The Nation: Neo-fascists play an important official role in Ukraine, 2018

quote:
That the snipers who killed scores of protestors and policemen on Kiev’s Maidan Square in February 2014, thereby triggering a “democratic revolution” that overthrew the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, and brought to power a virulent anti-Russian, pro-American regime—it was neither democratic nor a revolution, but a violent coup unfolding in the streets with high-level support—were sent not by Yanukovych, as is still widely reported, but instead almost certainly by the neofascist organization Right Sector and its co-conspirators.

§ That the pogrom-like burning to death of ethnic Russians and others in Odessa shortly later in 2014 reawakened memories of Nazi extermination squads in Ukraine during World War II has been all but deleted from the American mainstream narrative.

... assaults on gays, Jews, elderly ethnic Russians, and other “impure” citizens are widespread in Ukraine, along with torchlight marches...

Remember C14 neonazis from prev.posts?

Human Rights Watch: A court in Kyiv ruled in favor of a state funded Ukrainian far-right nationalist group, C14 in its defamation suit about being called ‘Neo-Nazi’, 2019
quote:
=========
A court in Kyiv ruled in favor of a Ukrainian far-right nationalist group, C14, in its defamation suit against the internet TV station Hromadske.TV after the outlet published a tweet referring to C14 as a “neo-Nazi” group.
...
Protection of freedom of expression has been steadily deteriorating in Ukraine just as violence by far-right groups like C14 has increased. Ukraine’s activists and journalists have repeatedly urged the government to adopt a “zero-tolerance” stance towards violence, threats, and intimidation from these groups. Instead, Ukraine’s authorities have focused on introducing restrictions on freedom of expression that they justify by citing the ongoing armed conflict and the need to counter Russian propaganda.

The group [C14] also hunts down Russia-backed “separatists” fighting in eastern Ukraine and reportedly receives government funding to carry out “national-patriotic education projects.”
=========end of the quote =========

Much nice Ukraine judges, too big justice...

NBC News: It's a dangerous oversight to deny Ukraine’s antisemitic history, collaboration with Hitler and embrace of neo-Nazis, 2022

quote:
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.

Statues have also been raised [in Ukraine] for Yaroslav Stetsko, a one-time chair of the OUN**, who wrote “I insist on the extermination of the Jews in Ukraine.”
...
But even if some elements*** of the country have been entangled with one of history’s most loathsome movements, standing with Ukraine is without doubt the honorable posture to take in this drama.
====end of quote====

** some articles about nowadays honoring of OUN on the official level in Ukraine:

▫️ The Jacobin Magazine: Ukrainian Jews sought the protection of the Germans from the Bandera lead OUN-UPA, (1943-1945)

▫️ University of Pittsburgh: Institutes of memory management and myth making were created in Ukraine, a key function -- to deny ww2 atrocities of the newly forged national heroes, 2005

▫️ The Guardian: Leading British historian is utterly outraged by prohibition of his book in Ukraine, over passage detailing wartime murder of Jewish children by Ukrainian militia, 2018

▫️ USA Today: Ukrainian President decorated a responsible for WW2 ethnic cleansings Bandera with the Hero of Ukraine award, 2010

▫️ Israel National News: Exhibition openly glorifying Nazism held in Ukraine Parliament, 2018

*** 🤯 Yeah, the extent of this "someness" is quite debatable, just read this telegram channel, don't be lazy and scroll the history...

WW2. Western Ukraine hails Hitler and for inexplicable reason Bandera. All in one place, on one banner, in the same words: “Heil Hitler! Slava Banderi”.

Next time someone tells you Bandera and his OUN & UPA fought both USSR and NaziGermany, slap the utterrer!

P.S. the mid banner: “Let there be the independant united Ukraine. Let there be the Führer Bandera”. Yep, the guy too was a Führer… what a series of inexplicable coincidences!!!

Well, there are many such pics and vids

The Hill: The reality of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is far from Kremlin propaganda, 2017

quote:
There are indeed neo-Nazi formations in Ukraine. This has been overwhelmingly confirmed by nearly every major Western outlet. The fact that analysts are able to dismiss it as propaganda disseminated by Moscow is profoundly disturbing. It is especially disturbing given the current surge of neo-Nazis and white supremacists across the globe.

Kiev’s rehabilitation of Nazi collaborators — a hallmark of European far right movements — has been condemned by Jewish organizations including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the National Coalition Supporting Eurasian Jewry, Yad Vashem, and the World Jewish Congress.

This is not Russian propaganda.
===end of quote===

C'mon, people, 加油! Spread the link to this channel, repost, share... 📣
Can't fight 👊🏻 the "No nazis in Ukraine" narrative alone.

