Linkerbaan , 8 months ago

Russia will use any excuse it wants to invade. If Azov didn’t exist it woud be NATO being too close. Putin just wants more land that’s all.

That said you can’t just discard the Azov origin which is only 8 years old. That’s like saying ISIS origins don’t matter. The old gang with a new name is just the old gang.

This article is a great summary. Especially near the middle: www.thenation.com/…/azov-battalion-neo-nazi/

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There is a kernel of truth in the allegations that Azov is just a Russian bogeyman. The Kremlin and Ukraine’s neo-Nazis have a symbiotic relationship that reaches to the very heart of this war: Putin needed a pretext to justify his illegal invasion; for that, he turned to Azov. Moscow seized on Azov’s existence to paint all of Ukraine as a cesspool of fascism in need of “denazification.” Azov is the linchpin in Putin’s narrative—without it, his excuse for the war is gone.

In turn, Azov’s defenders have capitalized on Russia’s obsession by implying that anyone who criticizes the group is a Putin apologist. Moscow and Azov use each other to defend the indefensible: For Russia, it’s acceptable to invade a sovereign country to fight neo-Nazis; for the West, it’s appropriate to lionize neo-Nazis because they’re fighting Russia

OUT WITH THE OLD, IN WITH THE OLD:

The problem with insisting that Azov’s neo-Nazism is just a Russian lie is the abundance of evidence to the contrary. Seven years’ worth of Western articles chronicling the group’s nature was too much to ignore. This left Azov’s whitewashers with the unenviable task of cobbling together a come-to-Jesus story in which Azov began as a neo-Nazi paramilitary group but somehow saw the error of its ways before 2022.

The narrative that emerged goes like this: (a) Azov’s deradicalization started after it joined Ukraine’s National Guard—over time, Biletsky and other veterans of the 2014 battalion were filtered out, implying that the new leadership is neo-Nazi free; (b) yes, there are a few leftover neo-Nazis in the National Corps, Azov’s political party; but © that doesn’t matter, because the Azov Regiment—later a brigade—has long since separated from the National Corps, which is little more than a fringe political sideshow.

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