AGI As an emblem they have the ancient rune symbol of the Wolfsangel, which was also used by the SS in the past. In the images they depict, the yellow and blue flag of their homeland is sometimes accompanied by a banner bearing a swastika. During the 2014 conflict in Donbass, they committed rape, torture and other war crimes, including against civilians, which were ignored by the Ukrainian authorities.
On the other hand, it’s harder to accuse them of antiSemitism given their proximity to figures like Nathan Khazin, an orthodox Jew who was one of the protagonists of the Euromaidan revolt. What is certain is that without the Azov battalion Among the pretexts for the invasion, Vladimir Putin could hardly have mentioned the need to “denazify the country.
The most famous of the nationalist militias that sprung up in Ukraine after Russia’s annexation of Crimea now spearheads the defense of Mariupol. The port city, exhausted from weeks of siege, is the headquarters of the battalion, which has built a pagan sanctuary dedicated to the worship of the Slavic ancestral deity Perun.
It is currently impossible to verify how much truth there is in Russian claims that Azov’s men sabotaged humanitarian corridors in order to take Mariupol citizens hostage and use them as human shields.
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Azov battalion
For sure the Russian “desinformatja” exaggerates both the numbers and the roots in Ukrainian society. The farright parties that can be approached have never achieved significant results in the elections, and when the Kremlin speaks of “thousands of nationalists barricaded in the martyr city, the battalion’s numerical consequence, according to Der Spiegel, would be so do have had a maximum peak of just over 2,500 units.
Today there would be fewer than a thousand, and they would have suffered nonnegligible casualties at the hands of the Donetsk separatists in the Battle of Volnovakha, which ended in a proRussian victory on March 12. Like the less famous but equally sinister Donbass Battalion, the Azov Battalion was born as a volunteer militia following Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
The first core was formed in the city of Berdyansk by some members of the farright formation Pravyi Sector with the aim of supporting the then inadequate Ukrainian army in the fight against the secessionist forces of Donetsk and Lugansk. Soon ultras from football curves, nationalists from all backgrounds and a few common criminals were added.
Some wellknown Ukrainian oligarchs financed it, including energy magnate Igor Kolomoisky, then governor of the Dnipropetrovska region, and Serhiy Taruta, a steel industrialist who ruled the Donetsk region. The founder, 42yearold Andriy Biletsky, a history graduate from Kharkiv University, has long been a leading figure in farright circles in Ukraine.
After the general election Biletsky put down the rifle but was not reconfirmed in 2019. “Bely Vozd,” or “white sovereign,” as his students call him, would come back to hug him, and now, Deutsche Welle reports, he would fight for Kyiv. During the 2014 war, the battalion distinguished itself in retaking Mariupol, which had fallen into the hands of the separatists. The Ukrainian government soon decided to include him in the National Guard and put him under the control of the Interior Ministry.
Since then, Azov has operated as an infantry regiment, equipping artillery and tanks. The battalion in Mariupol is likely to have gathered around a few hundred volunteers from politically similar organizations, given the dense network of contacts they have built up thanks to a celebrity in Europe who, if Kremlin propaganda might not have turned them to the Archenemy had chosen, built up they would never reach.