Remember: 🦍 Apes together strong!

some articles from Greece:

▫️Estia (Greece): Azov battalions used us as hostages!, 2022

The original Estia article is hard to find (it looks like it either doesn't exist in a digital or heavily paywalled). So only the references from other Greek newspapers to the original Estia's article are given here.

▫️Γεγονότα Στο Μικροσκόπιο: "Azov's battalions used us as hostages!", 2022

▫️ΣΤΗΛΕΣ: Ως πότε τροφή μας το ψέμα; How long are we going to lie?, 2022

Bare in mind, Ukraine has an aboriginal Greek population. Now the quotes (autotranslated from Greek):
==========quote==========
Cry of despair from the Greeks of Mariupol* - They break their silence and reveal for the first time in "Estia tis Kyriakis" that they were shot, blackmailed, threatened and looted of the food they had in their apartments!

The militants of the nationalist group "Azov" did not allow civilians to leave the basements of Mariupol, and "dirtyly insulted" all Russian speakers.

This was told on June 12 by the chairman of the Greek society of the village of Sartana, Natalia Papakitsa, who was captured by the nationalists, in an interview with the local edition of Estia.

”The Azov us used as a hostage. Captured Greeks. Looted our homes. Shot disabled in the head. Because we were talking in Russian they kicked and abused us, chanting: HAIL MARIUPOL! HAIL FREEDOM!"

Papakitsa, along with dozens of people, spent 33 days as hostages in the basement of a house in the city.

“I saw how some unmarked men and women, in black clothes, with maps in their hands, advised Azov where to install guns. They fired in the direction of the left bank,” the woman said.

According to her, they could be British or Poles. Also, according to Papakitsy, while people were sitting in the basements, the militants robbed their apartments. And in order for those in captivity to have at least some opportunity to survive, they collected snow and extracted water from it. At some point, they all together decided to run away as a group, and in this way the Greek woman managed to get to the Crimea.

"A sick person with a disability took the dog out for a little bit of and a sniper from flats apartments him shot in the head. That was 150 meters away from us. There are tens of hundreds of such cases. All of this took place even before the Russian troops entered the city,"

Papakitsy states the complete indifference of the municipal authorities of the city. The authorities fled the city and abandoned them.

“When we finally got to the first Russian post, they gave us water and fed us,” the woman said.
==========end of quote==========

Channel4 (England): How the far-right took top posts in Ukraine’s power vacuum, 2014

quote:
In the new Ukrainian government politicians linked to the far-right have taken posts from deputy prime minister to head of defence.

Parubiy was the founder of the Social National Party of Ukraine, a fascist party styled on Hitler’s Nazis, with membership restricted to ethnic Ukrainians. The Social National Party would go on to become Svoboda, the far-right nationalist party whose leader Oleh Tyahnybok. Overseeing the armed forces alongside Parubiy as the Deputy Secretary of National Security is Dmytro Yarosh, the leader of the Right Sector – a group of hardline nationalist streetfighters.

Inside Right Sector was an alliance of hardline nationalist groups including Patriot of Ukraine and the paramilitary group UNA-UNSO. Their members paraded in balaclavas and wore uniforms bearing far-right insignia, including the wolfsangel.

The new Deputy Prime Minister Oleksandr Sych is a member of the far-right Svoboda party, which the World Jewish Congress called on the EU to consider banning last year along with Greece’s Golden Dawn.

The initial actions of the interim government have included forcing making Ukrainian the only official language of the nation and making moves to remove a law which forbids “excusing the crimes of fascism”.

The anti-Russian far-right in Ukraine strongly associate themselves with the legacy of Stepan Bandera and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. In 2010 Viktor Yushchenko [president of Ukraine at the time] made Bandera a “hero of Ukraine”, despite charges of Nazi collaboration and ethnic cleansing by the controversial figure.
====end of the quote====

The Guardian: Neo-nazi Azov fighters are Ukraine's greatest weapon and may be its greatest threat, 2015

Mind you, the article is from 2015 when Azov wasn't integrated into the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine. Now, the Azov is an official part of the Ukrainian Army.
quote:
"I have nothing against Russian nationalists, or a great Russia," said Dmitry, as we sped through the dark Mariupol night in a pickup truck, a machine gunner positioned in the back. "But Putin's not even a Russian. Putin's a Jew." Dmitry claimed not to be a Nazi, but waxed lyrical about Adolf Hitler as a military leader, and believes the Holocaust never happened.

An aide to the governor of Ukraine controlled Donetsk region , Alex Kovzhun, said the political views of individual members of Azov were not an issue, and denied that the battalion's symbol had Nazi undertones.

"The views of some of them is their own affair as long as they do not break the law," said Kovzhun in written answers to questions. "And the symbol is not Nazi. Trust me – some of my family died in concentration camps, so I have a well-developed nose for Nazi shit."
===end of the quote====

Trust him? He has 'a developed nose' for Nazis?!
His relatives are turning in their graves by now.

