Fighting Russia Takes Focus Off Azov Battalion’s Nazi Roots

It was Biletsky who said in 2010 that his country’s mission was to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade . . . against Semite-led Untermenschen”, or inferior races.

As the world watches in despair as Russia bombs a maternity ward and a theatre in Mariupol, it is the battalion — now a regiment of the Ukrainian national guard — that is defending the city. They have also kept up a stream of professional drone videos taken of attacks on Russian tanks.

So does Putin have a point? And is Facebook tying itself in knots by allowing praise of the regiment’s defence of Ukraine even though it put the group on a par with Isis and banned it in 2019?

What is certain is Biletsky started out as a racist antisemite, leading a band including football hooligans as head of the Patriot of Ukraine group in 2005.

More confusingly, it is evident that Putin’s bête noire was not anti-Russian at the time. Vyacheslav Likhachev, head of Ukraine’s National Minority Rights Monitoring Group, said: “He’s a native Russian speaker from Kharkiv, a Russian-speaking city; he was under the influence of Russian neo-Nazis and he promoted a confederation of eastern Slavic nations. If he wasn’t openly pro-Russian, his ideas on race and opposition to EU integration could be interpreted that way.”

The turning point was the taking of Mariupol in 2014 by Russian-backed separatists, which prompted Biletsky to form his Azov battalion of 100 to 200 adherents and retake the city, challenging Russia’s assertiveness. “To him, the action was more important than the ideology,” Likhachev said.

Incorporated into the Ukrainian national guard as a regiment that year, Biletsky’s fighters joined regular Ukraine army units in taking on the separatists in the grinding conflict in the Donbas region.

“Their background wasn’t important to the Ukrainian government. Anyone who was able to muster 100 men was a candidate to lead a battalion or regiment and Biletsky’s soldiers wanted to fight while the regular army had little motivation to take on the Russian-backed operation in Donbas,” Likhachev said.

Adrien Nonjon, an expert on far-right groups at Paris’s National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilisations, agrees. “They saved Mariupol — it would have been a mistake to reject them,” he said.

In 2015 a regiment spokesman said that between 10 and 20 per cent of recruits were Nazis, while the following year they were accused of taking prisoners from the Donbas war back to Mariupol and torturing them, including the use of near-drowning and electric shocks.

Choosing politics over warfare, Biletsky headed for Kyiv in 2016 to set up Azov’s political wing, the National Corps, which was accused of involvement in attacks on Roma camps. Since then it has not flourished, polling only 2 per cent with other far-right groups in 2019 elections. Likhachev said: “Many of the Azov founders followed Biletsky into politics, while others have been ejected from the Azov regiment over the years to clean up its reputation.”

Nonjon said that as the regiment grew to up to 2,000 soldiers, the extreme views were diluted. “It got bigger and became less political. With Azeris joining, the whole white supremacy tendency was weakened.”

The regiment still uses the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel symbol but insists that it merely represents the letters “N” and “I” meaning “national idea”. Nonjon said that even though the regiment forms 1 per cent of Ukraine’s 200,000-strong armed forces, far-right admirers from abroad had inflated the regiment’s importance. “Groups who are fascinated by them come to Ukraine and see it as a kind of far-right Disneyland where you can show off your symbols, buy a T-shirt and claim to be part of an international movement,” he said.

Despite Likhachev’s background monitoring hate groups in Ukraine and defending minorities, he said that now was not the time to obsess about Biletsky. “The ideology he had ten years ago cannot explain what has happened with the maternity hospital and the theatre in Mariupol,” he said.