By Kit Klarenberg, Substack, 5/17/26

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On April 15th, Declassified UK published a bombshell investigation exposing how in the mid-1990s, senior British political and military officials were well-aware NATO expansion into Central and Eastern Europe “would provoke [the] Russians,” and likely trigger all-out war. Hitherto unreported Ministry of Defence files reveal London knew Moscow’s “sensitivities” over a “hostile military alliance” enlarging up to its borders were profound, and based on very “real” concerns. Yet, NATO’s dangerous crusade to absorb Central and Eastern Europe continued apace, ultimately producing the Ukraine proxy conflict.

Since the so-called Special Military Operation’s February 2022 eruption, British officials have relentlessly reiterated the mantra the proxy war was “unprovoked”. However, a declassified March 1995 Foreign Office memo noted “there was a widespread psychological and intellectual perception in Moscow that NATO was a real threat.” In May that year, then-Prime Minister John Major succinctly articulated Russian anxieties to his Irish counterpart John Bruton, as a “fundamental fear…of encirclement.” Concerns about EU membership were comparatively muted:

“For the Russians, NATO had a much more threatening symbolism and political resonance…The Baltics were particularly difficult, with extreme sensitivity for Russia. It would be very hard to have a NATO border directly against Russia.”

Still, in 1997 NATO invited Czechia, Hungary, and Poland to join, which they did two years later. In 2004, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania simultaneously joined the military alliance. So too did ex-Warsaw Pact members Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and former Yugoslav republic Slovenia. Declassified UK shows how back in August 1996, British Defence Intelligence prepared a NATO enlargement study specifically forecasting that these countries joining could trigger war, and an alliance military operation launched via Article 5 of the NATO treaty in response.

This refers to collective self-defence, under which NATO members are obligated to come to each other’s defence if attacked. In the scenario, Defence Intelligence assumed “Russia has vehemently opposed NATO membership for the Baltic states and has threatened retaliation to preserve her own security against a perceived hostile military alliance on her borders.” In the real world, Boris Yeltsin made at-times irate public statements about NATO enlargement into the Baltics at the time, while lobbying US President Bill Clinton on the issue behind closed doors.

NATO expansion continued regardless. In December 1996, Declassified UK reports then-Russian premier Viktor Chernomyrdin privately warned Major: “Russia could not stop NATO enlarging, but this would create a fragile situation which could explode.” Other declassified files from this time show senior apparatchiks in London were acutely aware of Moscow’s “concern,” “fears,” “hostility,” “negative attitudes,” and “resentment” over alliance enlargement. Both Major and his successor Tony Blair explicitly pledged in person to Kremlin officials that NATO wouldn’t “move up to Russia’s borders.”

However, a secret September 1996 policy paper made clear Britain was committed “to enlarge NATO to the East,” even if “Russian acquiescence is not possible.” In February 1997, Russia’s deputy foreign minister Nikolai Afanasievsky angrily branded public discussions in Western capitals of admitting former Soviet republics to the alliance a “blatant provocation” in a meeting with Jeremy Greenstock, Britain’s ambassador to Moscow. Greenstock reassured his Russian opposite number NATO had “no intention” of admitting former Soviet states “at this stage” – which, technically, was true.

‘Russian Problem’

A March 1997 Foreign Office memo forecast rapid NATO enlargement would “antagonise,” and ultimately “provoke,” Russia into a belligerent counter-response. Yeltsin’s “anxiety” about the “possible accession of Ukraine, the Baltic states and other states of the former Soviet Union” was considered the “most difficult issue” affecting Western relations with Moscow. A more staggered approach was thus required. That month, John Major met with NATO secretary general Javier Solana, who spoke of “Russians fears about NATO troops and equipment moving eastwards.”

Reflecting the deep unpopularity and distrust of NATO expansion among many sections of the Russian public and political class, Solana relayed to Major how Moscow’s foreign minister Yegeny Primakov “had more or less begged him for help in giving the Russians reassurance about NATO forces not moving eastwards.” A month later, Yeltsin dispatched a strongly worded private letter to John Major:

“Our negative attitude to NATO expansion plans remains unchanged. Implementation of those plans would be the biggest mistake of the West in all the post-war period.”

Hitherto unreported declassified CIA files amply demonstrate Washington’s cognisance of vehement public and state-level Russian opposition to NATO military action and enlargement not only in the former Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union, but the former Yugoslavia, dates back even further. A January 1993 CIA memo discussed “Serbia and the Russian Problem”. The Agency perceived it necessary – but potentially difficult – to secure Moscow’s acquiescence to US and UN actions being taken against the Serbs over the Bosnian civil war.

At the time, the newly-inaugurated Clinton White House was openly mulling direct intervention in the ever-worsening humanitarian crisis, up to and including all-out invasion. A year prior, Washington had imposed crippling sanctions on what remained of Yugoslavia over the bloodshed. The CIA felt it urgent to “sensitize [Clinton’s] new policy-making team to the growing danger of Russian alienation” from “Western policy toward Serbia.” The Agency feared “historical relations” between Belgrade and Moscow could “work against an effective international response” – in other words, overt US involvement.

“While the US cannot mortgage its Yugoslav policy to Russia, Washington should probably work harder at consulting Moscow before new policies are established,” the CIA memo cautioned. The Agency sought to explain “why Russian unease over Western policy toward Serbia may well lead to a veto of [UN Security Council] resolutions on the use of force.” The CIA reported how the Russian government had “grown increasingly concerned about the possible use of force against Serbia,” before outlining “five driving forces behind the concern.”

Among them was “Pseudo-Geopolitics”. Problematically for Yeltsin, and in turn the CIA, Pentagon and White House, “some Russians” were asking “why the West and the US in particular should inject itself in an area that Russia always regarded as its traditional sphere of influence.” While the CIA scornfully declared “the West should not take this argument very seriously in today’s world,” the agency warned that argument was “being made” at a public and political level in Russia, and the Kremlin “must deal with it.”

Another “concern” was “Slav Brotherhood”. The CIA observed how “romantic nationalists” in the country were replacing the Marxist slogan “workers, unite”, with “Slavs, unite.” Resultantly, Russian “ultranationalists” considered Moscow to be “duty bound to come to the aid of Serbs.” Without outlining why, the CIA believed that “for some of the same reasons cited above, we should not take this too seriously, but it cannot be dismissed if other players aid their racial or religious brothers.”

‘Dangerous Precedent’

The Balkans are of enormous cultural, economic, historic, military, political, and strategic importance to Russia. Yugoslavia had in the immediate aftermath of World War II been directly aligned with the Soviet Union, before the pair split in 1948. Thereafter, Belgrade and Moscow enjoyed harmonious albeit intermittently tense relations. It was entirely understandable why Russia and Russians would be anxious about destructive US-led actions against collapsing Yugoslavia, which was being forcibly broken up into easily exploitable Western puppet states, and future NATO members.

However, the CIA – and White House, and NATO – took for granted that in a unipolar world of unchallenged and unchallengeable US global hegemony, the notion Russia had any sphere of influence in the world, and interests outside her own borders, should not be taken “very seriously” in policy planning considerations – if at all. The West’s casual disregard for Moscow’s clearly-stated red-lines and obvious concerns became significantly ingrained, and turbocharged, with the March – June 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia.

Chinese and Russian aversion to the campaign was forecast throughout Western capitals. Hence, NATO avoided Beijing and Moscow’s inevitable UNSC vetoes on unilateral military action by invoking the UN Charter’s self defence clause, to bomb Yugoslavia without a Security Council vote. An eerily prescient April 1999 New Statesman article warned NATO’s unauthorised, illegal bombing was no “one off”, but “just the beginning” of a “brave new world”, in which the military alliance acted as a worldwide “riot squad.”

When the campaign erupted, by then prime minister Yevgeny Primakov was literally mid-air, en route to the US for an official meeting. He immediately ordered the pilot to return to Russia. Despite Primakov’s protests, the Yeltsin administration did not come to Belgrade’s rescue, instead encouraging Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic to surrender to NATO. Nonetheless, as a declassified June 1999 cable from Britain’s Moscow embassy dispatched to all London’s top overseas diplomatic missions reported, the alliance’s bombing of Yugoslavia had “left Russia bruised and bewildered.”

