) increases the risk of recruitment and use of children in illegal militarized formations.” Several Ukrainian legal experts and parents interviewed as a follow-up spoke in favour of military training and reminded the viewer that Ukraine was at war. Based on the legal opinion sought, the journalist concludes that “if the camps were the state camp, it could have been possible to talk about violation of the European Human Rights Convention, but because the camps are organized by the non-governmental organization, we cannot point out any such violations” (Sanduliak 2018). She then concludes that responsibility for the decision, as well as for fees, in this case rests with the parents. Although a couple of children interviewed in this brief report do not reflect the fuller spectrum of political subjecthood of Ukrainian children and youth, they do demonstrate how capable these young people are of assigning meaning to the event."

"This journalistic investigation reveals an evident disconnect between the political bodies of children actually affected by the war and those who participate in the military-patriotic camps, at least within the governmentcontrolled territories of Ukraine. Whilst the actually displaced children as well as those who continue living on the front line are still affected by an acute crisis of displacement and deficit of even basic survival means, such as water, food, and shelter, a different group of children, largely better socially equipped through access to families, educational institutions, and often enough financial stability to cover the cost of camps, become actual participants of the military-patriotic education. Although all young citizens are equally involved in the process of making and re-making the Ukrainian state, their contribution is contested by a kind of “moral militarism” (Lee-Koo 2011) where certain moral superiority is attributed to the children who actively participate in the state-mandated networks of military training."

"The design of the proposed network of the military-patriotic training, including the summer camps, although recent, resembles the system of a very similar kind, which used to be embedded in the educational curricula and which targeted primarily children and youth in the Soviet Union, of which some regions of Ukraine were a part for almost seventy years. Drawing on, among others, the work of Olga Kucherenko, Natalia Krestovska (2018) draws some similarities between the military-patriotic training for children that also exists in the self-proclaimed people’s republics of Luhansk and Donetsk and the Soviet tradition of education, which incorporated military training and obligatory instruction in “Civic Defense.” “Children’s participation in combat and guerrilla warfare…was included in Soviet propaganda, promoting a kind of cult around ‘pioneer heroes’,” recounts Krestovska (2018: 264). What Krestovska fails to observe is that the Ukrainian model of its military-patriotic education also contains a reference to the persistent legacy of the Soviet heritage in the Ukrainian government, its policy, and worldview. Upon a close examination, the new Strategy and the Soviet “Labour and Defense Ready” doctrine have much in common. “Labour and Defense Ready” (GTO) was initially a sporting movement, founded in 1930, but soon became increasingly more militaristic despite its declared intent to “overcome the empire-totalitarian rudiments in collective consciousness” (Prezydent Ukrainy: Chap. 2). As Kucherenko (2011: 88) notes in her book Little Soldiers, in the official Soviet discourse, athletes constituted the reserve of the army. Kucherenko further historicized the movement by tracing its implementation in educational curriculum."

[...]

Put in the context of the armed conflict and humanitarian and economic crises, Ukraine’s military-patriotic education of children and youth generates a spectrum of responses. Some of them, including the state’s position, are encouraging of such education and its growing value, whereas others call for the re-examination of Ukraine’s understanding of children’s rights. What is evident is that promotion of military training and encouragement of children and youth to take on an active role in defense of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial unity is actively and routinely extended to children in all of Ukraine and is implemented through a network of state and non-government educational institutions and governed by social and educational policy, such as the Strategy of National-Patriotic Education in both its 2015 and 2019 renditions. Despite some positive achievements, such as promotion of cultural literacy, support for national media production, as well as the need for systemic infrastructural support for existent and emerging youth organizations of various kinds, many aspects of the most recent edition of the Strategy remain concerning. It is concerning not only because it extends the obligation of territorial defense of the state to its youngest citizens, and mandates it as a requirement of citizenship, but also because it promotes no diversity in the expression of patriotism and civic identity. Furthermore, the version of patriotism the Strategy promotes is not new, but instead is full of remnants of the Soviet patriotism doctrine with its hegemonic masculinity, selective historical memory, and promotion of territorial unity above the value of human life.9 Disconcertingly, and unlike the earlier 2015 version of the Strategy, the most recent version of no longer mentions respect for human rights, superiority of law, tolerance toward others, and equality of all before the law as desirable features of the “new Ukrainian” (Prezydent Ukrainy 2019: preamble). What is new, however, is the state’s attempt to re-inscribe children as defenders in the political order of the country by appealing to what Agamben calls the state of exception, an opportunity of re-fashioning the state’s policy towards maximization of the value of militarism. By targeting young people, the Strategy, and ultimately, the government, appeals to the potential of a growing population—a classic developmentalist trope—to be redeemed in service to the country. By passing this legislation whilst the country is at war, and as it has yet to deal with polarization of its society, the government also puts children from the non-government-controlled territories in a condition of an unfair competition, where now and in the future, the value of their Ukrainian citizenship and validation of their experience and expressions of patriotism will have to be contested.

Although the real perceived threat to Ukraine’s territorial unity evidently complicates the context of the Strategy, the experience of some global multicultural states, preoccupied with issues of patriotism and nation building for centuries, demonstrates that the values and opinions of citizens are fluid and cannot be frozen by the state. Instead, they need to be continuously negotiated through public dialogue and openness to self-criticism (Robbins 2008; Mirel 2010; Soutphommasane 2012). As of now, it appears that formation of a unified Ukrainian national-patriotic identity receives more consideration, whilst achievement of patriotic pluralism, which arises from the value and ultimate equality of all citizens before the law, remains a challenge.

"the mass mobilization of selforganized militias—including children—from across the country" --> WHAT?

[...]

"Evidently, the Ukrainian children’s rights framework is incomplete, and its violations are not limited to the military conflict at its eastern front alone, but have a long history within the state-regulated network of educational and correctional institutions."

[...]

"Despite the name change, the Strategy is to be implemented in the setting of public educational institutions and, thus, is primarily directed at school-going children, youth, and young adults (Prezydent Ukrainy 2015). The same decree defines the national-patriotic education as the main priority of public education and calls for the 2020–2025 Strategy implementation plan (Prezydent Ukrainy 2019).5 The new edition of the Strategy takes into consideration the “irreversibility of the European and Euro-Atlantic direction of Ukraine,” which is also reflected in several amendments to the Constitution of Ukraine. State-sanctioned patriotic education has been part of the program, “Youth of Ukraine,” since approximately early 2000."

[...]

"The Strategy targets the country’s young citizens as those who are “in the process of identification of their life perspectives and are in need of a worldview basis.” Such a patronizing conception of youngsters is a problematic articulation of the developmentalist view on children and youth that stems from imagining them as blank slates, “incomplete individuals waiting to become adults,” conceptualized in terms of adult expectations to be redeemed in the process of development (Yakovlyeva 2020: 1540). Young citizens are framed as empty vessels to be ‘filled’ with values as defined and redefined by each subsequent administration, and which are currently oriented towards a vague conception of moral values of a “European” kind that are not elaborated or themselves defined, creating a situation ripe for exploitation. The document of 2015 was largely based on pre-existing policy from 2009, from which it differed in several important ways. "

"The 2015 Strategy evidenced a major reduction in content from the earlier policy, eliminating some aspects of the earlier Conception for the National-Patriotic Education of Children and Youth, including references to the intellectual, ecological, and legal aspects of citizenship, human rights, and humanistic perspectives. Whereas the 2009 version of the Strategy targeted “youth” or citizens age 14–35, its later versions included no age specification. However, the Provision on the Pan-Ukrainian Military-Patriotic Game “Sokil” (“Falcon”) for Children and Youth of 2018, which is part of the program, do characterize the actors of the game as those age 7–18. Noticeably, the 2015 Strategy hardened its emphasis on the military-patriotic duty of citizens. The mechanism of the Strategy’s implementation consisted of developing a collaborative network involving the state administration, local municipalities, and newly established regional councils of national-patriotic upbringing, none of which included any representation of actual children and youth, but which are supposed to serve as advisory boards to local administrations. At the level of regional councils, the appointed committees consist largely of educators, social workers, public administrators, and even military personnel. At the state level, the responsibility of the Strategy’s implementation was delegated to several ministries, such as the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Youth and Sport, the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Social Policy, the Government’s Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, the Ministry of Defense, and even the State Border Security Service. Noticeably, the structure established by the Strategy presents not a model of collegial governance but one of subordination. It invites children and youth to participate exclusively as “receivers,” whose political bodies are to internalize the predetermined meaning of the national-patriotic education. This approach to young people as “becomings” rather than “beings” has been extensively critiqued and problematized over the past four decades by the scholars of contemporary Childhood Studies and other disciplines (James and James 2004; James and Prout 1997; James et al. 1998; Jenks 1982, 1996; Uprichard 2008; Qvortrup 2005)."

--> OUN/UPA are heroicized in national military-national education! "Examples of that struggle are carefully chosen and go back to the time of the princedom of Kyivan Rus, and include Ukrainian Cossacks, Ukrainian Sich Riflemen, armies of the Ukrainian National Republic and Western Ukrainian National Republic, participants in the anti-Bolshevik peasant uprisings, troops of the Carpathian Sich, Ukrainian Insurgent Army, Ukrainian rebels in Stalinist camps, and participants in the dissident movement.6 The list is complemented by the more recent examples of “bravery and heroism” demonstrated by the participants in the anti-terrorist operation in the occupied territories of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions and the republic of Crimea. Although omitted from the earlier conception of the Strategy, Ukrainians who fought against the fascist state on the Soviet side in the Second World War also appear here as an example of heroic struggle."

Children and Childhood on the Borderland of Desired Peace and Undesired War: A Case of Ukraine, 2021 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74788-6_10

"Armed conflicts and wars are waged in all parts of the world. We hear and read about those notorious and bloody ones (Machul-Telus et al. 2011) on a daily basis, while those marginalized conflicts, arousing only momentary compassion, break the news less frequently. The majority of official discourses about war and conflict concern people who fight, escape, live in fear and a sense of helplessness, seeking meaning in the brutal reality surrounding them. These discourses are frequently incomplete: showing the part of reality ‘as it is’ and rejecting realities constructed ‘here and now’ through human choices. In many discourses connected with childhood in fragile contexts, the so-called ‘lesser evil’ (adolescent marriages, child labour) is analysed as either ‘black or white,’ failing to consider all the shades of grey. In others, such practices may be cast as problematic, judged but not explained. Prophylactic measures are proposed that, at times, instead of ameliorating the problem, do greater harm and are inadequate to the context in which the drama is unfolding. We wish to look at discourses constructed about childhood—specifically, about the situation of children affected by war—on the borderland of desired peace and undesired war. For the most part, these discourses are focused on the deficit and tragic aspects of the situation of the youngest (passive and active) participants of armed conflict. They overlook or take only vague notice of children’s voices, their own perceptions, and perspectives on their experiences in times of war. Additionally, a large part of research in this area has been grounded in a Western understanding of childhood, while constituting a fundamental Western concept for developing support programs for children in crisis situations (Zarif 2020).