U.S. House Passes 3 Amendments By Rep. Conyers to block the training of the Ukrainian neo-Nazi paramilitary militia, 2015

==== the press release ====

U.S. House Passes 3 Amendments By Rep. Conyers To Defense Spending Bill To Protect Civilians From Dangers Of Arming and Training Foreign Forces
June 11, 2015 Press Release

WASHINGTON— Late yesterday evening, the U.S. House of Representatives considered H.R. 2685, the “Department of Defense Appropriations Act of 2015.” During consideration of the legislation, Congressman John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.) and Congressman Ted Yoho (R-Fla.) offered bipartisan amendments to block the training of the Ukrainian neo-Nazi paramilitary militia* “Azov Battalion,” and to prevent the transfer of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles—otherwise known as Man-Portable Air-Defense Systems (MANPADS)—to Iraq or Ukraine.

[*personal note: Well, it was paramilitary back in the 2015 but now AZOV is an official part of Ukraine Army]

“If there’s one simple lesson we can take away from US involvement in conflicts overseas, it’s this: Beware of unintended consequences. As was made vividly clear with U.S. involvement in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion decades ago, overzealous military assistance or the hyper-weaponization of conflicts can have destabilizing consequences and ultimately undercut our own national interests,” said Rep. John Conyers. “I am grateful that the House of Representatives unanimously passed my amendments last night to ensure that our military does not train members of the repulsive neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, along with my measures to keep the dangerous and easily trafficked MANPADs out of these unstable regions.”

Ukraine’s Azov Battalion is a 1,000-man volunteer militia of the Ukrainian National Guard that Foreign Policy Magazine has characterized as “openly neo-Nazi,” and “fascist.” Ukraine’s Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, who oversees Ukraine’s armed militias, announced that Azov troops would be among the first units to be trained by the Pentagon in Operation Fearless Guardian, prompting significant international concern.

Since their initial use on a battlefield in 1978, MANPAD attacks have resulted in nearly 1,000 civilian deaths.

Added Conyers, “Both U.S. and Israeli officials have feared that these weapons could be used by terrorists to bring down commercial jets. As the boundaries are increasingly blurred between insurgents fighting the Syrian government and those fighting the Iraqi government, providing additional arms could further destabilize the Middle East. The same can be said for Ukraine, where an anti-aircraft missile allegedly downed Flight MH17 last summer, killing 298 civilians. The possibility that MANPADS—or any weapon—could fall into the hands of radical groups in Iraq, Syria, or Ukraine, would unquestionably increase the already-devastating human toll in both of these volatile regions.”

According to Reuters, The Azov battalion originated from a paramilitary national socialist group called "Patriot of Ukraine"**, which propagated slogans of white supremacy, racial purity, the need for authoritarian power and a centralized national economy. Azov’s controversial founder, Andriy Biletsky***, organized the neo-Nazi group the Social-National Assembly (SNA) in 2008.

[** personal note: about the nazis from the Patriot of Ukraine (__one__, __two__) >> ]
[*** Nazi Biletsky (__one__, __two__) ]

“The Azov men use the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel (Wolf’s Hook) symbol on their banner and members of the battalion are openly white supremacists, or anti-Semites,” wrote The Telegraph. Since Azov was enrolled as a regiment of Ukraine's National Guard in September and started receiving increased supplies of heavy arms, however, Biletsky has toned down his rhetoric, Reuters reported. According to the Washington Post, battalion members “could potentially strike pro-Russian targets on their own — or even turn on the [Ukrainian] government” if it pursues a diplomatic resolution to the conflict.

==== end of the press release ====

The Foreign Policy: Preparing for War With Ukraine’s Fascist, 2014

quote:
Pro-Russian forces have said they are fighting against Ukrainian nationalists and “fascists” in the conflict, and in the case of Azov and other battalions, these claims are essentially true.

The Jerusalem Post: Kiev regional police head accused of neo-Nazi ties, 2014

quote:
The newly appointed police chief for the Ukrainian province in which Kiev is located came under fire on Monday after it was alleged that he had past ties with a neo-Nazi organization.

Vadim Troyan was appointed to head the Kiev Oblast regional police on October 31 by Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, who feted him on Facebook as a respected commander whose like would form “the basis of a new national police force.”

Prior to his appointment he was deputy commander of the volunteer Azov Battalion, which has been engaged in combat operations against pro-Russian separatists in the country’s east. Kiev, while within the district, is an independent jurisdiction.

P.S. Troyan is the second from the left. The sign (blue letters on the wall) on the photo: "the Main Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the Kyiv Region" I post this dull photo for a reason ... to be continued...