There was shock in the country, from the streets to its highest levels, that “NATO resorted to military action in the face of direct Russian opposition.” The campaign was widely regarded as “setting a dangerous precedent for military action without UNSC authority,” therefore “reducing the weight of the Russian veto.” This was not only perceived as a “blow” to the UNSC, but outright “threat to Russian interests…setting an unacceptable precedent for action out of area, circumventing the Security Council if necessary”:

“[Moscow’s Ministry of Defense] has used NATO’s resort to force to argue Russia’s new military doctrine should take more serious account of a potential threat from NATO, with all that that means in terms of force levels, procurement and the future of arms control…The UK’s forward position on the use of force has not gone unnoticed…The Kosovo campaign has reinforced the perception here of an expanding NATO as a powerful tool for the imposition of US will in Europe.”

‘Intervention Elsewhere’

As a result of NATO’s illegal 78-day-long bombing of Yugoslavia, which killed thousands – including children – and violently disrupted daily life for millions, Russia suspended formal dialogue with NATO. The high-level Moscow station cable noted, “there are signs that Russia may be interested in resuscitating” the dialogue, “but an early return to the status quo ante is politically impossible.” It added:

“Strong and emotional opposition to NATO military action, like opposition to NATO enlargement, has been a continuing feature of Russia politics right across the spectrum.”

However, the Russian military was said to have “stood out for their vociferous rhetoric and active promotion of what they perceive to be Russia’s interests as a great power.” Moscow-based foreign policy analysts had “focussed in response” to the bombing “on the possibility of aligning Russian policies” with China and India, “but so far without much conviction as to whether this will prove practicable.” Nonetheless, the option was being widely discussed by influential political thinkers, “confidence” in the West locally having been grievously “undermined”.

The cable forecast that “rebuilding mutual trust” between NATO, its member states and Moscow following the alliance bombing of Yugoslavia was “likely to be a slow process.” It was believed an impending European Council meeting on creating a European Security and Defence Policy in Cologne, Germany would “be an important first opportunity to show Moscow that we continue to attach importance to working with Russia”:

“It would help to mitigate Russian concerns on the potential wider impact of NATO military action if [Tony Blair] were able to make the point to Yeltsin…that [the bombing of Yugoslavia] does not constitute a precedent for intervention elsewhere.”

The same unambiguous pledge had been “made separately” to the similarly outraged and disquieted Chinese, by Blair and senior diplomats. However, the bombing of Yugoslavia rapidly did become a precedent for further unilateral Western military action “out of area”, whether conducted under NATO’s auspices or not. Along the way, independent states like Libya were reduced to open-air slave markets. Meanwhile, the remnants of countries shattered by NATO imperialism were hoovered up by the alliance, one by one, with ever-rapacious speed.

Again, the British well-knew Western actions in the former Yugoslavia gravely enhanced Russian concerns about NATO-enforced unipolarity, and the alliance’s inexorable expansion ever-closer towards Moscow’s borders. In September 1999, then-foreign secretary Robin Cook’s private secretary wrote to Blair, warning how the Russians had found recent unilateral Anglo-American economic and kinetic warfare waged against Iraq and Yugoslavia “particularly hard to swallow”:

“The underlying reason for this disquiet (which is genuine) is a feeling that the United States and NATO are a law unto themselves. The idea…the West takes little account of Russian interests and…the process of NATO enlargement is intended to constrain Russia still further.”

‘Strong Divisions’

A February 2000 Foreign Office brief for a meeting between Blair and NATO secretary general George Robertson noted, “Russian opposition to NATO expansion has become even more hardline as a result” of Yugoslavia’s bombing. Undeterred, the alliance continued getting bigger, with British military and intelligence figures at the forefront of this push. Chief among them was Chris Donnelly, a longtime Ministry of Defence apparatchik elevated to NATO in 1989, just in time for the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and Yugoslavia.

As a scathing academic review of his 2004 work Reforming For Wars Of The Future noted, “if any one man has played a central role in the process of NATO enlargement and in providing constructive support for military reform in the newly liberated countries of East-Central Europe, it has been Chris Donnelly.” In many cases, states became ensconced in NATO despite significant public and political opposition. Strikingly, Donnelly himself admitted in January 2002 NATO was fundamentally not a defensive military alliance.

“Small armies from small countries cannot do much,” he explained, so “NATO runs better as a political alliance.” Donnelly left NATO in 2003. His thinking on NATO enlargement remained hugely influential thereafter. In early 2004, the alliance’s in-house magazine NATO Review published an essay he wrote on constructing a NATO “for the Greater Middle East.” An October 2006 US Army War College paper discussing how to embroil Ukraine in the War on Terror cited Donnelly’s 1997 thesis on “defence transformation in the new democracies.”

Ukraine was tentatively put on the NATO path at the alliance’s April 2008 summit. In February that year, then-US ambassador to Moscow Bill Burns – CIA chief under Joe Biden’s presidency – cabled Washington that Moscow was “particularly worried” about how “strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership.” “Much” of the country’s “ethnic-Russian community” opposed joining, and it “could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war.” This would force Russia to “decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.”

NATO’s own polling from 2011 suggested less than 20% of Ukrainians supported joining. Yugoslavia’s bombing was “particularly unpopular” locally – “for many…the image of NATO still evokes a sense of fear.” A week later, Burns outlined Moscow’s likely responses to Georgia and Ukraine being offered NATO membership to the White House. In respect of Georgia, “the prospects of subsequent…armed conflict would be high” – indeed, Russo-Georgian war came to pass in August 2008. Meanwhile, Burns’ observations about Ukraine reverberate today as a prophet’s curse wretchedly validated:

“Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red-lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In my more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests…a [membership] offer would be seen…as throwing down the strategic gauntlet…Russia will respond.”

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By Marta Havryshko, Responsible Statecraft, 6/2/26

When Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he claimed one of his goals was the country’s “denazification.” The Kremlin still uses this narrative as a cornerstone of its war propaganda.

Both Ukraine and the West reacted by dismissing the claim outright as a cynical abuse of Holocaust history. Politicians, media outlets, academics, and educational institutions rushed to prove that Putin’s argument was fraudulent.

But in their zeal to deconstruct Russian propaganda, Western elites created a propaganda myth of their own: there are no Nazis in Ukraine. Or, if there are, they are supposedly isolated cranks with no influence.

This fiction required the whitewashing of Azov, a unit founded in 2014 by the neo-Nazi group Patriot of Ukraine under the leadership of Andriy Biletsky. Azov became notorious for extremist ideology, Nazi symbolism, and allegations of war crimes in the Donbas. In 2018, the U.S. Congress banned the group from receiving American weapons, funding, or training.

After Russia’s full-scale invasion, that stigma vanished almost overnight. Kyiv repackaged Azov, separating the most radical elements into a new formation, the 3rd Assault Brigade. Western media rebranded and whitewashed it. The language of “de-radicalization” and “depoliticization” became mainstream. Questioning this narrative became taboo and labeled as “Russian propaganda.” The result is a culture of deliberate silence.

Neo-Nazi networks are deeply embedded in parts of Ukraine’s military structure. Their presence is visible in units such as Azov, the Third Assault Brigade, the Russian Volunteer Corps, Bratstvo, the German Volunteer Corps, Karpatska Sich, and others. Yet Ukraine’s Western backers continue to arm, fund, and train these units without meaningful scrutiny.

Even more striking is the normalization of Nazi imagery itself. Official Ukrainian military channels and mainstream media regularly publish images of soldiers wearing swastikas, Waffen-SS insignia, and patches linked to neo-Nazi groups like Combat 18 and Misanthropic Division. This is no longer treated as scandalous. It has been normalized.

Most disturbing of all, some Ukrainian military units have incorporated Nazi-linked symbols into their official insignia.