This chapter is an outcome of reflection aiming to understand how childhood is perceived—the costs of an adult-centric standpoint (Brocklehurst 2009, 2015)—and presented as well as how militarized discourses about children affected by armed conflict are constructed in the context of the conflict in the eastern territory of Ukraine: a conflict that is barely covered in the Western media."

[...]

"In all parts of the world, war and armed conflict do not fit into the ideal of childhood (Boyden and Hart 2007: 246) understood as a stage of safety and development and a period free from the burden of responsibility. The experiences of children living in the Donbas region are a literal antithesis to these assumptions. This is particularly true about the eastern territories of Ukraine—the region affected by the military operation, where, since 2014, numerous instances of human rights violations against adults and children (including sexual abuse, torture, and cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment) have been reported by various international organizations (Tzivaras 2018)."

[...]

"According to UNICEF (2018), military confrontations between Ukrainian forces and militant groups have left over 700 schools in Ukraine damaged or destroyed. The destruction of the school infrastructure, the military use of schools, or their proximity to military sites has made them unprotective environments."

[...]

"What is more, media representations of a particular child or group of children with weapons in their hands, or against the background of ruins, that fail to consider social, economic, and political factors contributing to the narration about war in a particular place, particular space or time, will be taken out of context. Every child is a victim of adults’ ideological, media, and military wars, which is evident in the past and currently waged armed conflicts, wars, and the brutalization of media discourse. This is coupled with increasing radicalization on the institutional level in many nationstates and indoctrination encompassing early processes of upbringing and education (Markowska-Manista 2018a). Thus, to understand the militarization of childhood, we need to examine how national states use patriotic education and social practices for indoctrination in national discourse in times of war and armed conflict or in times of anticipated war. Of equal importance is time (period of time) in which, due to ongoing armed conflict or anticipated armed intervention, educational, cultural, and social institutions and agendas become spaces and places of socializing young people to the culture of militarism."

--> DEFINITION OF MILITARIZATION AND MAJOR RATIONALES:

"Militarization is a multifaceted process through which militarism—i.e., the reproduction of war or readiness to fight and protect one’s homeland— through nurture, education, and media discourse becomes grounded in the deepest social layers (McSorley 2013: 234). States have always relied on the militarization of public life, including the sphere of education and nurture, to indoctrinate local populations. One of the key strategies adopted by countries engaged in armed conflict is the glorification of war and the patriotic education of children. This education envisages not only verbal indoctrination but also practical preparation to protect oneself and one’s homeland and to kill the enemy. The militarization of childhood in Eastern Europe, which our chapter addresses, results from the militarization of adults who then transfer it to children, as in many cases their emotional focus on the past1 (revolutions, uprisings, wars, cleansings, displacement, repression, starvation, communism—still alive in familial memory as well as in historical-patriotic memory) is more important to them than the future of their children."

[...]

"On the other hand, under the influence of adults, children become more vulnerable to aggressive ideologies and undertake radical action going beyond accepted frames, norms, and legal provisions. The fundaments for this type of behaviour are rooted in children’s communities and countries of origin and result from the process of constructing young people as useful to adults ‘here and now,’ particularly in the situation of war."

"In this light, we turn to reflect on instances of militarization of childhood in the Crimea and the territory of Ukraine affected by armed conflict. We cannot overlook the contexts of both states party to the conflict (the Russian Federation and Ukraine) as these regional activities fit into national strategies of patriotic education directed at both child and adult citizens. Iryna Matviyishyn draws attention to the practice of “military-themed education” through which Russia reaches children in the occupied territories of the Donetsk People’s Republic, the Luhansk People’s Republic, and the Crimea. Matviyishyn (2019) notices, “Its core message references the ‘formation of moral, psychological, and physical readiness of youth to defend the Motherland, loyalty to the constitutional and military debt in peacetime and wartime’.” It must be stressed that programs of military-patriotic education primarily directed at adolescents, supported by war veterans—both volunteers and recruits—are not new in the Russian Federation (SiecaKozlowski 2010). However, they have to be interpreted through a broader perspective than a simplified mirror image of propaganda that forces children and adults to be patriots. There are new needs of the state, oriented towards encouraging children and adolescents to military service in the future in the spirit of constructing a new national history and a new nation."

[...]

--> YOUTH SUMMER CAMPS and military-patriotic education on both sides "This is how the gap between new patriotic programs and the idea of co-producing patriotic education is bridged—co-producing not with the hands of central authorities, but low-level executors (the representatives of local communities in cities, towns, and villages). This way, patriotic programs spread in the social tissue of the nation and reach the occupied territories. There, in conjunction with supporting practices—the introduction of new textbooks with new content, patriotic poems, and songs as well as parades and student assemblies—it is designed to ‘help’ children understand the citizen’s new role in society. The media and human rights activists report that thousands of children in Donbas and the Crimea have undergone military training or have been engaged in other initiatives connected with military activity and recruited in non-state armed formations. These practices are present on both sides of the conflict and are reported to have intensified. Despite being organized by both pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian groups, military camps on the territories of Donetsk and Luhansk regions (that have illegally proclaimed independence from Ukraine) are more common and established on the incentive of the local authorities. While the establishment of military camps for adolescents is not a breach of international law, the practices that raise particular concerns include training children in military strategies, camouflage, and handling explosive devices as is reported by some sources (Burov et al. 2016: 3)."

"Each armed conflict inhibits, prevents, and paralyzes upbringing, teaching, and learning. The fight between pro-Kremlin separatists and pro-Ukrainian state forces taking place since 2014 has exacerbated nationalist sentiments and brought chaos to the system of education, curricula, and among students. In the absence of peace and stability, when educational institutions are unable to fulfil their designated roles, curricula in war zones are become political tools. These practices in the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine were described and visually presented by the photographer Diego Ibarra Sánchez in 2018–2019. He documented, inter alia, patriotic youth organizations actively training children how to fight, survive the war, use weapons, ‘hate the other,’ and how to defend oneself and one’s country against the neighbour-aggressor. In his summer diary, he mentions that “hundreds of children play war games while they are getting trained in military disciplines and firing tactics. … Time for playing with toys is gone. Childhood in Ukraine and Donetsk is being eroded by the conflict and it has turned in another way to spread propaganda” (Sánchez 2018)."

"The militarization of childhood on a territory appropriated by the enemy involves a number of mechanisms of propaganda, coercion, and exerting pressure on society, including parents, schools, and children, to adapt to the new conditions. Both in the dimension of upbringing and education, militarization entails the glorification of military service and war, popularization of military ideology, modification of accounts of history, and implementation of activities that reinforce the new narration among children and adolescents. These practices include changing the names of schools and education institutions, using new symbolic domains (erecting new monuments), introducing school uniforms with new insignia, organizing military sports and games at schools and among local communities (in which children are taught to shoot, assemble, disassemble, and load firearms such as Kalashnikov machine guns), and engaging patriotic groups in teaching children how to defend their country. For instance, the Eastern European Group of Human Rights reports that the administration of the temporarily occupied territory of the Donetsk region promotes a total militarization of children and adolescents (Burov et al. 2016)."

--> UKRAINE SUMMER YOUTH CAMPS

"Another element of militarization involves the preparation to react in the situation of armed mobilization implemented through militarypatriotic camps and recruitment to the so-called ‘Youth Army’ (Yunarmia). According to Halya Coynash (2019: 12), “Russia’s Defense Ministry is trying to get one million children and young people into this ‘army’ and it is likely that very many schools in occupied Crimea have their own units. In later October, it was reported that Russia had recruited 1500 children and young people from Sevastopol into Yunarmia.” Moreover, “This ‘youth army’ is the militaristic wing of the Russian Movement of School Students.” created by presidential decree in October 2015 and aimed at instilling “the system of values inherent to Russian society.”"

"The Youth Army is supposed to be “responsible for issues linked with the military-patriotic upbringing of young people” (Coynash 2019: 12). Shooting courses dubbed “Colorful childhood” for secondary school children serve as another illustration. The courses are organized by a paramilitary formation, “The Republic of Donetsk.” Among activities conducted with the students on military training ranges are shooting training using automatic weapons such as machine guns and building general firearms skills."

"The strategy of the national-patriotic education of children and youth has existed since Ukraine gained independence and has been updated the new generation of Ukrainian children. By decree of the President of Ukraine on “The Strategy of National Patriotic Education” (Prezydent Ukrainy 2019) as well as the letter of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine “On National Patriotic Education” (Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine 2019), recommend that schools and universities provide a more effective patriotic education for children and adolescents. This can be done, for example, through meetings with ex-political prisoners, including soldiers and sailors, and other veterans of the Russian-Ukrainian war. National-patriotic education for children and adolescents is defined as the “…formation of patriotism and love for the motherland, spirituality, morality, respect for the national Ukrainian heritage, imitating the best examples of courage and valor of fighters for the freedom and independence of Ukraine and the definition of effective mechanisms of systemic interaction of government and civil society institutes on issues of national and patriotic education” (Press Service of the President of Ukraine 2015). The aim of the implementation of national-patriotic education is “… to contribute to a major national revival and protection of democratic European vector of Ukraine” (Press Service of the President of Ukraine 2015). A meeting held in 2018 in Kyiv between a ‘Hero of Ukraine’ and university students serves as an example of such national-patriotic education for the young (Ministry of Information Policy of Ukraine 2018). This type of meeting is designed to instill in young people courage and heroism necessary for unconditional protection of their homeland. Under article 65 of the Constitution of Ukraine “Defence of the Motherland, of the independence and territorial indivisibility of Ukraine, and respect for its state symbols, are the duties of citizens of Ukraine. Citizens perform military service under the law” (Constitution of Ukraine 1996)."

