The United States lifts the veto to send weapons to the Azov Brigade in Ukraine

Azov is the best-known name of the Ukrainian extreme right that emerged in 2014, starting with the Maidan revolution. It is a political and military movement founded by extremist and ultranationalist elements that helped to overthrow the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych. They quickly formed a paramilitary battalion to combat the pro-Russian separatist uprising in Donbas. Since the war in Donbas, the United States had prohibited its weapons transferred to Ukraine from ending up in the hands of Azov. This has been the case until this Tuesday, when the White House State Department announced that the Azov Brigade will finally be able to receive its war material.

This brigade is today an assault force that is part of the National Guard and the Ministry of the Interior. It is one of the best prepared regiments that Ukraine has for its defense against the Russian invasion. For years it has been accused by international organizations of violating fundamental rights. The US State Department, as it has advanced The Washington Post, considers that Azov now complies with the Leahy law. This rule, which came into force in 1961, stipulates that the Government cannot provide foreign aid to organizations that commit crimes against humanity.

The American twist comes after two months of Ukrainian pressure to lift the veto. The agreement between American Democrats and Republicans last April in Congress, to unlock more than 50 billion euros in military assistance for Ukraine, included an anti-Azov clause. The commander of the brigade, Denis Prokopenko, published a statement in which he stressed that the application of the Leahy law on Azov “is above all based on the features that Azov is given by the major Western media, which seem to have assumed an attitude under the influence of Mocú propaganda.” The Kremlin frequently mentions Azov as a paradigm of an alleged neo-Nazism governing Ukraine. No far-right force has representation in parliament today.

“There is no evidence to confirm the accusations of Russian propaganda that they have been hindering Azov for 10 years,” Prokopenko wrote, “if they existed, the Azov delegations would not have been received in the US, European countries or Israel.” .

From Ukraine, the international community is asked to assume that Azov has become a “patriotic” organization and far from its ultranationalist origins, according to leading analysts such as Iván Gomza, head of the Department of Political Studies at the Kiev School of Economics. (KSE). The president himself, Volodymyr Zelensky, has paid tribute to his fighters on several occasions despite the fact that the Azov Movement was, until the invasion, one of his most furious opponents because they considered it conciliatory with Russia. In an essay published in April 2022 – three months after the start of the invasion – Gomza stressed that Nazi symbology and other distinctive neo-fascist elements in Azov have lost their original meaning and essentially serve to maintain the internal community spirit. “Another important issue is that the academic world must seriously analyze the use they have as a weapon for States with bad intentions and war purposes,” said Gomza: “The academic community must be aware of the disproportionate attention that their limited professional interest may have. if it is abused and misunderstood in the age of social media.”

The KSE professor stated that only 15% of Azov members consider themselves neo-Nazis. The special envoy of Morning Express has spoken in the more than two years of war with combatants from this brigade, and they all agree in highlighting that they are not neo-Nazis but they are nationalists. Asked about their political position, their ideas about social and identity rights, they are clearly radical nationalism and conservatism.

The studies that define Azov as extreme right outside Ukraine are numerous, such as the book published in 2022 by Michael Colborne, a renowned Canadian researcher of extreme right movements in the countries of the Soviet Union: “The Azov Regiment is probably the only unit military in the world that was born from a far-right group and that continues to be connected to a broad far-right movement.” This expert added: “A regiment like Azov has no place in the armed forces of a democratic country and should be dismantled.”

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