The far right and Ukraine’s military culture

Many Ukrainian military units using Nazi symbols are led by men shaped by Azov and the far-right milieu around it. For example, there is Oleksandr Kravtsov, the well-known commander of the Vedmedi unit, which was part of Azov. His body is covered in Nazi imagery, including 1488 — references to the white supremacist “14 Words” slogan coined by David Lane and the coded salute “Heil Hitler.” (“H” is the eighth letter of the alphabet.) Tattooed across his chest is the SS motto: “My Honor Is Loyalty.” He turned that slogan into the motto of his own unit. SS lightning bolts became part of its official insignia.

After returning from Russian captivity, Kravtsov’s unit was folded into the Ukrainian military structure — first the 36th Brigade, then the 39th Coastal Defense Brigade. Nothing changed. The SS symbols and motto remained.

Many commanders in the 3rd Assault Brigade also came out of Azov and still hold extremist views. Unsurprisingly, they openly embrace the corresponding symbolism. A subunit of the 3rd Assault Brigade adopted a modified insignia (replacing two grenades with three) of the Dirlewanger SS Brigade — one of the most notorious Nazi formations of World War II. In 2025, the brigade unveiled the emblem publicly at a memorial in Kyiv. No scandal followed.

Azov also normalized the Black Sun — a symbol born in Himmler’s SS cult headquarters at Wewelsburg Castle and now used globally by neo-Nazis and white supremacist terrorists, including the 2019 Christchurch mosque terrorist in New Zealand and the recent San Diego Islamic Center shooter.

After 2022, Black Sun spread rapidly through Ukrainian military culture. It appeared in Azov-linked units such as the Decepticons platoon and the Mortars unit of the 3rd Assault Brigade. Soon it migrated further — into units with no openly ideological profile at all — and became part of the insignia of the 156th Zvaha Battalion and the Unmanned Systems Battalion of the 110th Brigade named after Marko Bezruchko.

Azov mainstreamed another Nazi-linked emblem as well: the Wolfsangel, used historically by several Waffen-SS divisions. Rebranded as the “Idea of the Nation,” it became one of the most recognizable symbols in Ukraine’s wartime military culture. The symbol now appears far beyond Azov itself. The newly created Nachtigall Battalion — named after the Nachtigall Battalion formed by German military intelligence in 1941 — uses the same Wolfsangel-inspired insignia.

Some units within Ukraine’s military do not hide their fascination with the Third Reich’s military culture. For example, the 422nd Regiment of Unmanned Systems calls itself “Luftwaffe” and uses virtually the same eagle as Hitler’s air force. Its commander, Mykola Kolesnyk, regularly appears with the symbol on patches and clothing. The unit even sells merchandise featuring the Nazi eagle — hoodies, mugs, T-shirts, caps, keychains — to fundraise for the war.

Not just aesthetic choices

The use of Nazi symbols in Ukraine’s military is not merely an aesthetic problem. It is moral, political, historical, and legal.

First, it represents a form of historical revisionism and the gradual rehabilitation of Nazism itself — a direct challenge to the postwar Western consensus built on the memory of World War II. Within far-right military culture, Nazi imagery is often wrapped in romanticized narratives about anti-Soviet struggle. In practice this trivializes the sacrifice of the seven million Ukrainians who fought Nazism in the ranks of the Red Army alongside the Western allies (in contrast to the 300,000 who served in various military formations and police units on the side of Nazi Germany).

It also desecrates the memory of Nazism’s victims in Ukraine: 1.5 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, along with millions of Slavs, prisoners of war, Roma, the mentally ill, forced laborers, and countless others consumed by the machinery of racial extermination and exploitation.

Second, the problem is not only historical. It is profoundly contemporary. Every SS rune, Black Sun, or Wolfsangel displayed by Ukrainian soldiers hands the Kremlin another propaganda victory. Russian propagandists do not need to invent imaginary Nazis in Kyiv. They simply point to the insignia openly worn by some of Ukraine’s most celebrated military units — including formations branded as “elite,” such as the 3rd Assault Brigade.

Third, there is also a glaring legal contradiction. By openly using Nazi imagery, these units violate Ukraine’s own 2015 memory laws, which explicitly ban the propaganda of the Nazi regime and the public use of its symbols. The law describes such acts as an insult to the memory of millions of victims and have penalties of up to five years in prison.

Yet no one is prosecuted.

Why?

Because the Zelensky government — and President Volodymyr Zelensky himself as commander-in-chief — have made a political bargain with the far right. Since 2022, far-right activists and networks have flooded into the security and defense sector. In conditions of total war and chronic manpower shortages, this alliance became politically convenient, perhaps even inevitable. Now it is becoming entrenched.

The state depends on radicalized military formations for manpower and battlefield effectiveness. The far right, in turn, receives legitimacy, weapons, influence, and institutional protection. What emerged from wartime necessity is evolving into mutual dependence.

Ukraine’s Western partners have made their own bargain. They, too, depend on Ukrainian manpower to weaken Russia. And so they tolerate extremists inside Ukraine’s armed forces as long as those extremists continue fighting. More than that, they remain largely silent about the ideology and symbols involved, because acknowledging them would mean admitting an uncomfortable truth — that the neo-Nazi problem in Ukraine is not simply a Kremlin invention.

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Nazi-era specter haunts Kyiv: Poland and Israel turning against Zelensky

By Uriel Araujo, InfoBrics, 6/4/26

A new controversy has once again exposed the fragile foundations of the Polish-Ukrainian partnership and the unresolved historical issues plaguing Kyiv’s post-Maidan regime. Polish President Karol Nawrocki has signaled support for stripping Volodymyr Zelensky (his Ukrainian counterpart) of Poland’s highest state distinction – the Order of the White Eagle, awarded by former President Andrzej Duda.

The immediate trigger was Ukraine’s decision to rebury Andriy Melnyk (the infamous leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists – OUN), with state honors and in the presence of Ukraine’s top leadership, including Zelensky himself. Poland’s Nawrocki has thus argued that Ukraine is “not ready to become part of the European family” while it continues glorifying figures associated with Nazi collaborationism and anti-Polish (plus anti-Jewish) atrocities.

The affair exemplifies some of the deepest historical wounds separating Warsaw and Kyiv, not to mention aspects of Ukraine’s regime that are often whitewashed. It also illustrates how Ukraine’s ultranationalism (since at least 2014) has been a source of ethnopolitical tensions with neighbors in general, including Hungary, plus Romania and also Greece; and not just with Russia.

Melnyk was more than a patriotic activist: by the 1930s, the OUN had embraced increasingly radical and antisemitic positions. Many of its leaders collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II. Historian Grzegorz Motyka, among others, has documented how the OUN cooperated with German intelligence and prepared subversive operations against Poland in 1939 with Abwehr support.

The legacy of the OUN and its military wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), remains deeply explosive due to the Volhynia massacres: Ukrainian nationalists killed approximately 100,000 Polish civilians between 1943 and 1945, including coordinated attacks on Polish communities and churches during Bloody Sunday in July 1943.

For the last few years since 2022, Polish leaders have thus attempted to separate support for Kyiv’s war effort from these grievances. Yet that balancing act is becoming harder.

Even Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, hardly known for nationalist rhetoric, publicly criticized the tribute to Melnyk in Kyiv.

Poland is not a lone voice: Israel’s Foreign Ministry condemned the ceremony, declaring that “there is no place for ignoring historical truth,” Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial center warned that honoring leaders who collaborated with the Third Reich and genocide undermines Holocaust remembrance.

The controversy is a part of a wider issue. Shortly afterward, Zelensky also renamed an elite military formation with the honorary title “Heroes of the UPA,” thereby further inflaming Polish public opinion.

As I’ve argued, the politics of historical memory has long been the Achilles’ heel of Polish-Ukrainian relations. Back in 2021, I noted that Warsaw supported Ukrainian independence, NATO integration, and EU aspirations largely for geopolitical reasons, while remaining deeply uncomfortable with Kyiv’s glorification of Stepan Bandera, the OUN, and the UPA. These competing historical narratives have never been reconciled.

The irony is striking enough: in 2022, amid the escalation of the Russia-Ukraine war, Polish and Ukrainian leaders openly discussed unprecedented levels of integration. Zelensky even spoke of a future without borders between the two countries (which would be a de facto confederacy), while Duda declared that the Polish-Ukrainian border should unite rather than divide.