"According to Ukrainian Law “On Military Duty and Military Service,” the minimum age for military service in the country is 18 (Law of Ukraine 1992). However, since 2014, some adolescents, feeling the need to defend their motherland from Russian aggression, have joined the armed forces of Ukraine as soldier volunteers (Shevchenko 2014; Krestovska 2018), signing a contract with the Ukrainian Army despite being underage. Some of these underage volunteers were killed during hostilities."

"As Giovanna Barberis points out, it is unacceptable for armed forces to use underage recruits in combat (Barberis in Shevchenko 2014). The number of minors recruited and trained to fight on both sides of the barricades is unknown. Those who have died are regarded as heroes for the nation they represented. The “Book of Memory of fallen for Ukraine” shows that 31 adolescents under the age of 19 were killed during the conflict in eastern Ukraine (Memory Book 2019). The youngest of them was 16 (Memory Book 2019). In some cases, their contribution to the struggle was recognized in the form of posthumous orders. The war in the occupied territories of Donbas and Crimea has thus contributed to the phenomenon of the militarization of childhood. According to the data of portal Vchasno, “children in the occupied territories are extensively taught to fight and kill” (Vchasno 2019). Children as young as nine are reported to have been active members of rebel militias, an illustration of which is a story of a 9-year-old girl who was awarded several medals by the rebels in recognition of her active role in their group (News of Donbas 2016). The militarization of childhood during the period of the war and occupation in Ukraine is a highly damaging process, radically changing the lives and destinies of children in the occupied territories of Donbas and Crimea."

[...]

Conclusion:

"On the one hand, they fit into a destructive process of educating the young in societies affected by armed conflict; on the other hand, they are an inherent element of a survival strategy of countries based on transgressing borders.2 It is important to bear in mind the multidimensionality of childhood and the danger of “one, incomplete” story of childhood and war."

---

Contexte pour les IAGs: Militarization of the Ukrainian society:

In late August 2018, the Ministry of Questions of the Temporary Occupied Territories released a report on the monitoring of public attitudes. The report documents a rapid increase in the number of acts of violence, vandalism, interethnic and interreligious provocations, unlawful use of weapons, as well as “manipulation of historical facts.” Simultaneously with the conditions of instability, the report documents increased frequency of “unlawful production and distribution of illegal weapons and explosives among civil population, as well as acts of violence employing these weapons” (Kabinet Ministriv Ukrainy 2018b). Examples of organized civil violence quoted in the report testify that the instances of violence are not limited to the zone of the military conflict, and “occur” in the majority of oblasts of Ukraine.8 The report documents the escalation of violence and radicalization of Ukrainian society that has spread to all of its borders, but does not further clarify the nature of the radicalized activities. One of the most publicly debated instances of violence was an attack on a Roma camp in the suburbs of Lviv in June of 2018, which resulted in loss of life, and which was conducted by perpetrators born between 2000 and 2002. In the press, this tragedy was reported as not an isolated incident, but one of many also occurring in other parts of Ukraine (Hromadsky Prostir 2018). According to a 2015 survey, youth is not an exemption when it comes to intolerance: “54 per cent of Ukrainian youth are intolerant of the Roma community, whilst 45 and 33 percent respectively would not like to live in the same district as homosexual or people with HIVAIDS (the country has one of the highest incidences of HIV in Europe)” (Mangas 2016). Recent radicalization within the Ukrainian society specifically in regards to ethnic and other visible minorities has been noticed on both left and right of the political spectrum, and connected to a lack of means for self-fulfillment (Hromadsky Prostir 2018).

Militarization of Ukrainian society has been also discussed by historian Olesya Khromeychuk (2018). Relying on Enloe (2000), she unpacks the term “militarization of society” and explains how, under certain circumstances, which include an armed conflict, the mood of militarization in a given society starts to expand beyond the front lines, and populates other forms of social relations, such as policy, cultural norms, and their artistic expressions. Khromeychuk observes a perpetuating tendency within the contemporary Ukrainian society to derive the meaning and structure of its social relations from the military confrontation in both present and past. She observes prestige associated with heroic efforts in the fight for the Motherland that populates contemporary Ukrainian media, as well as pointing out the many inequalities that a militarized society produces, such as the discrepancies in gender roles prescribed by the war that defines manhood and soldiering as “the ultimate expression of masculinity” and other illusions embedded in a symbolic structure of a militarized society (Khromeychuk 2018). The Strategy is an example of such tendencies

Une autre analyse de la "militarization of childhood in Ukraine", dans le même monographe:

Markowska-Manista, U., Koshulko, O. (2021). Children and Childhood on the Borderland of Desired Peace and Undesired War: A Case of Ukraine. In: Beier, J.M., Tabak, J. (eds) Childhoods in Peace and Conflict. Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74788-6_10

À creuser bien davantage sur le mouvement Azov mais quelques extraits pertinents: From the Fires of War: Ukraine’s Azov Movement and the Global Far Right https://books.google.be/books?id=kiBZEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA69&lpg=PA69&dq=azov+children+training+camp&ots=MhNYe_GTsF&sig=ACfU3U2xta4bP8M1rVfNwuSJtT_86H5kAQ&hl=fr#v=onepage&q=azov%20children%20training%20camp&f=false

--> Ils parlent des militaro-patriotic summer youth camps aussi:

"Delineating between 'official' and 'unofficial' affiliates and subgroups of the Azov movement isn't a straightforward task. This is particularly the case because, as I show below, many 'official' initiatives themselves blur the lines by having clear relationships and links with 'unofficial' initiatives, and vice versa. Nonetheless, criteria that can be used to try and make this distinction should focus on whether the affiliate carries the branding of the Azov movement, particularly of the National Corps, or whether it is explicitly patronized and promoted by senior leaders of the movement.

One National Corps-branded affiliate is Youth Corps, a series of youth camps across Ukraine that have been held since 2015. Each 12-day camp session (Myachina, 2020) hosts approximately 90 children and youth, and involves many different activities that wouldn't be out of place at any other summer camp, like kayaking and obstacle courses. But Youth Corps camps also teach youth how to assemble and disassemble firearms; each day at the camp is begun with a group recitation of the Prayer of the Ukrainian Nationalist, an OUN-era paean to Ukraine with lines like "...let me find death in those deeds, a sweet death in agony for you." Youth Corps has received Ukrainian state funding for "National-patriotic education" to host some of these camps (Kuzmenko and Colborne, 2019)."

Also tried to do a COVID-19 help group but lasted only a few months.

--> Paneuropean "Troisième Voie" ideal:

"In her capacity as head of the initiative at the National Corps central headquarters in Kyiv, Olena Semenyaka heads the Intermarium project. An early 20th century idea resurrected by the far right of an eastern European confederation of countries to counter both Russian influence and western influence, the project sees countries spanning from the Baltic to the Black Sea and the Adriatic as a bloc of nations that, as Semenyaka has described, can act like a springboard for the revival of Europe; as per a slogan used at its international conferences since 2016, "the heart of Europe beats in the East." Under Semenyaka's direction, the project has hosted a number of international conferences with representatives of far-right movements, along with more mainstream right-wing figures in its most recent iteration in December 2020. I discuss the triumphs and troubles of the Intermarium initiative in more detail in Chapter 6."

"Azov Regiment veteran and March of Defenders chief organizer Dmytro Shatrovskyi heads arguably one of the most important Azov affiliates: the Veterans Brotherhood. There are several hundred thousand veterans of the war across Ukraine, of whom only a small minority hold far-right views, have any connection to the far right or are willing to join a far-right movement. In spite of this, groups like Veterans Brotherhood have become "the most influential political actors in veteran organizing" (Friedrich and Lütkefend, 2021). Veterans Brotherhood has played a central role in the launch of Ukraine's veterans' ministry, building relationships with key government officials and positioning themselves as the main defenders of veterans' interests (Bellingcat Anti-Equality Monitoring, 2019). Veterans are, understandably, held in high regard in Ukraine; surveys over several years have suggested those who have fought in the still-hot war are among the most trusted people in Ukrainian society. Veterans Brotherhood and the broader umbrella movement it dominates, the Veterans Movement of Ukraine, takes full advantage of this. These efforts are a means for the far right to insulate their activities from criticism, working alongside non-far-right actors to slowly push itself more into mainstream of Ukrainian politics and society (Bellingcat Anti-Equality Monitoring, 2019)."

"Publishing houses also form part of the list of Azov affiliates" comme Plomin, "both a book club and publishing house", qui publie de nombreux ouvrages extrêmistes "less subtle and much more openly extreme", comme des ouvrages fascistes ("Corneliu Codreanu and his Iron Guard"), antisémites, et de terroristes (traduction d'unabomber manifesto avec des notes positives du traducteur, terroristes d'extrême droite italien Franco Freda, etc).

Silver Roses, "only female-oriented group in the male-dominated Azov movement", "mouvement anti-féministe", éjecté en 2020 du mouvement Azov.

Le reste n'est pas accessible en ligne...

Mais il y a des interviews de l'auteur: https://violence-marker.org.ua/en/2021/12/29/azov-needs-a-war-an-interview-with-michael-colborne/ en 2021

"In 2016-2017, I covered the far-right activities in Bulgaria and Slovakia. And in late 2018 I came to Ukraine and decided that I wanted to write about the local far-right movement. So I started studying the topic, talking to people, particularly about Azov.

I was stunned. Especially by how little this topic was covered in the media. Between 2018 and 2019, I started regularly writing about the far-right in Ukraine, although by that time, to be honest, a lot had already been researched. Gradually I arrived at the idea of creating a book.

What exactly about this topic grabbed your attention?

In part it was due to the myths about the Ukrainian far-right, when people say that it’s “Kremlin propaganda,” or that “Ukraine is full of Nazis,” or other such nonsense which was broadcasted in 2014–2015. I wanted to figure out for myself what is fiction here and what is the truth. The more I dug into this topic, the more I realized that despite the similarities between the Ukrainian far-right and their comrades from other Eastern European countries, there was a significant difference between them which engaged me. The Ukrainian far-right acted openly, which, of course, is concerning and should be covered in the media."