Bilateral tensions however never disappeared. In 2023, for instance, agricultural disputes led Warsaw to halt weapons deliveries temporarily, while then President Duda famously compared Ukraine to a drowning man capable of dragging down his rescuer. By 2024, disputes over the exhumation of Volhynia victims and disagreements regarding the issue of Crimea were already straining relations.

The current dispute also highlights that broader issue which Western media typically prefer to downplay: the role of neo-Fascism in post-Maidan Ukraine.

Critics often cite Zelensky’s Jewish background to dismiss concerns about extremism in Ukraine. Yet this does not negate the neo-Nazi influence – if anything, it makes the situation more embarrassing. A Russian-speaking secular Jew from Kryvyi Rih, Zelensky was not known for emphasizing his Jewish roots throughout his career as a comedian (quite on the contrary).

As President, he has frequently used Christian themes and given Easter addresses in speeches to Ukrainian soldiers, which of course does not align very well with a Jewish persona, even giving rise to speculations about a Christian conversation (that never happened).

Moreover, Zelensky was born a Russian-speaker in a very bilingual country such as his – he is fluent in Ukrainian but needed to improve his mastery of the language further as President – and actually counted on the votes of Russian speaking Ukrainians like himself; only to then reinvent himself as a Ukrainian nationalist. The point is that this is a flexible character, who acts according to circumstances. Like many Ukrainian leaders, Zelensky operates amid oligarchic ties and real pressure from far-right military and paramilitary figures, who have even publicly threatened his life if he deviates too much from their line. And, as I’ve noted before, these ideological forces continue to shape the state well beyond their electoral weight.

Be as it may, Poland is unlikely to abandon Ukraine overnight: Warsaw remains one of Kyiv’s most important partners. Yet nationalism is experiencing a revival on both sides of the border. Geopolitics can postpone disputes over memory and identity, but it cannot erase them. And the post-Soviet Ukrainian Question – particularly Kyiv’s far-right problem – remains a latent challenge for the entire continent.

By Paul Grenier, Landmarks Journal, 5/15/26

Deciding whether or not to align one’s country with the United States is as fateful as it is difficult. That, at any rate, is what history tells us. For those still pondering that question today, the following essay/detective story (which originally appeared, Feb. 22, 2026, in The Duran) undoubtedly supplies some useful food for thought. —The Editors

It is perhaps only natural that the tiny Republic of Georgia should have fallen out of the news cycle in the U.S. at this point in 2026. The flashy protests in downtown Tbilisi have long since petered out. The Georgian Dream government – the very government against whom the NGO-organized crowds had been protesting — remains stably in power. Meanwhile, there has been one crisis after another, from Venezuela to Greenland to Iran.

And let’s be honest: to most Americans, tiny Georgia just doesn’t matter very much. As so often happens, though, the United States very much matters to Georgia.

Case in point: as punishment for the country continuing to do business with Russia and China, the U.S. Congress, by means of the so-called Megobari Act (the word ‘megobari’ in Georgian means ‘friend’) is likely to soon place the Georgian government under sanctions.

The threat of such sanctions, or rather, the threat of getting on ‘the sanctions escalator’ as the foreign affairs analyst Alexander Mercouris likes to put it, could easily intimidate a small country like Georgia and cause it to change course. And yet, for now at least, Georgians are doing the opposite. They are insisting that it is they who have been ill-used, and they are gradually distancing themselves from Washington as a result.

How has Georgia been ill-used? Georgian officials and experts claim that after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in November 2022, the U.S. pressured their tiny Caucasus nation of 3.8 million to confront Russia militarily. These officials have stated that they were urged to open a second front against Russia from the south, and pressured to transfer vital weapons systems to Ukraine. All this amounted, from the Georgian perspective, to their being asked to commit suicide.

These claims have been roundly dismissed as ridiculous by the U.S. officials involved, as well as by such outlets as The New York Times. And yet the evidence for the Georgia version of the story is well worth taking seriously, all the more so as, in recent months, credible Georgian voices have provided important additional detail.

*

The notion that Washington, in the wake of the Russian invasion of 2022, urged Georgia to confront Russia militarily has been denied by the U.S. ambassador at the time the Ukraine war broke out, Kelly Degnan. It has also been denied by the Hudson Institute’s Luke Coffey during Congressional testimony. And it has been subjected to ridicule by The New York Times.

Indeed, in his lengthy New York Times essay, author Scott Anderson wrote sarcastically about talk in Georgia about some sort of Western ‘global war party’ urging Georgia to open up a second front against Russia “and in that way to seal its own doom.” Significantly, Anderson questioned the plausibility of claims made by Georgian Prime Minister, Irakli Kobakhidze, that it was indeed true Western officials had urged such a course, but out of national security considerations he couldn’t say who it was. Today those considerations, apparently, no longer apply. Georgians are naming names. Among them: Kelly Degnan.

The first instance of pressure on Georgia – and, specifically, on the king-maker Georgian billionaire, Bidzina Ivanishvili — concerned BUK anti-aircraft missiles. I learned of the US ambassador’s pressure on Ivanishvili from a highly credible source: Petre Mamradze.

Mamradze, a doctor of theoretical physics and mathematics, served, among other high government posts, as head of the Georgian State Chancelry across several administrations, from 2003 – 2012. (It was also Mamradze who, after the collapse of the USSR, helped secure uranium supplies and worked with the U.S. to get them out of the country to a secure location.)

That the US would be interested in sending Soviet-era BUK anti-aircraft missiles to Kyiv is easy to understand. They are effective, and already familiar to the Ukrainian military.

According to Mamradze’s account, a few days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Ivanishvili discovered that, without any explanation or any charges having been brought against him, his considerable financial assets held in Western financial institutions had been frozen. Mamradze further states that, almost simultaneously with this discovery, Amb. Degnan requested a meeting with Ivanishvili, and they then met on March 21, 2022. At that meeting, Ambassador Degnan told Ivanishvili to see to it that Georgia’s BUK air defense missiles and Javelin anti-tank weapons were transferred to Ukraine.

Ivanishvili responded that he considered this request to be, at the very least, dishonorable, especially given that the West had just frozen his financial assets. Ivanishvili reportedly described the request as tantamount to blackmail, aside from being insane: it would leave Georgia defenseless and “naked” against Russia, whose tanks are located about two hours’ drive from Tbilisi. In the early days of the Ukraine war, however, Ivanishvili did not publicly come forward about this incident — at least, not in public.

Anatol Lieven, in a published account of his Sept. 30, 2025, conversation with Georgian president Kavelashvili, points out that Georgia went to considerable lengths to prevent Georgian volunteers from going to Ukraine to fight and had also rejected Western pressure to send Kyiv military aid. What is more, and to Western chagrin, the Georgian government rejected Western efforts to force Georgia to impose the full range of EU sanctions on Russia. All the above led, Lieven observed, to accusations against Georgian Dream leaders that they were “pro-Russian.”

In his heated response to this charge, Kavelashvili told Lieven:

…The West demanded that we get involved in war with Russia against our vital national interests…just like in 2008, when the then government’s unreasonable actions on the basis of trust in NATO led Georgia to disaster … but today, Georgia has a government that represents the interests of our people…the same media outlets that accuse us of being under Russian influence tell the same lie about President Trump.

Since this September 2025 conversation, circumstances in Georgia have changed in such a way as to make possible greater public openness about who it was that was pushing the country into a confrontation with Russia, even to the point of opening up a second front. Back in spring 2022, Georgian Dream considered the U.S. its ‘strategic partner.’ The public revelations about how Georgia has been treated, however, have put that relationship in doubt.

Thus, to the account provided earlier by Bidzina Ivanishvili about Western pressure to open a second front, we can now add a December 2025 press conference during which Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze stated that he was present at two meeting in February, 2022 — one in early February, the other on February 27 or 28 — at which US Ambassador Degnan was present. At these meetings, says Kobakhidze, the Georgian government was pressured to not only implement anti-Russian sanctions, but to also open up a second front. When the Americans were asked about what would happen if, or rather, when, Russian troops occupied the country, the Georgians were told that they could start a guerilla war of resistance in the forests, and that the Americans would support them. During this interview, Kobakhidze said he did not wish to say specifically which of the Americans present at the meeting had told them to do these things, but he did insist that the US ambassador was present.