--> DÉTOURNEMENT DE SOURCE encore, voici ce que dit Le Monde: "Pour Michael Colborne, chercheur et journaliste pour le site d’enquête Bellingcat et auteur d’un livre publié en 2022 (en anglais) sur « le mouvement Azov », seule une minorité des soldats du régiment sont aujourd’hui portés par des idées d’extrême droite ou néonazies." https://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2022/03/23/qui-sont-les-soldats-du-regiment-azov-accuses-d-etre-les-neonazis-de-l-armee-ukrainienne_6118771_4355770.html

"Could you say that the Nazis have a kind of dark charisma which provokes interest?

It’s not the case for me. I am not as much interested in the far-right themselves as in their groups and in the way misanthropic ideas manifest in society, the way people who promote them start being seen as a part of the mainstream—this is the subject of my research. I am much less interested in the great man theory than in the forces and circumstances which allowed these ideas to develop."

Background de Colborne (en 2021): "How long have you been working at Bellingcat?

For two and a half years. Before that, I was a freelancer and worked for openDemocracy, Foreign Policy, Balkan Insight and the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network."

Bellingcat pro-ukrainien? "Most of your articles have been published on the Bellingcat website which has taken a clear pro-Ukrainian stance. However, it is sometimes assumed that the topic of the radical right in Ukraine is promoted by Russian propaganda. Is there a conflict here? How were your investigations received in Ukraine?

Bellingcat writes about what needs to be covered for the public. We investigated the crash of Flight МН17 in the sky above Donbas, the Skripal poisoning and other things which pointed at the involvement of the Russian FSB. But when we write about the Ukrainian radical right, I think it is seen as criticism of Ukraine. I am personally interested in holding people on both sides accountable. Should we keep silent about regrettable circumstances “on our side” because it supposedly can play into the enemy’s hand? “Don’t talk about the Nazis, you are feeding Kremlin propaganda!” This mindset, unfortunately, exists in the heads of Ukrainians. But I did not sign up for this. The best you can do in this situation is study the problem and talk about it openly, not sweep it under the rug. This approach will never help Ukraine."

"What are the difficulties you faced while preparing the book? The last time we talked, you mentioned that it was impossible to talk to Nazis because they always lie.

This applies to all radical right in any country. I found that there’s no point in interviewing them, because they tell lies to your face in order to present their movement or idea in a good light. Of course, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t talk to them at all. When I write about someone in particular, I must ask for a comment. In this case, talking to them can be useful, they can deny or confirm a certain fact, but you will not get serious insights from them. Although when I went to the National Corps with questions about Andriy Biletsky for my book, they never answered me. If the far-right want to be judged fairly, they should not ignore journalist requests.

I think that in the case of the far-right we first need to explore all the open sources, analyze the propaganda and communication channels, talk to other experts, and only then, at the very end, talk to them directly."

"A few months ago in Kyiv, journalists covering the radical right were attacked by dumb youngsters who confused reporters with antifascists (referring to the attack on the Bukvy correspondent Oleksandr Kuzhelny. Ed.)."

"Why did you decide to dedicate the book to Azov specifically, even though there are many other neo-Nazi organizations in the country?

Back in 2018, it became clear that this is the biggest and most powerful far-right movement which makes all the others look insignificant. I was stunned by the scale of Azov, which managed to build an entire infrastructure that includes the National Corps political party, the National Militia, and many other smaller organizations. I find it equally fascinating and concerning.

After the 2019 election, it became clear to me that Azov had taken the dominant position in the far-right movement. Ukraine has very few groups which try to go their own way, but even they need to coordinate their actions with Azov. Even fewer of them are in conflict with Azov. I would say that Azov has almost completely taken over the far right in Ukraine and established a monopoly."

[...]

"However, in the worst-case scenario Azov will get even more opportunities to present themselves as the “true defenders of the homeland and the avant-garde of the revolution.” If it comes to capturing Ukrainian cities, I’m afraid we will see far-right guerilla fighters in the streets."

"So is Azov the one group in Ukraine which is the most interested in another war?

Yes, I talk about this in my book. Azov was founded on war, so it needs a war, whether a real or a metaphorical one. As I say in my book, war gives the far-right a raison d’etre and a goal. If they get another war in 2022, whatever they say, they will be happy about it."

[...]

"The Ukrainian radical right use Telegram for everything, from the National Corps’ official channel and the channel of its leader Andriy Biletsky, an enormous number of minor channels for various subgroups associated with Azov, and to the semi-secret chat rooms. All of this together is a huge array of data. I got literally obsessed with the far-right Telegram, but at least I had a chance to figure out how the whole communication works. The information published on the official channels of the National Corps, Biletsky or Maxim Zhorin, the head of the party’s headquarters, is a polished message for the outside world. But on the small channels and in the chat rooms, the radical right talk frankly and do not try to hide anything behind eloquent wording because they think that nobody is watching. A huge chunk of information for the book was taken from conversations between Azov members on Telegram."

"If you needed to briefly explain Azov to someone who doesn’t know the situation in Ukraine, how would you describe it and what historical comparisons would you draw on?

Fortunately, comparisons with the far-right movements of the 1930s and 40s are not really appropriate because Azov is not as powerful or numerous as Hitler’s Stormers or Mussolini’s Blackshirts. I’d resort to a comparison which the far-right use themselves: the German Freikorps in the interwar period. One far-right organization chose this name on purpose in Ukraine today. The historical similarities are not entirely accurate, so I would mention contemporary Italian fascists from CasaPound, especially given that the Ukrainian far right have been in contact with them and Azov was partially modeled after the Italian example.

A much better comparison is the far-right movements in Croatia and Serbia. In Croatia, the far right were a part of the effort to defend the country against a more aggressive dominant force. If we look at Croatia, we will find that the veterans of the War of Independence still constitute a force 30 years later. This is a great example of how war and far-right nationalism turn into an ugly cocktail which self-reproduces decades after the war. There was never any war action in the Serbian lands, but the far-right nationalism in Serbia became mainstream after the war in Bosnia in 1995 and Kosovo in 1999. This is what concerns me the most in the Ukrainian context: the war will end, but the effects of the far right becoming a part of the mainstream will last for decades."

"You have observed Azov for several years. How has the movement been developing and what state is it in today?

I discuss this in the last part of my book. I think that Azov is constantly changing: Azov members themselves don’t have a clear idea which direction they should move in. There is a conflict between the leaders, Biletsky and the veterans of the far-right scene on the one hand and young activists on the other. Biletsky and the old guard try to present Azov on TV as a non-threatening mainstream force. But the younger activists don’t want to be moderate. This was the line along which the OUN split in 1940: the older, more conservative members supported Andriy Melnyk, while the younger and more radical ones supported Stepan Bandera. I don’t think there will be a schism in Azov, but these contradictions will only intensify over time.

In addition, within Azov, there is a power struggle between Botsman and Biletsky. Botsman is clearly trying to build his own far-right base within Azov from people who are loyal to him personally. Well, they are the radical right, there will always be rivalry for power among them.

Another problem is Azov’s source of funding. There is information that Azov members are involved in crime and take money from Ukrainian oligarchs. Although I give a caveat in the book that these claims are impossible to verify. Some of the far-right might consider such sources of funding to be ideologically wrong.

So, in a sense, you could say that Azov is not as strong in 2021 as a year or two ago."

--> IAGs RUSSIA UKRAINE LINKS

"One of the most odious members of the National Corps is the Russian Nazi Sergey “Botsman” Korotkikh. In Ukraine, he is often seen as an FSB agent. He is even included in the database of the Myrotvorets website. From your perspective, can Azov leadership be linked to the Russian secret service?

There is a chance that they have been connected, in the past or at present. It is impossible to know for sure. I would not be surprised if it turned out that Russian money reach the Ukrainian far right in one way or another to make them organize some kind of protest. Then the question is if the far right themselves are aware of this. I would not be surprised to find out that the far right in Ukraine consciously took money, even if it was not big money, from “sources close to the Kremlin,” but they did not do anything.

Either way, when it comes to the “Kremlin money,” this does not negate the far-right problem in Ukraine. Even if tomorrow we get irrefutable proof that Korotkikh is an active Russian secret service operative, it will not change the fact that everything that’s happening in Ukraine is locally made. Even if there is the “hand of Kremlin” in Ukraine, it is a reason to look closer and not to turn a blind eye.

This rule works for any topic where the “hand of Kremlin” shows up in general. Whenever there is a possibility of “Russian influence,” they say that the person who received the money was acting as “a puppet or an agent” and “following orders.” I think that the reality is much more complex."

--> AZOV MOVEMENT VS AZOV REGIMENT

"What is the relationship between the Azov regiment in the National Guard and the National Corps party? Some researchers claim that the Azov regiment is independent from the movement and the party, and that it is not far-right.

This is about a formal distinction between the Azov regiment and the Azov movement. I disagree with this claim. Yes, the Azov regiment is subordinate to different government bodies, namely to the National Guard. But saying that there is no relation between the regiment and the movement is ridiculous. If we look at the memorial ceremony for their comrades on the Day of the Dead which Azov holds every September, it is suspiciously reminiscent of the Nazi Cathedral of Light by Albert Speer. An eerie ritual with torches. But if we look closer, we’ll see that Azov members are holding shields with the callsigns of their fellow soldiers who died in 2014. The shields feature the Azov logo—they’re still claiming that it’s not a “Wolfsangel.” There’s also a “black sun” on the shields.

I look at this and think, “Do you really want to convince people that the regiment under the same name, which uses far-right symbols and still invites Andriy Biletsky to give solemn speeches, and the movement are independent phenomena? Then why, when anti-fascists hold banners demanding to disband the Azov regiment, the radical right lose their minds in anger?”

I think that the myth that there is no connection between the Azov regiment and the Azov movement has been promoted since 2019 by the regiment’s supporters who want to defend it from attacks by promoting this myth."

--> AZOV INFLUENCE ON UKRAINE POLITICS (perspective from vote results) and YOUTH SUMMER CAMPS

In the latest parliamentary election, the united nationalist bloc, which included the Freedom Party and the National Corps, got 2.15%. How do you explain the electoral weakness of right-wing forces in Ukraine? Does this result mean that they have no impact on the country’s politics?

They have an impact on politics in Ukraine even though they achieved nothing in the election. Azov and the far right change the discourse in the country using non-parliamentary methods, for instance, by controlling the Veteran Ministry, the municipal guard via C14, or through national-patriotic education. I think that these two percent in the election don’t mean anything, I generally don’t believe that radical nationalists will ever win more votes in Ukrainian elections. The only way for the radical right to gain more votes in elections is to become more moderate. The National Corps is doing it right now, while remaining a far-right party at its core. I don’t think Ukrainians will buy it. In addition, many parties have employed nationalist rhetoric since 2014. The best example is Poroshenko’s 2019 campaign.