*

Is the above account complete and accurate? It is difficult to say with complete certainty. As we have noted, it has, after all, been contradicted by mainstream sources in the West. And yet the credibility of those Western sources has itself been seriously undermined by accounts such as those of former State Department official Michael Benz. Western reporting – exactly as illustrated by the above-referenced New York Times article – often consists of a kind of circular reasoning whereby Western-financed NGOs on the ground, whether in Georgia or in some other foreign country, repeat back to American reporters more or less exactly what the Western governments that pay their NGO salaries want them to say. Not the most scientific methodology for arriving at the truth of anything.

And so, whether definitively proven or not, the Georgian account detailed above remains highly credible. Indeed, it fits a long-standing pattern. Consider Ukraine. Can anyone doubt that Ukraine would be far better off if, in 2008, the U.S. had not started its obsessive drive to bring that unfortunate land into a military alliance hostile to Russia? By insisting on that policy for so many years, Washington has demonstrated remarkable indifference to the welfare of Ukrainians.

Why should Georgians expect any better?

By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 6/3/26

Ukraine hit St Petersburg oil terminals on the morning of June 3 just as Russia’s flagship St Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) kicks in a message designed to show that nowhere in Russia is safe from Ukraine’s long-range drones.

Ukraine drones flew over the city before diving into oil storage tanks on the Gulf of Finland only 17km from the conference centre where the event is due to begin today.

Residents posted photos and video footage of loud explosions and a massive fire after the city came under attack and black smoke rising over the St. Petersburg Oil Terminal, one of Russia’s largest fuel storage and export facilities.

Authorities immediately shut down the air space over Russia’s former imperial capital making it impossible for any delegates who have not already arrived in St Petersburg to reach the city. Leningrad Oblast Governor Aleksandr Drozdenko reported that 50 drones had made the 500km journey from Ukraine and were shot down over the region on June 3 but did not comment on the fires at the port. Nearly 30 flights delayed for over two hours and nine others diverted to other airfields, according to the Russian state news outlet TASS.

This is the fifth summit since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine over four years ago. The attack is part of a sustained campaign by the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) to cut Russia off from its main export revenues, which has reduced Russia’s exports of refined products, but has yet to affect the overall volume of oil exports or reduce the Kremlin’s income from oil taxes.

The strikes have bitten into Russia’s refined production and forced Moscow to turn to its friend Belarus to cover the shortfall, but production has not fallen enough to spark a fuel crisis yet. While the drone strikes do significant damage, as IntelliNews reported, the payload on the long-range drones is not big enough to destroy a refinery and typically the damage done can be repaired within a few weeks.

The St Petersburg facilities boast a reported throughput of 12.5mn tonnes per year and have been repeatedly targeted, culminating last month with a series of attacks on the Primorsk and Ust-Luga terminals – the two biggest oil terminals on Russia’s western coast.

Dignitaries from over 130 countries and territories of the world are in attendance to show solidarity with Russia and as part of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plan to rebuild Russia’s international and trade relations with the members of the Global South.

Amongst those in attendance are Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, President of Tanzania Samia Suluhu Hassan, actor Stephen Segal and YouTube star Andrew Tate, as well as China’s vice president and Saudi Arabia’s energy minister. A member of US President Donald Trump’s administration is set to appear at the forum, the first known attendance at the event by an American official in several years.

Unusually, this year there is a large delegation of German businessmen in attendance as the resolve to keep the tough sanctions regime on Russia starts to crack and calls for restarting commercial relations with Russia slowly gather momentum.

Putin is due to give the keynote address on June 5. The new attack on St. Petersburg comes a day after Russia launched a devastating mass missile and drone strike against Kyiv, Dnipro, and other Ukrainian cities, killing at least 23 people, including two children, and injured over 100 others. The Kremlin said the strike was in retaliation for a Ukrainian drone strike on a student dormitory in the university town of Starobilsk on May 22 in occupied Luhansk Oblast in eastern Ukraine, which killed 21 students, injured 42 others and caused outrage in Russia.

Refinery throughput down

Repeated attacks on Russian oil infrastructure have reduced the throughput at Russia’s leading refineries and put domestic supplies of petrol and diesel under pressure.

Output is down by around 10% y/y according to official figures. Ukrainian attacks appear to have disabled most of the spare refining capacity that Russia traditionally maintained, according to Sergey Vakulenko, an independent energy analyst, and any more reduction in refining capacity will have a disproportional effect on supplies of fuel to the domestic market, say experts.

The Kremlin has expanded restrictions on fuel exports as a result, banning overseas sales of jet fuel in addition to earlier limits on gasoline exports. In occupied Crimea, Russian authorities have been forced to ration fuel due to shortages, limiting purchases to 20 litres and banning the filling of fuel canisters. Belgorod and Kursk regions, as well as in Ryazan and parts of the Moscow region, have also reportedly been affected by fuel shortages.

Due to the reduction of refined products, Russian oil companies have compensated by increasing the export of crude oil. Russian seaborne crude oil exports have climbed to their highest levels since the start of the war in Ukraine.

Average crude exports since the beginning of 2026 have reached 3.46mn barrels per day (b/d), about 120,000 bpd higher than in 2025 and above the previous post-invasion annual high of 3.36mn b/d recorded in 2023, according to Bloomberg’s calculations. Seaborne exports averaged 3.64mn bpd in the four weeks to May 31, Bloomberg reported, citing tanker movement data.

The four-week average value of crude shipments stood at about $2.24bn per week in the period ending May 31, down slightly from $2.38bn in the previous four-week period because of lower oil prices.

***

Germans return to SPIEF as Russia sanctions resolve starts to fray

By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 6/2/26

German businessmen are going to the St Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), Russia’s premier investment forum that kicks off tomorrow.

In fact, German business never left Russia. Following the invasion of Ukraine hundreds of foreign businesses working in Russia said they would leave. In reality only one in ten made the exit. And once you drill into it, those like Apple, that shut down their franchises in Russia, actually continued to sell – just their products went via the traders in Turkey et al and their business didn’t stop at all. Everything just went back to the 1990s set up where intermediaries did everything.

Of those companies that didn’t leave, no country didn’t leave more than the Germans. And Germany had literally ten-times more registered businesses in Russia than any other European country.

When I first arrived in Russia I, and the Russians, assumed that their natural business partner would be the Americans. They are supposed to be the entrepreneurial risk-takers. As it turned out, the American firms are extremely risk adverse. From conversations with many Russian businessmen, they all complained that their US counterparties insisted on lengthy and complicated contracts and talks would go on for months. The Russians found all this a bit silly as they pointed out in the 90s those contracts were not enforceable anyway as everything had collapsed.

It soon became clear the people to do business with were the Germans. They were happy to simply sign an MoU and send some money to get started. If things worked well then they rapidly scaled up. It turned out that the Germans and Russians share a very similar mentality, which is not obvious at first glance.

And it worked very well indeed. The US is dominated by mega-corporations, but Germany’s economy is made up of the Mittelstand, thousands of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) some of which are not that small, employing dozens of people and with a turnover in the millions and tens of millions of euros. These companies are lean, nimble and entrepreneurial. And they are always looking for new markets. Russia was a paradise of unploughed fields hence the inflow of all these German companies. And thanks to the barriers to entry, as Russia was and is a hard market to work in, the upside is that also makes it extremely profitable. From the Russian side, thanks to the Soviet legacy, Russian businesses have an unslakable thirst for high quality specialist machinery. Vorsprung durch Technik. Throughout the last thirty years since the collapse of the USSR I think half of all Russia’s imports for that entire period has been machines.