There are a lot of young people at National Corps demonstrations. Sometimes they are just children. How do they manage to involve them in the organization?

Azov leaders are very smart and resourceful. They try to present Azov as something masculine and very cool. As a place where you can train and become a stereotypical cool guy: muscles, tattoos, guns. I think that young Ukrainians, especially from small towns, are attracted by this.

--> INTERNATIONAL AGENDA, made more difficult since 2019

Your book is titled From the Fires of War: Ukraine’s Azov Movement and the Global Far Right. The first part of the title is clear, it refers to the war of 2014, but please explain the second part for our readers. How does Azov relate to the global far-right movement?

Azov’s relationship with the global far-right movement has undoubtedly changed, and I’ve dedicated an entire chapter to it. It is easy to trace by following the actions of Olena Semeniaka, the National Corps secretary for international affairs. In 2017–2018, she traveled all over Europe and talked to the far right in Germany, Croatia, Portugal, Italy and other countries.

Everything changed in 2019, first of all due to the critical media coverage of Azov’s activities, including my publications. This ended their aggressive international information and propaganda work. They could not stand up to the criticism and lost ground. Publications about the training base for the far right in Ukraine and comparisons between Azov and ISIS attracted so much attention that Azov had to suspend its international programs, at least in the public field. Secondly, the attack on mosques on 15 March 2019 in Christchurch made people pay close attention to far-right terrorism. I’m curious what Azov is going to do with its international program. I don’t think they will abandon it entirely, maybe they will carry it out in secret or more selectively.

At the same time, many of the foreign far right still see Azov as the ideal model of a far-right movement. This perception is partly based on myth and partly on real facts. Even now, the Western far right, particularly the French and the Germans, write about Ukraine as a place where you can simply come, get a gun and go to the front right away. But it hasn’t worked like that for a few years now!

What does the far right success in Ukraine mean? Is it a global right-wing revanche?

I think it is. We’re observing the revival of far-right forces everywhere, it’s just that there are factors in Ukraine which made the situation significantly worse. In other countries I visited the far right are much less numerous, but even they have started acting openly and confidently.

[...]

There are far right in every country. And they are feeling more confident. I think that the reason for this global right-wing turn is that influential politicians are leaning to the right and even use a soft version of the far-right rhetoric. This has paved the way for the real far right: when politicians repeat their ridiculous ideas, it gives the far right confidence. When I look at the current American political situation and compare it to what they had before Trump, I see that the far right are acting even more openly. In countries such as the US, Canada and the UK, they have infiltrated the media and complain about the “culture war,” the onslaught of liberalism, wokeism and other nonsense. This polarization of the debate gives room for maneuver to the far right, who start seeing themselves as the avant-garde of the fight against the LGBTIQ+ and gender theory.

What can we call this? The return of the far right?

I would call it a global far-right revival which we can observe around the world, not just in Ukraine. I mean primarily the majority of European and North American countries.

Interview de Michael Colborne du 22 février 2022: Silence won’t make the Ukrainian far right go away

Acting like any mention of the problem feeds Kremlin propaganda is only making it worse. https://www.newstatesman.com/international-content/2022/02/silence-wont-make-the-ukrainian-far-right-go-away

"The best known, though not best understood, name on Ukraine’s far right — the Azov movement, the subject of my latest book — is being more frequently dropped online by people who want to give Putin a free pass to do what he wants in Ukraine."

"The basics: Ukraine’s far right, particularly the Azov movement, has long been able to operate with a degree of impunity and openness that makes it the envy of its international peers. The movement grew out of the Azov Regiment (originally a Battalion), formed in the chaos of war in early 2014 by a ragtag group of far-right thugs, football hooligans and international hangers-on — including dozens of Russian citizens — becoming an official unit of Ukraine’s National Guard.

With estimates of membership as high as 10,000 members — thankfully nothing near the numbers of fascist parties of the 1930s, with whom it shares more ideological affinity than it will publicly admit — the Azov movement has been able to take advantage of a general “patriotic” turn in Ukrainian mainstream discourse since Russian aggression began in 2014. The movement’s leaders have been adept at playing up their own status as veterans, insulating themselves from criticism as mere “patriots” who voluntarily took up arms in the earliest days of the war when Ukraine’s military was a shambles. Still, they’re not invincible; Azov’s alleged longtime patron, the former interior minister Arsen Avakov, left office in July 2021. Since then at least some of the impunity the movement had enjoyed has appeared to fall by the wayside."

"What even makes up the Azov movement can depend on who you ask. In 2019 the movement’s former international spokesperson publicly described the Azov Regiment as the “military wing” of the Azov movement. These days the regiment and its defenders act like it’s a totally unrelated entity, but one that still openly recruits at movement events; witness the Azov movement leader Andriy Biletsky, the regiment’s first commander, at its cultlike yearly honouring of its fallen."

"The movement’s most public face is the National Corps political party, which won barely 2 per cent of the vote in a coalition with other far-right parties in parliamentary elections in 2019. It’s more a brand than a party, a polished PR-focused outfit that isn’t above coyly referencing the so-called “14 words”, a white supremacist slogan. From Centuria, the black-clad paramilitary that’s been part of the movement’s civil defence training sessions, to youth camps, book clubs and sports classes, the Azov movement tries to be a one-stop shop for all things far right. There’s also a bevy of loosely affiliated but more extreme subgroups under its umbrella as well, including open neo-Nazis who praise and promote violence."

--> SUMMARY OF AZOV MOVEMENT: "From Centuria, the black-clad paramilitary that’s been part of the movement’s civil defence training sessions, to youth camps, book clubs and sports classes, the Azov movement tries to be a one-stop shop for all things far right."

"The Azov movement has used the current crisis to try and make itself appear more mainstream, hosting public civil defence training sessions and positioning itself as the force that can best protect Ukraine from its enemies, particularly in the case of a full-scale invasion.

There’s long been a real fear in Ukraine of feeding into Kremlin propaganda by talking about the far right; I expect to get heat online for this article, not because of what I’ve said here, but because I’ve said anything about the far right at all. It’s a fear that, understandably, isn’t helped by Putin and company’s nonsensical claims about “genocide” in Donbas and its obvious willingness now more than ever to fabricate pretexts for further intervention in Ukraine.

But pretending the far right isn’t an issue won’t make it go away, and it won’t stop people outside Ukraine from talking about it. I know that policymakers in Washington, DC, Berlin, London and Brussels, to name a few capitals, are more concerned about the issue of the far right in Ukraine than a lot of people might realise, even if these concerns don’t always percolate out into public. The existence of a well armed, well trained, committed group of far-right extremists and friends is a factor in Ukraine’s future, no matter what Putin decides to do in the next few weeks. When the most extreme fringes, for example, muse openly about making lists of “internal enemies” to be killed during the chaos of the first days of a full Russian invasion, refusing to pay attention shouldn’t be an option."

"As we creep close to the bloodiest of outcomes thanks to Vladimir Putin — the ultimate causa prima of the current situation — there’s a question I’d pose to Ukrainians and their international defenders. Are these guys from the far right really on your side? After all, these guys don’t like the European Union or Nato; many see the West as just as big an enemy as the Kremlin.

There are also, ironically enough, a few curious, if unproven, Russia connections. Some in the Azov movement, such as Sergei Korotkikh, have been publicly accused of being agents of Russian security services in one form or another. They’ve appeared to be OK working with Vladimir Putin’s friends when it suits them. From Biletsky on down, in 2019 and 2020 senior Azov movement figures flocked en masse to appear on television channels associated with the pro-Kremlin politician Viktor Medvedchuk (Putin is godfather to his daughter). They happily made appearances on channels whose closure by President Volodymyr Zelensky they’d later cheer.

Still, it has to be stressed — and it’s sad that it has to be — none of this justifies or merits Russian intervention in Ukraine. As the scenarios that I considered impossible weeks ago become reality, I’m struck by the dismissiveness from some elements of the compulsively online left about the current situation, as if somehow Ukraine deserves to be invaded, occupied and sectioned up because of the existence of the far right.

I’ll ask this, then: is your attitude to Ukraine’s current situation, and to Ukrainians as a whole, to abandon them to the whims of a former imperial power simply because there’s a far-right problem in the country? It’s really not that hard to be critical of the issue of the far-right in Ukraine, and recognise it as a real issue, without justifying a paranoid authoritarian’s grasps at the last remnants of a dying empire."

Colborne à nouveau, déjà dans l'article WP FR: https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/01/congress-max-rose-ukraine-azov-terrorism/

qualifie le régiment de « dangereux mouvement extrémiste néonazi-friendly » avec « des ambitions mondiales »

Opinion piece, but sources good: 27 March 2022 https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/how-russia-spurred-ukraine-s-global-neo-nazi-recruitment-n1293177

"Once it became an official part of the state, the Azov Battalion distanced itself from neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideology, and its far-right leadership left the regiment. But interviews with individual members, its use of insignia that was also used as a Nazi symbol, assessments from experts and recent social media video posts from the group clearly show continued anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, antisemitic and white supremacist views among its fighters."

--> Youth camps again "The Azov Battalion developed extensive recruiting tactics within Ukraine, including for youth, establishing a fight club in Kiev as well as “youth camps, recreation centers, lecture halls and indoctrination programs” that teach children as young as 9 years old “military tactics and white supremacist ideology.”" Source: https://thesoufancenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Report-by-The-Soufan-Center-White-Supremacy-Extremism-The-Transnational-Rise-of-The-Violent-White-Supremacist-Movement.pdf

"In Ukraine, the Azov Battalion has recruited foreign fighters motivated by white supremacy and neo-Nazi beliefs, including many from the West, to join its ranks and receive training, indoctrination, and instruction in irregular warfare.140" Ref 140: https://thesoufancenter.org/intelbrief-the-transnational-network-that-nobody-is-talking-about/

"* The Azov Battalion is emerging as a critical node in the transnational right-wing violent extremist (RWE) movement.

Recruits from the U.S., Norway, Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Sweden, and Australia, among others, have reportedly traveled to train with the Azov Battalion.
The global nature of these groups is just one of several similarities between RWEs and Salafi-jihadists."

--> Confirmation que c'est un hub de l'extrêmisme...

"In the wake of the New Zealand mosque attacks, links have emerged between the shooter, Brenton Tarrant, and a Ukrainian ultra-nationalist, white supremacist paramilitary organization called the Azov Battalion. Tarrant’s manifesto alleges that he visited the country during his many travels abroad, and the flak jacket that Tarrant wore during the assault featured a symbol commonly used by the Azov Battalion. Tarrant’s transnational ties go beyond Ukraine, however. Tarrant claimed that he was in touch with Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist, and he took trips throughout Europe, including the Balkans, visiting sites that symbolized historical battles between Christians and Muslims. During the video of his attack he could be heard listening to a song that glorified Bosnian-Serb war criminal Radovan Karadzic, and his gun featured racial messages and names of white supremacists from around the world.

The Azov Battalion is emerging as a critical node in the transnational right-wing violent extremist (RWE) network. This group maintains its own ‘Western Outreach Office' to help recruit and attract foreign fighters that travel to train and connect with people from like-minded violent organizations from across the globe. Operatives from the outreach office travel around Europe to promote the organization and proselytize its mission of white supremacy. In July 2018, German-language fliers were distributed among the visitors at a right-wing rock festival in Thuringia, inviting them to be part of the Azov battalion: ‘join the ranks of the best' to ‘save Europe from extinction.' It has also established youth camps, sporting recreation centers, lecture halls, and far-right education programs, including some that teach children as young as 9 years old military tactics and far-right ideology. This aggressive approach to networking serves one of the Azov Battalion’s overarching objectives to transform areas under its control in Ukraine into the primary hub for transnational white supremacy. "

"Too often, the focus on foreign fighters has been relegated to Sunni jihadists, but in a globalized world, the foreign fighter phenomenon has deep roots across ideologies, from foreign fighters assisting the Kurds in Iraq and Syria, to Shi'a militants traveling from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Lebanon to join with Iranian-backed foreign fighter networks operating in Syria. It is now evident that RWE networks are also highly active in recruiting fighters worldwide to its cause, with the Azov Battalion and other ultra-nationalist organizations playing a significant role in the globalization of RWE violence. Indeed, the Azov Battalion is forging links with RWE groups, hosting visits from ultra-nationalist organizations such as members of the Rise Above Movement (R.A.M.) from the U.S. and the British National Action from the U.K., among other white supremacists from around the world. In the United States, several R.A.M. members (all American citizens) who spent time in Ukraine training with the Azov Battalion were recently indicted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.) for their role in violently attacking counter-protestors during the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, VA in August 2017. "

"The Christchurch shooter was not simply a lone actor, but the product of a broader network of right-wing violent extremists. If the evidence ultimately proves that Tarrant went to Ukraine to train with like-minded individuals, then the attack in New Zealand was possibly the first example of an act of terrorism committed by a white supremacist foreign fighter. And unless the international community recognizes the danger posed by these transnational networks, the New Zealand attack is unlikely to be the last."

Background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Soufan

Back to source: https://thesoufancenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Report-by-The-Soufan-Center-White-Supremacy-Extremism-The-Transnational-Rise-of-The-Violent-White-Supremacist-Movement.pdf

"In late September, a U.S. Army soldier stationed at Fort Riley in Kansas was arrested after distributing information online about how to build a bomb and planning to travel to Ukraine to fight with the Azov Battalion. Members of the “western outreach office” travel around Europe to promote the organization and meet with like-minded individuals and groups. In addition, the group invited prominent white supremacy extremist ideologues to visit Ukraine.141 In October 2018 American Greg Johnson, a leading ideologist for the white nationalist movement, visited Ukraine and attended a series of events hosted by the National Corps In the summer of 2018, German-language flyers were distributed among audience members at a rock concert in Thuringia, inviting them to be part of the Azov Battalion: “join the ranks of the best” in order to “save Europe from extinction.”142 Similar efforts to infiltrate mainstream German society by softpedaling messages of racism and hatred are staged frequently"

"There are striking resemblances between the Azov Battalion’s Western Outreach Office and al-Qaeda’s Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK), which was responsible for promoting the cause and helping recruits reach the battlefield. Just as Afghanistan served as a sanctuary for jihadist organizations like Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group in the 1980s, so too are parts of Ukraine becoming a safe haven for an array of white supremacy extremist groups to congregate, train, and radicalize. And just like the path of jihadist groups, the goal of many of these members is to return to their countries of origin (or third-party countries) to wreak havoc and use acts of violence as a means of recruiting new members to their cause. Unlike jihadis who are attempting to strike Western targets, though, radicalized white supremacists have the added advantage of being able to blend in seamlessly in the West, just as Brenton Tarrant was able to do. For Russian neo-Nazis, the International Russian Conservative Forum serves as the rallying point for white supremacy extremists from all over the globe to congregate and network.144"

"Street-level white supremacy extremist groups have proliferated following the Euromaidan protests of 2014 and subsequent armed conflicts in Crimea and the Donbass, in eastern Ukraine. The most well-publicized of these groups are associated with the Azov Battalion. 145 While the international white supremacy extremism sympathies of the paramilitary arm have 146 been well documented, veterans of the movement have formed several more informal street organizations. (The paramilitary has now formally been incorporated into the Ukrainian 147 military, at least in theory.) These street-level organizations, such as the National Corps (or National Militia), have been implicated in brutal attacks on ethnic Roma encampments— pogroms justified by their ultranationalist, exclusionary rhetoric and stated goal of “cleaning the streets.”148 Other movements unaffiliated with Azov, such as the neo-Nazi group Combat 18, have received the official imprimatur of government officials for their “street patrols.” The 149 proliferation of paramilitary groups in Ukraine has likely been exacerbated by the ongoing conflict, which has both drawn foreign fighters and undergirded the rise of exclusionary ultranationalism.150"

"The Azov Battalion has cultivated a relationship with members of the Atomwaffen Division as 151 well as with U.S.-based militants from R.A.M., the Southern California–based organization that the FBI has labeled a “white supremacy extremist group.” The relationships between U.S.- 152 based WSEs and the Azov Battalion go beyond mere networking and include training and radicalization of American extremists.153 The Azov Battalion also maintains a political wing and has ties to a growing vigilante street movement that can be counted on for violence, intimidation, and coercion. So far, nationals from Germany, the UK, Brazil, Sweden, the United States, and 154 Australia have reportedly traveled to join the Azov Battalion in Ukraine. The group has also allegedly established youth camps, recreation centers, lecture halls, and indoctrination programs, including some that teach children as young as 9 years old military tactics and white supremacist ideology."

Back to source: https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/how-russia-spurred-ukraine-s-global-neo-nazi-recruitment-n1293177

"In early March, one of the world’s leading intelligence experts sounded the alarm about a Ukrainian militia’s public invitation to foreigners to join its ranks and fight against Russia. That call, from the Azov Battalion, triggered a surge of volunteers from across Europe and the U.S., including in neo-Nazi chat rooms and channels. Warning of the risks of extremist mobilization among foreign fighters, terrorism analyst and founder of Search International Terrorist Entities Intelligence Group Rita Katz warned that we haven’t seen “such a flurry of recruitment activity” since ISIS."

Another opinion piece, good summary: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/ukraine-has-nazi-problem-vladimir-putin-s-denazification-claim-war-ncna1290946

"Of the many distortions manufactured by Russian President Vladimir Putin to justify Russia’s assault on Ukraine, perhaps the most bizarre is his claim that the action was taken to “denazify” the country and its leadership. In making his case for entering his neighbor’s territory with armored tanks and fighter jets, Putin has stated that the move was undertaken “to protect people” who have been “subjected to bullying and genocide,” and that Russia “will strive for the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine.”

Putin’s destructive actions — among them the devastation of Jewish communities — make clear that he’s lying when he says his goal is to ensure anyone’s welfare.

On its face, Putin’s smear is absurd, not least because Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish and has said that members of his family were killed during World War II. There is also no evidence of recent mass killings or ethnic purges taking place in Ukraine. Moreover, labeling enemies Nazis is a common political ploy in Russia, especially from a leader who favors disinformation campaigns and wants to stir up feelings of national vengeance against a WWII foe to justify conquest.

But even though Putin is engaging in propaganda, it’s also true that Ukraine has a genuine Nazi problem — both past and present. Putin’s destructive actions — among them the devastation of Jewish communities — make clear that he’s lying when he says his goal is to ensure anyone’s welfare. But important as it is to defend the yellow-and-blue flag against the Kremlin’s brutal aggression, it would be a dangerous oversight to deny Ukraine’s antisemitic history and collaboration with Hitler’s Nazis, as well as the latter-day embrace of neo-Nazi factions in some quarters."

Back to source: https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/how-russia-spurred-ukraine-s-global-neo-nazi-recruitment-n1293177

"Warning of the risks of extremist mobilization among foreign fighters, terrorism analyst and founder of Search International Terrorist Entities Intelligence Group Rita Katz warned that we haven’t seen “such a flurry of recruitment activity” since ISIS."

Original source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/03/14/neo-nazi-ukraine-war/ (paywall, can't read, continuing on msnbc)

"Congress passed a resolution to block U.S. military funding for Ukraine from being used to support the Azov Battalion in 2015, although the ban was lifted in 2016. And in 2019, the U.S. tried but failed to have the Azov Battalion declared a “foreign terrorist organization.”" --> donc rferl a propagé une fake news, la loi n'est pas passée.

"Once it became an official part of the state, the Azov Battalion distanced itself from neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideology, and its far-right leadership left the regiment. But interviews with individual members, its use of insignia that was also used as a Nazi symbol, assessments from experts and recent social media video posts from the group clearly show continued anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, antisemitic and white supremacist views among its fighters."

"And although it is a relatively small battalion, estimated at only 900 volunteers, Azov’s reputation and global reach is far bigger. The group has recruited foreign fighters from at least half a dozen countries and has globally become “a larger-than-life brand among many extremists,” according to Katz. U.S.-based militants from the now-defunct Rise Above Movement, along with members of the terrorist group Atomwaffen Division, have been cultivated by Azov."

Original source for the "larger-than-life brand": again https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/03/14/neo-nazi-ukraine-war/ (paywall, can't read, continuing on msnbc)

"It's important to remember that white supremacist extremist groups and scenes in Ukraine are still a marginal and fringe part of the political spectrum. The presence of a small minority of extremists, including in the Azov Battalion, has been grossly exaggerated by Putin in claims that Ukraine needs to undergo “denazification.” But while Putin’s propaganda is patently false, the presence of ultranationalists among Ukrainian regiments remains a thorny issue that must be carefully monitored."