While these firms have continued to work, what is new here is that the leading businessmen are openly participating in SPIEF. This is yet another sign that the resolve to “just increase the pressure on Russia a little more so it will collapse,” is crumbling. The rhetoric coming out of Brussels is as tough as ever – the 21st sanctions package is in the works and may target the scandalous Irish exports of aluminium to Russia – but on the ground, European businesses continue to do as much business with Russia as they can. Die Welt wrote a piece about the German delegation that included an interesting survey: two thirds of German business would like to see commercial ties restored, especially the gas. The more reserved panellists said that shouldn’t happen until after the fighting in Ukraine stops.

It’s gonna happen. We seem to be in silly season already and there are endless pieces about the “turning point” in the Ukraine conflict and how Russia’s economy is about to collapse. But this is all wishful thinking. A careful reading of the battlefield reports shows that the AFU is not taking “hundreds of kilometers” of territory back. What they are taking is “grey zone” territory that has few Russians in it. The AFR advances have slowed down, but that appears to be because they are coming up against the Defensive Line in Donbas.

As for Russia’s budget woes those are real too, but again, the budget deficit is only 2.5% of GDP – well below the EU’s excessive deficit threshold of 3% — while the number of European countries in the Excessive Deficit Club continues to grow with most of the biggest countries now members. That is another reason why the Germans are in SPIEF: they very badly need to make more money.

Russia’s Ministry of Finance (MinFin) has just done a deal with the oligarchs who are going to “voluntarily” contribute RUB300bn to the budget to help close the gap. Given the deficit is likely to be RUB4 trillion this year, that is not very much, but it is part of MinFin’s plan to squeeze a little out of everything and spread the load. It can’t afford to simply borrow everything as the cost of servicing the OFZ bonds is getting very expensive. When you add in the other stuff like dividends then it seems that Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov is going to cobble together a package to cover the short fall. For instance, the oil companies are earning excess profits already. Gazprom paid a whopping RUB51 per share in 2022 or RUB1.2 trillion all by itself. In the pre-sanctions era it used to pay out a mere RUB8 per share much to the annoyance of its shareholders and invest the rest in never-ending production and transport projects. This year we can expect the same sort of big state-owned company dividend payments from anyone who is making money.

Personally, I would love to go to SPIEF again. It’s White Nights in St Pete at the moment and the whole city is out on the streets deep into the night with most of the bars and cafes remaining open well into the small hours. And Russia’s elite throw parties so the whole event becomes a big social do. The metals oligarch Prokhorov used to throw one of the most famous open door parties every year until he quit Russia. And the talks and sessions at the conference are also fascinating as the discussions are surprisingly frank and realistic.

2008 was a vintage year and the high point of Russia’s move towards becoming a liberal modern economy. That year Professor Sergey Guriev was in charge of the economic blueprint and Medvedev was president. Guriev told me he filled the programme out with liberal reforms and massive privatisation plans and Medvedev didn’t change a word. Then the Great Financial Crisis happened and all that had to be abandoned.

Not sure what will come out of this year’s event, but we may look back and say it was a milestone in the reestablishing ties with Russia. Who knows. After all, the economy could collapse too. But I still think that Ukraine is closer to the edge than Russia.

By Gordon Hahn, Substack, 5/12/26

Note: This article is being cross-posted without editing and any typos are contained in the original.

As Ukraine’s political-military situation both at the front and in the rear deteriorates, the potential for major political crises and coup plots against the rule of Volodomyr Zelenskiy grows. As I have noted earlier, war and revolution often come together; war weakens the state, regime, army and society, leading to political fracture and designs by some to seize power for themselves illegally or asystemically. A classic example is World War I and its effect on Imperial Russia, but other manifestations of this phenomena affected Turkey, Austria-Hungary, Poland, later Germany, and other states as well, including a briefly quasi-independent Ukraine. Various forms of regime change and state collapse occurred in each: the illegal seizure of power by revolution from above, revolution from below, palace coups, including military coups. In Ukraine various warlords, military contingents, and socialist and nationalist revolutionary parties seized power in different parts of the country, with several coups occurring at the ’center’ in Kiev. All this could happen again just as the experience of the 17th century Ukrainian ‘Ruin’ is beginning to repeat itself in this war-torn country.

The most likely candidates to attempt and be capable of a successful seizure of power will be armed ones, and there is no more powerful, potentially revolutionary force than the two Azov army corps: The 3rd Army Corps Azov of the Ukrainian armed forces’ ground forces led by the neofascist Azov organization’s founder Brigadier General Andriy Biletskiy and the 1st Corps of the Ukrainian National Guard under the Internal Affairs Ministry led by Brigadier general Denys ‘Redis’ Prokopenko. What resources do Azov and its Army Corps possess? How much political and ideological influence do they wield inside Ukraine? And what domestic and foreign allies do they have and what do the latter provide Azov? What are the prospects for and obstacles to an Azov-led military or military-backed coup? In this Part 1, I discuss Biletskiy’s 3rd Army Corps ‘Azov.’ I will examine the 1st National Guard Corps Azov in Part 2.

The Rise of the Militant Azov Movement

Azov has its roots in the pre-Maidan neofascist Black Corps (BC), Social-National Assembly (SNA) and the Patriots of Ukraine (PU) parties all founded by then civilian political actor, Biletskiy. BC was the most immediate precursor organization of Azov and was founded during the Maidan revolt, which itself ended in an ultimately violent revolt led by neofascist in February 2014. The Maidan revolt hijacked the originally more popular ‘Revolution of Dignity’ at that time.[1] BC’s members were tied to members and associates of PU. After the Maidan revolt, the BC fought anti-Maidan elements in Kharkiv in March 2014. In May 2014 Biletskiy founded in Berdyansk, the Azov Battallion in Berdyansk. Thus, the battalion was created in the crucible of the Ukrainian civil war that developed in the Maidan revolt’s wake. Originally named in honor of the Sea of Azov, the Azov Battalion was made up of local volunteers, patriots, nationalists, and football ultras, particularly from Metalist Kharkiv.

Azov played a key role during the disturbances that occurred in Mariupol in reaction against the Maidan regime and its declaration of an anti-terrorist organization targeting the Donetsk and Luhansk separatist movements. The battalion suppressed the Mariupol separatists, firing on a police station, killing and wounding many anti-Maidan policemen. “(P)oliced streets”, the battalion had suppressed the rebellion in Mariupol by June 2014. The batallion fought in the defense of Ilovaisk and Marinka in Donetsk Oblast from the Donetsk separatists backed by Russian forces.[2]

The Azov Battalion like other autonomous, volunteer neofascist and ultranationalist battalions that formed were incorporated nominally under the command of the newly formed Ukrainian National Guard (NGU) under the control of the Internal Affairs Ministry in the course of 2014.[3] Thus, from the outset of the Maidan regime in Ukraine, neofascist groups and the siloviki departments (the organs of coercion – military, intelligence, and police organs) demonstrated an affimnity for each other.[4]

On 11 November 2014, the battalion was expanded, becoming the Azov Regiment in the NGU. The regiment’s official name later became “the 12th Special Purpose Brigade Azov.” The Azov regiment then was supplied with equipment from the Ukrainian government, including T-64B1M tanks, D-30 artillery, and various other vehicles. In February 2015, the regiment carried out an offensive east of Mariupol, towards the settlement of Shyokryne, and liberated five settlements.[5] By the time of the larger Russian ‘special military operation’ begun in February 2022, Azov had been incorporated into the Ukrainian armed forces.