Original source: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2022/03/05/russia-invasion-ukraine-attention-extremist-regiment-nazi/9368016002/

“The Azov Regiment is definitely a nasty crew,” said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. “They’ve had a high neo-Nazi presence, there’s documented antisemitism.”

"But Beirich and other experts were quick to point out that Russia itself is home to paramilitary organizations founded on white supremacist and fascist ideals. Prominent modern American racists have been quick to praise Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, admiringly comparing Putin to Hitler and cheering on his “anti-woke” agenda. Russia’s white supremacist factions are at least as significant as that of Ukraine, several experts said. "

"And those experts said there are also signs the Azov regiment has shed some of its troubled past, moving away from at least overt support for the white supremacy its founders believed in. "

--> Pas overt mais covert!

On its face, the statement was baffling. Ukraine, a sovereign democratic nation led by a Jewish president whose family was almost wiped out in the Holocaust, is categorically not, as Putin would like people to believe, beholden to neo-Nazis, according to several experts and political scientists who spoke with USA TODAY.

The Azov Regiment is part of Ukraine's broader "Azov Movement," which has at its core white supremacist and antisemitic philosophy. But the extremist-right commands support from at best perhaps 2% of the Ukrainian electorate, according to one prominent political scientist.

Compared with other countries in Eastern and even Western Europe, Ukraine's neo-Nazi problem is a fringe issue, said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, CEO of Valens Global, an international strategy and security company.

Gartenstein-Ross said there’s a huge difference between a regiment with a checkered history playing a minor part on the battlefield and the notion that Ukraine is somehow overrun by neo-Nazis, as Putin has long pretended.

“The small, marginal presence of Azov does not justify a Russian invasion, on the pretense of de-Nazification,” Gartenstein-Ross said.

A regiment with its roots in hate, ultra-nationalism

Colborne describes the nascent battalion as “a significant number of individuals from Ukraine’s far-right football hooligan scene, estimated from 50 percent to 65 percent of Azov’s fighters at the time. Other fighters included open neo-Nazis from foreign countries, especially Russia.”

As the Azov Regiment assimilated into Ukraine’s National Guard, some of its most infamous leaders left to create the Azov Civil Corps, later the National Corps.Gartenstein-Ross said the regiment seems to have eschewed some of its most extremist elements in the intervening years. “I'm not saying that it's reformed, but it actually became part of the state military,” he said. “I put a question mark there, giving some possibility that the Azov regiment has changed in cognizable ways.”

--> Idem que Umland, c'est une supposition, pas de stats sûres. Et vu les liens qui ont par la suite été documentés avec les groupes néonazis à l'international...

Vyacheslav Likhachev, a member of the Expert Council of the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine, scoffed at the idea that the Azov regiment still has neo-Nazi leanings, calling it “stupid” and “outdated”.

--> Likhachev et Umland sont tous deux biaisés pro-ukraine évidemment...

"Asked about the numerous visits from European and U.S. white supremacists and neo-Nazis to the Azov Regiment, Likhachev acknowledged that, for a while, the regiment was considered “a free space paradise for neo-Nazis from all over the world,” but he said reports that those neo-Nazi war tourists were ever active in Azov were overblown.

“Those who came under the illusion that they will be Azov fighters, they mostly spent some time here in Ukraine and, if they were lucky they made some photos with weapons which they took in their hands for five minutes,” Likhachev said. “Then they drank some good and cheap Ukrainian beer and went back home.”"

--> Franchement, c'est gros comme un gratte-ciel... C'est publié le 2022-03-05, on sait déjà les opérations conjointes avec les organisations néonazis à l'international comme R.A.M. ou M.D. et le tireur de Christchurch.

Andreas Umland, an analyst at the Stockholm Center for Eastern European Studies who has studied the Azov movement, said it is wrong to categorize the regiment as still a “Neo-Nazi regiment.”

Certainly, there are still white supremacists and far-right extremists present in Azov, he said, but in recent years the military wing of the movement has moved away from open support of fascism.

The presence of the Azov regiment in the Ukrainian military has long represented a practical dilemma for the Ukrainian government, Umland said. The regiment has built a reputation as a force capable of protecting the public from adversaries.

“People sign up because these are the tough guys,” Umland said.

Umland also pointed out an uncomfortable truth: In times of war, a country needs soldiers who will do battle against their enemies, and often the most willing people to fight on the front lines are ultranationalists schooled in jingoistic pride.

“If you’re going to fight a war, who is going to fight it? For war, you need a certain type of people,” he said. “The people who are willing to do that are the ultranationalists.“

--> Umland, même si militant, doit tout de même suivre une éthique et une rigueur académique. Donc il fournit des raisons logiques et explicites pour ses interprétations. Pour lui, puisque le régiment Azov ne soutient plus ouvertement le néonazisme (mais seulement en covert - le nazisme est toléré et les partenariats étroits avec de nombreux groupes néonazis sont activement noués et entretenus dont programmes d'entrainements), alors ça ne se qualifie pas de néonazi. C'est un point de vue mais c'est une définition bien restreinte, et c'est le seul académique/spécialiste à soutenir cette interprétation.

The Transatlantic Connections Between American and Southeastern Europe’s White Supremacists, 12 November 2020, par Heidi Beirich https://globalextremism.org/post/balkans/

Originally published in the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung brief, “Political Trends and Dynamics: The Far Right in the EU and Western Balkans,” Volume 3, 2020 Background: https://globalextremism.org/heidi-beirich-ph-d/

Plus de contexte sur les néonazis occidentaux et orientaux et leur nouvelle idéologie de domination paneuropéenne:

A revisionist interpretation of the history of Southeast Europe, in particular the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, has become inspirational to American white supremacists. As white supremacy is an increasingly international movement, Southeast Europe has become a destination for extremists who view immigrants and Muslims as the primary threat to white supremacy worldwide. For this movement, the Yugoslav Wars have been mythologized as a successful enterprise that reduced the demographic threat of the Muslim population to white people living in the region. Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader who was sentenced to life in prison by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, is seen as a hero for ethnically-cleansing Muslims from what is now Republika Srpska (Karadzic is imprisoned in the Dutch city Scheveningen). For American white supremacists, Karadzic’s ethnic-cleansing campaign in the 1990s is regarded as a roadmap for white supremacists to emulate.[1]

This interpretation of the Yugoslav Wars dovetails with the most popular propaganda pushed today in white supremacist circles, The Great Replacement, which argues that white people are being “replaced” in their home countries by non-white immigrants. In Europe, this applies particularly to Muslims who are viewed as an “invading” people, whether they are citizens or not. As white supremacists increasingly see demographic change as the main threat to their existence, a handful have engaged in mass violence to stem the tide of migrants and refugees. This propaganda has inspired six mass attacks just since October 2018. These included the mosque attacks in Christchurch, N.Z., attacks staged at two American synagogues, an El Paso, Texas, Walmart, a synagogue in Halle, Germany, and two shisha bars in Hanau, Germany.[2] The mass murderers in these incidents, and many similar ones in the last decade, are extolled for taking a stand against demographic change. What’s interesting is many of these terrorists were inspired by the white supremacist reinterpretation of the events of the Yugoslav Wars.

Brenton Tarrant, who killed 51 people at two New Zealand mosques in 2019 was an admirer of the Serbian forces in the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, particularly those involved in the genocidal violence. Tarrant, who traveled through the Balkans, views the battle against Muslims in the region as a centuries long campaign.

A handful of American hate movements have had a presence in Southeast Europe for decades. These have included white supremacist, neo-Nazi and racist skinhead groups. The Hammerskin Nation, a violent racist skinhead group founded in 1988 in Dallas, Texas, has long had chapters throughout the region and still does. A Europol report from 2019 documented two other skinhead groups that have had American chapters over the years—Blood and Honor and Combat 18—active in Serbia. In May, Balkan Insight reported that symbols from both groups were found on buildings in Prijedor, Bosnia, alongside a blog address promoting the far right in the region.[9]

The Europol report says these organizations and networks are getting “increasingly popular among younger and better-educated demographics.”[10] It found that international extremist movements including Soldiers of Odin, which has American members,[11] were actively seeking to recruit members from European army personnel and police forces, including in the Southeast.[12]

[...]

American white supremacists have traveled to Ukraine to train with the Azov Battalion, which was originally formed as a volunteer militia to fight Russian irregular forces working with eastern Ukrainian separatist forces starting in 2014, in particular with the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. Foreign fighters have been drawn to both sides of the conflict in the Ukraine, but research suggests that right-wing extremists have been more likely to be involved on the side of Azov and other groups that worked to repel Russian involvement in the region.[28] There is a parallel here to the history of foreign fighters during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. Americans, as well as Italians, Spaniards, Brits and French fighters joined Croatia’s Black Legion in 1991 and the majority of were linked to extreme-right organizations within their own countries.[29]

American white supremacists have gained even greater exposure to the ideas of racial extremists from Southeast Europe through their involvement with Azov, as it has attracted white supremacist foreign fighters[34] from many countries including Greece and Croatia, with some 20 Croats joining the battalion in 2015.[35] Also, Azov moved to form a “foreign legion” of sorts under the leadership of a Croat living in Zagreb. According to BIRN, Bruno Zorica, a retired Croatian army officer and former member of the French Foreign Legion, was repeatedly mentioned in Azov social media posts as a key figure in the unit’s creation. Zorica commanded a special forces unit of the Croatian army during the country’s war against Belgrade-backed Serb rebels in the early 1990s.[36]

According to a 2019 report by The Soufan Center, approximately 35 American fighters have traveled to Ukraine in recent years with far-right extremists attracted mostly to the anti-Russian side.[37] This mixing of white supremacists from around the world in Ukraine is now seen as a terrorism threat. “I believe Europe is in great danger,” Alberto Testa, an expert on far-right radicalization at the University of West London told Vice News in 2019. Testa believes eastern Ukraine has become a critical staging ground for the international “white jihad struggle” of the far right, where extremists could “train for what some would call racial holy war.”[38]