Azov has a youth organization, which, according to Clark University Professor Marta Havryshko, who is from Ukraine’s neofascist hotbed Lvov (Lviv) and specializes in studying such extremist groups, “prepares youth for street violence and confrontation with the police” and “has already used political violence against LGBTQI+, leftists, and feminist activists.” Moreover, it has “widened its activities across Ukraine” since the war began. Like its parent group Azov, it maintains close ties and conducts activities with other neo-Nazi groups like the Misanthropic division, Ukrainian Unity in Blood, Ukrainian Galician Youth, and others.[6] Azov’s and Centuria’s cult of violence – so reminiscent of WW II Germany’s Nazis, is evident in a Centuria video posted on the internet.[7] According to Havryshko, ‘Centuria’ celebrates the birthday of OUN anti-Semite and Nazi collaborator Yaroslav Stetsko, who wrote in a 25 June 1941 letter to OUN‘s leader Bandera: “We are are establishing a militia that will help to eliminate the Jews and to protect the population.” Stetsko also called a party colleague “unprincipled” for marrying a Jew and denied him “room at the helm of national life.”[8]

Biletskiy’s Azov and 3rd Army Corps, have a virtual empire, nearly a state-within-the state that includes its own military, technology, and other training programs, an educational institute, ‘educational’ programs in schools, an array of social media, bookstores, consumer products (tee-shirts, flags, etc., etc.).[9]

Azov’s Schism

Azov has seen splits, defections, and spinoff groups. Before the war the influential Azov commander Sergei Korotkikh (nickname ‘Botsman’) defected. At the beginning of the laerge-scale war in February 2022, Azov members based in Kharkiv created their own unit ‘Kraken’ in the Military Intelligence of Ukraine (HUR). This event speaks once more of the affinity between Ukrainian neofascist groups and Ukrainian siloviki.

Azov underwent a split in mid- 2022 resulting from the siege of Mariupol, the port city on the Sea of Azov from whence comes the movement’s name. The long Russian siege eventually ended when the Ukrainian forces, mostly Azov units, encircled by Russian forces underground in the Azov Iron and Steel Works or ‘AzovStal’ surrendered in May 2022 after negotiations. Rather than being sent to Russia, Azov leaders and some fighters were allowed to go into exile in Turkey, where they were supposed to stay until the war’s end by agreement between Moscow, Kiev, and Istanbul. However, Azov fighters returned to Ukraine partially by way of prisoner exchanges and partially by Turkey’s release of many in summer 2023. The returned prisoner-exiles and their commander Denis Prokopenko (nickname ‘Redis’) in the interim had become national heroes for their refusal to surrender for so long and their subsequent exile. Biletskiy and other Azov elements were not in Mariupol or had escaped before the encirclement, and questions arose as to why they were not there. Then Biletskiy formed from among Azov members his military formation, the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade, which, because Biletskiy led a propaganda campaign, became known as one of, if not the most effective of Ukrainian military brigades. Upon Prokopenko’s return he re-formed an Azov brigade under the National Guard (Azov NG) and like Biletskiy sold his unit as the most effective fighting unit in Ukraine.

Tensions emerged between the two Azovs. There have been a series of violent episodes between Azov NG and Azov 3rd Brigade soldiers, highlighting the those tensions. In 2024, Azov 3rd Brigade member Semyon Klok (nickname ‘Malysh’ or ‘Little One’), who would beat a 3rd Brigade officer in June 2025, shot and seriously wounded a National Guard officer. On June 2025, the Azov split deepened when a major in the 12th Brigade of the Azov National Guard (Azov NG), Andrei Korenevich (nicknamed “Koren’’), accused fighters of the Azov 3rd Separate Assault Brigade, who, he said, were closely tied to Biletskiy, of beating him up. According to reports, two Azov Corps members beat Korenevich, and two other members accompanied them. The beaten commander said the beating could not have occurred without Biletskiy’s permission or direct order and called upon 3rd Corps members to think over what is happening. Pointedly, Korenevich charged Biletskiy with “criminal habits” and political ambitions: “It is already clear to everyone that after the war he (Biletsky) is going to enter politics. The whole of Ukraine is plastered with his portraits, as if the election campaign has alreadybegun. Guys from the 3rd, give yourself an answer to the question: are we really fighting for Ukraine,led by bandits who do not disdain to organize attacks on their own?”[10]

Deputy commander of the 12th Brigade of Azov NG, Svyatoslav Palamar’ (nicknamed ‘Kalina’) condemned the spread of “thief-like concepts” in the army, presumably Biletskiy’s fault, justifying attacks on brothers. Indeed, one of the Azov 3rd Corps perpetrators of the beating, was wanted on an international warrant for premeditated murder. Indeed, Palamar’ issued a manifesto sorts – “AboutUkrainian Nationalism and Azov” — condemning Biletskiy and the Azov 3rd Corps. Specfically, hecriticized military personnel who “deliberately replaced the commandments of the Ukrainian nationalistwith ‘criminal romance’ and exchanged honor, dignity and ‘fraternity’ for illusory authority, following‘criminal concepts’ and ‘imagined membership in bandit groups.’” Such are “not friends of Ukraine”and are “not on the (proper) path.” “Those who justify attacks on brothers with ‘thieves’ concepts’definitely are not Ukrainian nationalists. The Ukrainian nationalist has never lived, does not live andwill not live according to the ‘concepts’ of banditry. Moreover, he does not have, has not had, and willnot have the right to plant crime and ‘concepts’ among the Ukrainian military.”[11] Even the National Guard itself issued a statement condemning the beating.[12] However, this split proved temporary as evidenced by Biletskiy’s and Prokopenko’s reunion upon the formation of the 3rd Army Corps Azov in 2025.

The split between Azov units in the siloviki – military Azov (Biletskiy’s 3rd Assault Brigade) versus Prokopenko’s Azov NG did not extend to the political movement. Biletskiy denied in October 2023 that such a split existed.[13] In terms of neofascism’s profile within Ukraine, the split mattered little. Both Biletskiy’s and Prokopenko’s Azovs push the neofascist Azov ideology propaganda in schools, universities, and mass and social media. But Biletskiy’s Azov movement and 3rd Army Corps’ has long had a large and growing infrastructure for doing so that now includes its own training school that Prokopenko’s Azov NG endeavors to match.[14]

Despite the 2023-2024 tensions within Azov, Biletskiy’s star continued to rise along with that of his 3rd Assault Brigade ‘Azov’ in the course of the war, even as Ukraine’s military fortunes waned.

Azov at War: Rising Through the Ranks

At the onset of the large-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Azov 3rd Brigade was stationed on the outskirts of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov and fought to defend the city during the Russian siege of 2024. With the encirclement of the city, the Azov fighters withdrew to the massive underground complex of the AzovStal plant, and all its members being severely wounded, killed, captured, or surrendered and placed into Russian captivity or sent into exile in Turkey under agreement they would only return until after the war. In September 2022, many fighters from the regiment were released from Russian captivity, and the commanders, including Denys Prokopenko ‘Redis’ were returned to Ukraine in violation of the agreement, as noted above.

Between January and February 2023, the Azov Regiment was expanded and reformed into the 12th Brigade of Operational Assignment, which was soon disbanded in favor of the Azov 3rd Seprate Assault Brigade under the Offensive Guard program. The new brigade defended areas of southern Ukraine during its disastrous, NATO-conceived summer counteroffensive in 2023 towards Melitopol. Biletskiy’s first major Azov propaganda campaign and his ensuing growing authority coincided with the 3rd Brigade’s combat efforts during the battle of Bakhmut in 2023. The Azov 3rd Brigade later redeployed to the Serebryansky forest in the Kreminna direction and then to New York and Toretsk in mid-2024. Thus, like the rest of the Ukrainian army, Azov units, under whatever name and structure, have experienced defeat after defeat, forced to retreat further and further west in Donetsk Oblast. Recently, the 3rd Brigade had been deployed on the Northern Donbass and Kharkiv fronts that slowly but surely have been giving way to Russian forces after gritty battles albeit.[15]

The 3rd Army Corps ‘Azov’, formed officially on 4 August 2025, was founded in March 2025 on the basis of the 3rd Separate Assualt Brigade ‘Azov’ to which the 60th Mechanized Brigade and “many other” but identified “support units” were joined in July. The new corps required an immediate reorganization of Azov’s social media channels in August 2025, and Biletskiy’s August announcement included the usual promotional material. He noted that the 3rd Army Corps’ “bridgehead is the last line of defense for the Northern Donbas and Kharkiv region” and that the corps “holds about 150 kilometers – approximately 12% or 1/8 of the entire front line.” Biletskiy added: “It can be confidently stated that the Third Corps is already influencing the course of this war.” By August, the 53rd Mechanized Brigade and the 63rd Mechanized Brigade had also been placed under the command of the corps. The former held positions in the Serebryansky forest, and the latter had been fighting extensively in the Luhansk direction alongside the 60th Brigade.[16] At present, the 3rd Army Corps Azov consists of the old Azov 3rd Brigade, three mechanized brigades joined to it, plus a communications brigade (see Table below).