Azov successfully recruited well-known American white supremacists to train with the unit. Joachim Furholm, a Norwegian citizen and self-described “national socialist revolutionary,” led Azov’s effort to bring Americans to Ukraine. Azov framed participation in Ukraine’s war against Russian aggression as an opportunity for Americans to acquire combat and other training for use in the United States after returning home.[39] In 2018, members of the American, neo-Nazi group, Rise Above Movement (RAM), traveled to Ukraine to visit Azov as part of a tour that started in Southeast Europe. Robert Rundo, head of RAM, was depicted in a now deleted Facebook video in a cage match with an Azov fighter.[40] Azov’s hierarchy was thrilled to have the American neo-Nazis on hand. “We think globally,” Olena Semenyaka, an Azov official, told Radio Free Europe in 2018.[41] She hosted Rundo along with RAM members Michael Miselis and Benjamin Daley, who participated in the white riots that occurred in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 and ended in the murder of antiracist counter protester. In the case of Rundo, Miselis, and Daley, Semenyaka said, “they came to learn our ways” and “showed interest in learning how to create youth forces in the ways Azov has.”[42] Semenyaka has spoken of other important Azov allies in Southeast Europe, in particular Greece’s Golden Dawn.[43]

Other American extremists have been in contact with Azov. In October 2018, American white nationalist Greg Johnson, who runs the San Francisco, Calif., based Counter-Currents Publishing, visited Ukraine and attended a series of events hosted by Azov.[44] According to Bellingcat, the late Andrew Oneschuk, a prominent member of the now defunct but very violent American neo-Nazi organization Atomwaffen Division (AWD), was in contact with Azov on its podcast.[45] Also, an alleged U.S. Navy veteran, “Shawn Irwood,” enlisted in the Armed Forces of Ukraine and maintained contact with Azov’s National Corps.[46]

--> social network use by white supremacists (including pro-Azov messages):

Ties Online

The white supremacist online space is filled with networking between Americans and Southeast European extremists, where they share the sentiments expressed by Tarrant and Breivik about the Yugoslav Wars. Since the 2000s, an array of white supremacists and other aspiring extremists worldwide have seized on this mythologized version of the Yugoslav Wars, demonizing Muslims and recasting them as non-white “immigrants,” ideas widely shared online.[47]On the unregulated message board 4chan, it is not hard to find the Bosnian genocide favorably discussed as an example for racists in other nations. A typical 4chan post reads, “god praise Milosevic and Karadzic, shame amerimuts had to bomb us and prevented us from cleansing the muslims [sic] from our lands.”[48]

Other parts of the Internet circulate similar material. The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) found in 2019 both pro-Azov and pro-Serbian extremist comments on Discord, a voice and chat application.[49] BIRN scoured leaked Discord messages and found no shortage of Azov devotees. One user wrote that Azov “will have the foreign legion set up within the next 18 months or so,” a project that was launched from Zagreb.

[...]

Nationalist Governments & Extremism

The growing links between American extremists and those in Southeast Europe are of great concern. But so too is the fact that increasingly illiberal governments in the region provide a ripe environment for these groups to grow their relationships and spread the white supremacist ideas they share.

A 2020 report from Freedom House,[58] an independent human rights group that rates countries’ support for liberal democratic government, found that in the Balkans region, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Romania and Slovenia remained “free” in 2019. Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia were “partly free.”[59] In general, the report found that “illiberal populists in Central and Southeast Europe defended their ground or made gains in 2019, undermining democratic norms even in the face of mass protests.”[60]

The Azov Regiment has not depoliticized, Atlantic Council, 2020

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/the-azov-regiment-has-not-depoliticized/

"The Azov Regiment within Ukraine’s National Guard has in recent years sought to distance itself from the broader Azov movement’s roots on the far right of the Ukrainian political spectrum. This has been used as an argument against calls from some quarters in the US to define the regiment as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. However, despite claims to have moved away from far-right ideology, the available evidence indicates that the regiment remains joined at the hip to the internationally active National Corps party it spawned, and the wider Azov movement associated with the regiment."

"The Azov movement has long been a symbol of the far-right in Ukraine. It has risen to prominence over the past six years due to its role in the ongoing war against Russia, and has achieved levels of mainstream media exposure far in excess of the group’s minimal electoral support. This is not only a domestic issue for Ukraine. The far-right in general, and their apparent impunity, have significantly damaged Ukraine’s international reputation and left the country vulnerable to hostile narratives exaggerating the role of extremist groups in Ukraine. With awareness of right-wing terrorism now growing globally, the potential threat posed by the Ukrainian far-right beyond the borders of the country is attracting increasing attention."

"Conducted together with online open-source investigators Bellingcat, my research into the National Corps has revealed a pattern of troubling international activity and ties to white supremacist groups. New revelations appear regularly. I recently learned that the National Corps apparently provided training in Odesa to a member of American neo-Nazi group “Rise Above Movement”. In 2019, the party invited German neo-Nazi party “Dritte Weg” (Third Way) to march alongside Ukrainian veterans in Kyiv. In an earlier interview with the neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement, the party’s international secretary promised opportunities to train “in military tactics, shooting and more” in Ukraine. On the international stage, the party touts its ties to the Regiment in order to boost its legitimacy.

Shekhovtsov argues that the National Corps should be taken out of the debate about the Azov Regiment because “Azov attempted to depoliticize itself; the toxic far-right leadership formally left the regiment”. However, the role of the far-right leadership in the regiment remains evident. Both the National Guard unit and the political party admit to being part of the wider “Azov movement” led by the regiment’s first commander and current National Corps party leader Andriy Biletsky. The unit routinely hosts Biletsky (and other former commanders) at its bases and welcomes his participation in ceremonies, greeting him as a leader. Biletsky positions himself as the curator of the regiment, and has claimed to deal directly with Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov on related matters – a claim that Avakov appeared to confirm in early 2019.

Shekhovtsov describes the regiment as a regular unit of the National Guard, but it is not. Regimental commanders have said that their unit owes its special status to being shielded from government interference. In 2019, the head of Azov’s military academy claimed Biletsky protected Azov from being “destroyed” by Ukraine’s leaders, while another commander described Biletsky as someone who “finds sponsors that really invest money”. Furthermore, Azov’s Kyiv recruitment center and military academy share a location with the offices of the National Corps."

The relationship between the regiment and the National Corps is also blurred in the political messaging of Biletsky, who has posed with active duty Azov soldiers in political videos. National Corps figures routinely visit the regiment, and the party’s ideologists lecture Azov troops. Their blogs are published on the regiment’s site, while Azov’s social media pages promote the National Corps. According to an August 2017 video, ostensibly recorded at Azov’s base, emigre Russian neo-Nazi Alexey Levkin lectured the regiment.

The close alignment between the Azov Regiment and the National Corps continues under the Zelenskyy presidency. In March 2020, soldiers from the regiment were featured alongside leaders of the National Corps in a video ad for a rally meant as a warning to Zelenskyy’s government. Based on this evidence, it is clear that the Regiment has failed in its alleged attempts to “depoliticize.”

This makes it next to impossible to draw a clear line between the regiment itself and the wider Azov movement, including the National Corps. But does the Azov movement merit a Foreign Terrorist Organization designation? There are three criteria that must be met: the organization must be foreign; it must engage in terrorist activity or retain the capacity and intent to engage in terrorist activity; and the organization’s terrorist activity must threaten the security of US nationals or the national security of the United States. US law enforcement is already keeping an eye on Americans that are in contact with the Azov movment, as then-acting Secretary of Homeland Security Kevin McAleenan confirmed in October 2019. At present, nothing indicates that the Azov movement engages in terrorist activity or has such intent. Nevertheless, its international ties with groups espousing extremist white supremacist ideology should ring all sorts of alarm bells.

Oleksiy Kuzmenko is a researcher for the Bellingcat Anti-Equality Monitoring project.

Also wrote: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2019/02/15/defend-the-white-race-american-extremists-being-co-opted-by-ukraines-far-right/

"Newly uncovered evidence going back to 2015 suggests that the Ukrainian white nationalist Azov movement has been systematically co-opting American right-wing extremists to advance the former’s own international agenda. In audio statements uncovered by Bellingcat, this agenda was summarized by the International Secretary of the political wing of Azov, the National Corps, as “world conservative revolution,” aimed to “defend the white race.” These new findings are separate from the recently reported ties between Azov and American violent neo-Nazi group the Rise Above Movement, and members of the American alt-right."

Azov's Three-Pronged Movement (including Azov Regiment): https://www.bellingcat.com/app/uploads/2019/02/azov_36132210.png

Selon Adrien Nonjon, chercheur à l'université George Washington134 et à l’Inalco spécialiste de l’Ukraine, le bataillon Azov connaît une forme de dépolitisation depuis son intégration à la garde nationale par le ministère de l’Intérieur ukrainien : « leurs rangs ont grossi avec des Ukrainiens dépolitisés simplement admiratifs de leurs réussites au combat. Andreï Biletsky lui-même, après avoir quitté le commandement d’Azov pour la présidence du parti politique d’extrême droite Corps national, a beaucoup lissé son discours. Il nie les mots très durs qu’il a tenus dans sa jeunesse lorsqu’il parlait de croisade contre les sémites »1. Il souligne notamment la présence, outre les néonazis, « de monarchistes, d'orthodoxes, de païens et d'écofascistes»135. https://www.liberation.fr/checknews/quelle-est-limportance-du-regiment-azov-cette-unite-ukrainienne-fondee-par-des-proches-de-la-mouvance-neonazie-20220308_6UPAODEHPVCCBA5Z5BQ2QQZKTQ/

Il y a son article sur theconversation

"S’il y a encore indéniablement des néonazis au sein d’Azov, l’appartenance idéologique n’est néanmoins pas le seul moteur d’adhésion au groupe. Ce qui est certain, c’est que généraliser cette idéologie, bien réelle au sein du régiment, à l’armée (qui compte plusieurs centaines de milliers d’hommes) ou la société ukrainienne, comme certains canaux pro-Kremlin peuvent le faire, n’a guère de sens."

Eric Aunoble, chargé de cours à université de Genève spécialiste de l'Ukraine soviétique, affirme en 2022 que « Le fond idéologique de ce bataillon relève clairement du néonazisme »139. https://www.marianne.net/monde/europe/guerre-en-ukraine-qui-sont-les-neonazis-dont-parle-vladimir-poutine

Sur WP FR: Accusations d'homophobie/antisémitisme/antitziganisme --> NON! Ces exactions sont bien établies et acceptées, ce ne sont pas des accusations!