The Azov 3rd Army Corps consists of anywhere from 6,000 to 20,000 troops, stationed in a privileged unit that is likely to be well-equipped and well-staffed. It is likely that its number of personnel tends towards the upper limit of the indicated range of 6-20,000. Again, its privileged position will ensure a sufficient number of recruits, and those in the best shape will be sent its way.

It is important to note regarding Azov’s control over the 3rd Army Corps that Biletskiy has been successful in placing hardened Azov members into command positions of the 3rd Corps’ subdivisions, most motably in the 53rd Mechanized Brigade. For example, Lt. Col. Ihor Mykhailenko, commander of the 53rd Mechanized Brigade, was appointed in March 2026, when the decision to form the corps was made. Mikhailenko also was appointed deputy commander of the Azov Corps and is a long-time Azov operator and committed neofascist. He volunteered to the Azov Battalion in 2014 and took command of an assault group during clashes in Mariupol. Mykhailenko also took part in the battles at Ilovaisk and Shyrokyne that same year. In late 2014, he commanded the 3rd Company and soon was second in command of the Azov Regiment, holding that position until 2016. After frontline action, Mikhailenko founded the abovementioned ultranationalist “Centuria” organization, focusing on social mobilization through ideological indoctrination and military training.[17] Upon Russia’s February 2022 invasion, Mikhailenko returned to the front and commanded the Azov-Kyiv Special Operations unit until being appointed deputy commander of the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade Azov—that is Biletskiy’s deputy. Mikhailenko says that the 53rd Mechanized Brigade under the Azov 3rd Army Corps will prioritize psychological support, the development of air drones (UAVs), and the training of personnel.[18]

The 3rd Army Corps ‘Azov’ units are battle-hardened as well as ideologically oriented. For example, founded in Dnipro in 2015, the Corps’ 60th Mechanized Brigade has had numerous important deployments, including: Kherson Oblast, 2022; Bakhmut, early 2023; Kherson counteroffensive, summer 2023; Kupyansk, January 2024; Liman, March 2024 to present.[19] Commander of the Corps’ 60th Mechanized Brigade, Maj. Dmytro Rohozyuk, has less of an Azov pedigree than the 53rd’s Lt. Col. Mykhailenko but makes up for this with battle experience and planning expertise. Following the full-scale invasion in 2022, Rohozyuk joined the Azov Special Operations Regiment “Kyiv” and took part in the defense of Kyiv and Mariupol. He later became a company commander in the 1st Assault Battalion of the 3rd Assault Brigade, participating in the Bakhmut campaign. He was then appointed Head of the Operations Department as Chief of Planning. Following the creation of the 3rd Army Corps, he has served as its Deputy Chief of Staff, helping to establish corps-level planning structures. Last year Rohozyuk assumed command of the 60th Mechanized Brigade. According to Volodymyr Fokin, a commander from the 3rd Assault Brigade, before Rohozyuk’s appointment to the 60th Brigade, it had poor leadership, a lack of rotation, and little knowledge of its standing forces. By January 2026, Rohoziuk claimed major improvements, including sharply cutting the number of AWOL personnel and integrating experienced units from the 3rd Assault Brigade to train up existing and new personnel in the 60th Brigade.[20]

63rd Mechanized Brigade, like the other units already discussed, is a unit of the Ukrainian Ground Forces and was formed on 14 March 2017 on the basis of a joint directive of the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff, but its official creation dates from 23 June 2017. Bases in Khmelnistkiy Oblast’ in western Ukraine, the unit was formed from servicemen of the units of Operational Command West. In October 2019 of that year, the brigade was deployed to the “combat zone in eastern Ukraine,” meaning Donetsk or Luhansk. At the beginning of the Russia’s ‘special military operation’ full-scale invasion, the brigade engaged Russian forces in Kherson and Mykolaiv Oblasts, defending for the right bank of the Dnieper River. In November 2022, after the Kharkiv offensive’s success and its troops helped to retake the city of Kherson. The 63rd saw heavy fighting in Bakhmut from mid-December 2022 and from 2024 operated in Luhansk, defending positions to the west of Kreminna in the region that recently had been taken by Russian forces. In March 2025, the brigade received BTR-4 vehicles, becoming the fourth unit of the Ukrainian Ground Forces to receive them. Joining the newly established 3rd Army Corps by August 2025, the 63rd Brigade was reorganized “to streamline the command, recruitment, management, and other procedures within the brigade,” “likely at the initiative of the corps’ headquarters.[21]

The 63rd’s commander is Major Denys Shapoval’, known by his callsign “Shapa.” He is another long-time Azov member. Shapoval joined the Azov Regiment in 2015, undergoing intensive training within a special-purpose unit. He first saw combat in 2016 near Mariupol, seeing further action in Marinka, Krasnogorivka, Shyrokyne, and Novoluhansk in the civil war. After returning “briefly” to civilian life, Shapoval returned to combat with the February 2022 Russian invasion, fighting in Kiev, Kherson, Bakhmut, and Kurdyumivka. He rose through the 63rd Brigade’s command ladder to become from Chief of Staff of 1st Mechanized Battalion of the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade Azov before being appointed commander of the 63rd Mechanized Brigade in March 2026.[22] Thus, another long-time Azov soldier has taken command of another brigade pillar of the 3rd Army Corps Azov. The 3rd Corps’ structure is rounded out by the 122nd Communications Brigade that leads the Corps’ technical and drone personnel and operations and is commanded by Ihor Bondarchuk.[23] It is “expected,” according to a supportive social media outlet dedicated to Azov’s military structures, that the 3rd Army Corps “will include a heavy mechanized brigade and a dedicated artillery brigade.”[24] All in all, the well-resourced, battle-hardened, and ideologically-fortified 3rd Army Corps will be a formidable force for both foreign and domestic foes to deal with.

Political Azov

The Azov Army Corps’s two predecessor organizations – Biletskiy’s 3rd Assault Brigade and Prokopenko’s Azov National Guard unit – had been the most politicized elements in the Ukrainian armed forces writ large. After the fall of Bakhmut, the authority and popularity of Biletskiy and his 3rdBrigade continued to grow through the winter 2023-2024 battle for Avdiivka and later battles. Prokopenko’s Azov project had a lesser profile but is well-known. A new level of power and authority within both army and society came with the elevation of 3rd Separate Assault Brigade to the status of an army corps—the 3rd Army Corps ‘Azov’—and it marked a new high point for Biletskiy’s political ambitions.

Biletskiy, Prokopenko, and their respective Azov projects have been the only military elements allowed to have a political presence and engage in political – and highly ideological – propaganda.[25]Both Biletskiy, Prokopenko, and other Azov commanders intermittently speak out on larger military, war and state issues that other officers are not allowed to address. Politicization of the army and National Guard through their Azov units now is likely to intensify, feeding on mounting multiple crises and Azov’s growing military power and political authority rising.

Azov is well-financed. Rumors circulate among the political elite that Ukraine’s coal oligarch Rinat Akhmetov was financing both Biletskiy’s and Prokopenko’s Azov brigades and their connected universe of social institutions on instructions from, and under the control of, the Office of the President (OP).[26] Zelenskiy’s goal is said to be the creation of a political party that could drain votes away from the popular Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhniy, Kiev’s ambassador to London and former commander of Ukraine’s armed forces and former President Petro Poroshenko’s ‘European Solidarity’ party. If elected to the Rada, Biletskiy’s Azov party would form a parliamentary majority with Zelenskiy’s declining Servants of the People (Slugi haroda) party and ensure Zelenskiy’s control over the Rada and Cabinet of Ministers, sidelining European Solidarity.[27] As noted above, it is rumored that the OP, at least under the management of its former leader Andriy Yermak, is well-predisposed towards Prokopenko’s Azov.[28]

*I will examine the 1st National Guard Corps Azov in Part 2.